New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's recent race relations speech, much like Lincoln's famed 1860 Cooper Union speech, apparently has elevated Landrieu to the status as contender for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union_speech
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These are hard days of coarse language — of tweets and catcalls that appeal to the worst in us, not the best. Maybe that’s why a big, sweeping, old-fashioned speech delivered in New Orleans on Friday made such an impression on me. It was a reprieve. It was an antidote.
But it also addressed matters that are forever tripping us up — race, history, healing — better than anything I’ve heard or read in a long time. It was the masterpiece we needed at the moment we needed it, and I fear that it was lost in the brutal whirl of news these days. It shouldn’t be....
Our country’s leader was denied even a cameo. But he was most certainly present in Landrieu’s warnings about holding on to any “false narrative” and his plea that we not “marinate in historical denial.” This was a speech about facing and owning the truth.
It cut straight to the heart of things, making the case against monuments that glorify the Confederacy by asking us to consider them “from the perspective of an African-American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth-grade daughter” why a statue of the most famous Confederate general occupied such a lofty perch above the city.
“Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her?” Landrieu said. “Do you think she will feel inspired — and hopeful — by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential?”
He then put her experience in a larger context. “Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are, too?”>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/o...or-speech.html
The last two sentences invoke the spirit of Texan Lyndon Johnson when he campaigned throughout the South stating that passage of the Civil Rights Act was the pathway to the future for the South.
Lyndon B. Johnson: Voting Rights Act Address
Johnson realized that a land of discrimination as evidenced by Jim Crow laws was becoming an outlaw (read "The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson" by Eric Goldman) as globalization took hold after WWII, and exerted his immense legislative skill into the passage of a tough Civil Rights bill. Is the time right to reject the public glorification on the Confederacy in the South, and all of the political views that accompany this glorification, just as the time was right in 1964 to end Jim Crow laws?
<< In December 1964 the Court decided
Katzenbach v. McClung and
Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, upholding Title II [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] as a valid exercise of Congress’s commerce power. In the years since, the act has been a remarkable success. Its acceptance in the South was surprisingly quick and widespread. In a stroke, the act demolished the rickety but persistent foundation for segregation and Jim Crow. Title II reached far into the daily lives of southerners, creating an unprecedented level of personal mingling between the races and making integration a fact of daily life. Title VII, meanwhile, has vastly reduced workplace discrimination, through the efforts of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although years of toil, struggle, and bloodshed still lay ahead, the 1964 law dealt a major blow to the system of segregation. The past 50 years of American history are almost unimaginable without it.>>
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...cy-for/358630/
So Landrieu's speech becomes a rallying cry as the Republican Party through gerrymandering and limits on voting rights once again attempts to minimize along racial lines the power of the ballot box along racial lines.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ess/100855582/
Here's the text of his heralded speech discussing race relations in 21st century America and defending the removal of Confederate statues from prominent locations in New Orleans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/o...ript.html?_r=1
Would a President Landrieu finally end the Civil War, much as Lincoln's election was the catalyst for the outbreak of the Civil War?
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I urge you to read Landrieu's
speech online to appreciate its poetry and power. What most impressed me is that, like many great leaders, Landrieu did not cast blame or condemn his political opponents.
Yet he was refreshingly honest about the city's racial history. "New Orleans was America's largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousand of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape, of torture," he said.
He forcefully refuted the ludicrous notion that the statues should remain because they are part of that history. "When people say to me that the monuments are history, well what I just described is real history, as well, and it is the searing truth." That, he said, "begs the question: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks?"
Landrieu's extensive discussion about why city leaders installed statues and monuments ("to rewrite history and hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity") was as powerful and persuasive as anything I've seen on this question.>>
Mayor Mitch Landrieu's speech on race was one for the ages: Opinion | NOLA.com
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