Historian Sees Red Over White Supremacist ‘Help’

When Richard Bell looks at the Liberty Monument these days, he thinks of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and becomes angry.

“Duke has used us and taken advantage of a delicate situation for his own political purposes,” said Bell, president of the Louisiana Historical Society. “We completely disassociate ourselves from Mr. Duke and his agenda.”

Bell’s problem is that he is trying to make an evenhanded case for keeping the Liberty Monument on public view in New Orleans. The granite obelisk commemorates an 1874 uprising by the White League against the state’s Reconstruction government. Civil rights groups see it as a testimonial to white supremacy.

Enter Duke.

After more than a year of virtual isolation following his failed but well-publicized bids for Senate, governor and President, Duke is back in the news as a vocal supporter of the monument.

“This is the kind of controversy that Duke thrives on,” said Lance Hill, the former director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Nazism and Racism, a statewide group that documented many of Duke’s racist and Nazi connections.

City workers took the monument down in 1989 to make way for street repairs. A Duke supporter sued the city for keeping it warehoused, and it was put up again in a less visible spot this spring. Now another top Duke organizer, Hope Lubrano, is spokeswoman for a group called the Friends of the Liberty Monument.

“These are the people we want nothing to do with,” Bell said. “We’re not interested in white supremacy; we only care about preserving our city’s historical monuments.”

Raphael Cassimere, a University of New Orleans professor specializing in African-American history, said Bell misses the point. “Duke is not the issue; he’s only a sideshow. The issue is the monument, which is a symbol of white supremacy and a constant reminder to black people of just how deeply entrenched racism is in our society.”

Civil rights activists have objected to a plaque later attached to the monument stating that the “national election in November, 1876, recognized white supremacy and gave us our state.” (In the election, Democrat Samuel Tilden won a majority of the popular vote, but 22 electoral votes were in dispute. Congress gave the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes after Republicans cut a deal and agreed to end Reconstruction in the South.)

At the rededication rally, civil rights activists clashed with monument backers, including Duke, who was a featured speaker.

“What people don’t realize is that we have as much a right to get our point across as they do,” Lubrano said. “Where do they get off telling us what should be torn down? This is history, you can’t make it go away.”

In the long run, the monument fracas could hurt Duke’s hopes of rekindling his political career “because it only links him once again with the forces of white supremacy,” Hill said.

Meanwhile, the tide may have turned against the monument. The New Orleans City Council has passed an ordinance allowing the city to remove any monument that “honors, praises or fosters” ideologies in conflict with the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.