NEW ORLEANS — The name Robert E. Lee is now officially stripped from the circle at Howard and St. Charles Avenues in New Orleans. Thursday, the city council voted to give the location two names, one old and one new.
The grassy park inside the location will now be called Harmony Circle. But the circle itself retains the name Tivoli Circle, the original name for the site before the Lee statue went up in the 1880s. Council member Lesli Harris sponsored the ordinance.
“The name Harmony Circle reflects New Orleans where we work to come together and we all make our community whole,” Harris said. “We celebrate our diversity as a strength, not as something that will tear us apart.”
The city took down the statue of the Confederate general in May 2017. The removal attracted both applause and outrage at the time.
Council member Eugene Green says renaming the circle is long overdue.
“I’m just pleased that just as the renaming commission intended that we are able to get rid of some of these names that have really oppressed people just by their very existence,” Green said.
Italian-American Society President Charles Marsala objected, telling council members the entire monument site should revert back to Tivoli Circle. Tivoli is a town in Italy.
“We believe that Harmony is a great idea, but best-suited right across the street (in Duncan Plaza) where it could honor in that park, many of the civil rights leaders, many other ideas,” Marsala said. “We were never given the opportunity to express that.”
Mark Raymond who chairs the city’s renaming commission called the council action, amazing.
“It’s an amazing day, we’ve been doing this work for what, 2 years, trying to rewrite some of the wrongs that were done, historically,” Raymond said.
The statue of Lee was removed in 2017 — the last of four Jim Crow-era monuments taken down in New Orleans under then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu following two years of political and legal battles. New Orleans has yet to decide what to do with the former Jefferson Davis and General P.G.T Beauregard monument sites.
Opponents of removal have defended the icons as historic memorials to Southern heritage. But moves to eliminate Confederate memorials in Southern cities had gained impetus after nine black parishioners were fatally shot in 2015 by an avowed racist at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The renaming of the circle comes as part of a continuing New Orleans city government project to rename streets bearing the names of Confederate leaders. Last year, for instance, Jefferson Davis Parkway, named for the president of the Confederacy, was renamed to honor Norman C. Francis, the long-time former president of Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black institution.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.