[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 131 (Friday, July 24, 2020)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E682]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TESTIMONY ON THE ROBERT E. LEE STATUE REMOVAL ACT
______
HON. ANTHONY G. BROWN
of maryland
in the house of representatives
Friday, July 24, 2020
Mr. BROWN of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I include in the Record. the
following testimony, per Mitch Landrieu, who testified in support of my
bill, H.R. 970, the Robert E. Lee Statue Removal Act, at the House
Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests,
and Public Lands legislative hearing on July 21, 2020. The testimony
addresses Confederate statues and symbols on public lands.
I want to thank Chair Haaland, Ranking Member Young, and
the other Members of the Subcommittee for the opportunity to
discuss the important matter of Confederate symbols. It is a
pleasure to be with you this morning.
My name is Mitch Landrieu I am the president and founder of
a social impact organization called E Pluribus Unum, named
after our nation's founding motto. Our goal is to help
advance racial and economic equity in the South. I also
served as mayor of the city of New Orleans from 2010 to 2018
and Louisiana's Lieutenant Governor from 2004 to 2010.
As many of you know, as mayor of New Orleans, I removed
four Confederate statues from public land, with a process
that started in 2015 and ended in May of 2017, with the
removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from the city's most
prominent circle.
That process helped reintroduce historical facts and a more
proper telling of the history of how and why many of these
statues or monuments were put up in the first place.
The historic record is clear, most statues of Confederate
leaders were erected not just to honor these men, but as part
of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost
Cause.
The Lost Cause had one goal--through monuments and other
means--rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the
Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. It sought to
continue to oppress Black Americans.
James W. Loewen, a retired University of Vermont professor,
and the author of Lies Across America: What Our Historic
Sites Get Wrong, put it succinctly in a Washington Post oped:
``The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they
could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white
supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was
all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the
misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our
public monuments and our history books.
According to the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
there are some 700 Confederate memorial monuments and statues
erected well after the Civil War. There are over 1000
streets, buildings and other markers named after Confederate
leaders. According to their research, ``two distinct periods
saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and
other symbols. The first began around 1900, amid the period
in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise
the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society.
This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a
dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born
in the inunediate aftermath of the Civil War. The second
spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s,
as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among
segregationists. These two periods also coincided with the
50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War.''
In summary, the South lost the war and a group of people
got together and decided that they were going to adorn the
country with monuments that revered those who fought on
behalf of a cause that was lost, which they wanted to make
seem noble. It was a propaganda campaign of epic proportions.
You see, these statues are not just stone and metal. They
are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These
monuments purposefully celebrate and perpetuate a fictional,
sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, the enslavement,
and the terror that it actually stood for.
The truth is they were fighting for the right to own and
sell black human beings.
History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a
statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the
Confederacy lost. We are all the better for it.
But in this, the 20th year of the 21st century, we should
not debate whether the United States of America should revere
the Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not
fight for the United States of America. They fought to
destroy it. They may have been warriors, but they were not
patriots.
Ultimately, as a country, we must grapple with a simple
notion--there is a difference between remembrance of history
and reverence of it.
To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal is an
inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to
our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. It
ensures that all that our fellow brothers and sisters once
fought to end will still continue.
As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony
for the National Museum of African American History &
Culture, ``A great nation does not hide its history. It faces
its flaws and corrects them.''
Members, you now have an opportunity to do your part
correct this past. This is an important first step.
Let me close with a plea to your humanity.
I noted in a speech upon removing the monuments that a
friend asked me to consider these monuments from the
perspective of an African American mother or father trying to
explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is
and why he is revered with a statue.
Can any of you look into her eyes and convince her that
Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she
will feel inspired and hopeful? Do these monuments help her
see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought
that if her potential is limited, yours is too?
We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When
you look into this child's eyes is the moment when the
searing truth comes into focus. This is the moment when we
know what is right and what we must do.
We cannot continue to walk away from this truth. We must
remove these Confederate symbols that dirty the soil of our
beloved country. Once that is done, we can better confront
the racist systems that have divided us by design for
generations and get us closer to that more perfect union we
all aspire to be.
Thank you.
Mitchell J. Landrieu
Founder and President, E Pluribus Unum
Former Mayor, City of New Orleans (2010-2018)