, Columnist
Alabama Won't Quit the Confederacy
A state law preserves old monuments, the trace elements of treason and tyranny.
Confederate memorial in Montgomery.
Photographer: Katy RobertsThis article is for subscribers only.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered a powerful speech last month justifying his city's removal of Confederate statues from public spaces. "These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history," Landrieu said. "These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for."
Within days of Landrieu's speech, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey took pains to extend the unnatural life of the Confederacy. Ivey signed a bill designed to preserve and cherish her state's monuments to the death, enslavement and terror that Landrieu had just renounced.