Mitch Landrieu, Part 1: Mayor of New Orleans “In the Shadow of Statues”

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2:02To the podcast and to O Magazine's Year of Big Questions. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be with you. I'm thrilled to be with you, too. We are taping this interview actually during the last few weeks of your second and last term. That's right. 21 days left. 21 days. Yeah, about 20 hours and 47 seconds. Who's counting? But who's counting? It's been 30 years. I've been in office for 30 years. It'll be the end of that career. Isn't that amazing? I remember because my first child was born, like right when I got elected. and we've had, Cheryl and I have five kids, and so my oldest daughter who I talked to the other day is graduating with a master's degree.

2:39And so you were out campaigning for your first election, I think it was - In 1988, when I was in the state legislature. And your wife was carrying - Gracie, my oldest child, the oldest of five. And your mother was campaigning - And she was carrying me in 1960. Yes, yes. I just thought that the thread of that, so powerful. It is, you know, when I was, when you write, you know, it makes you think. Yeah. Isn't it cathartic?

3:07Yeah. It's discernment. When you get into a place of discernment, you really start thinking about stuff. You make connections that you never really made before. Stories that always... So for example, one of the stories in the book is about one day, I was in the legislature in 1960, and he voted against the segregation package. And then it was all kind of a three-dimensional story. But when I started writing the book, I started thinking about, because people ask me, you know, you gave that speech and it was a great speech. And how long did it take you to write the speech? And the technical answer is about a year, you know, but the real answer is my entire life.

3:40And what I remembered was that I had to go back and ask my mother and father an uncomfortable question. Like, when exactly was I conceived? Which is like, that's not really what you want to ask your mom and daddy, because the first thing is none of your damn business. And I said, well, kind of it is. But I was, my birthday is August 16th, 1960, which meant that my mother and father conceived me somewhere around December of 1959. And it was in that period of time when I was in utero. My mother had four children at home under basically five years old because my mother has, we have nine children, have eight brothers and sisters.

4:15And she had them in 11 years. That's an amazing moment. But at this moment in 1960, when my father had just gotten elected to the legislature, a young white guy from this isle didn't really have two nickels to rub together. His mother and father were basically had nothing. My grandfather worked for the public service, you know, for the city. And my grandmother ran a little, you know, store in the house that my father lived in. He actually slept in the storeroom. This kid gets elected to the legislature and he's confronted with Jimmy Davis, who was like George Wallace and basically said segregation forever.

4:48And my father was one of two people that voted against the segregation package. And that night, the story is that he tells is when he was going back to the hotel, he was confronted in the elevator by Leander Perez, who was one of the great segregationists in the South at the time, and a congressman named Willie Rainick. And they basically said to him, you're a marked man, we're going to get you. And that was like, and I was in utero. And so, you know, when you jump past, when you jump forward 57 years and think, well, how long has this been going on? There hasn't been really a time when the issue of race, you know, this because you're from the South, hasn't permeated our lives in one form.

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7:21That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash supersoul. 4HERS.com slash Supersoul. Weight loss by HERS is not available in all 50 states. Wagovi is a registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wagovi clinical study information, and restrictions, visit 4HERS.com. The author. Yes, and you grew up when people were calling your father the N-word lover, that he was a nigger lover, that he was, you know, favoring black people, that he was all the time. And they called me Son of Moon the Coon. Yeah. That was my moniker. They really called me either Half Moon or Quarter Moon or Son of Moon the Coon.

8:08You know, something like that, a pejorative term. My whole life. There's not a time when those phrases were not kind of used in and around places where we were. that you grew up in this culture where you had parents who were, for their time, extraordinary in their vision of being able to see people as human beings, right? Yeah. And even that, you are still shaped by a culture around you. And this is what you and I both know so clearly, is that it's not even just what your parents tell you, but it's how your father treated other people of color around him. It's how you see your people, your parents respond Yeah, it was it was minorities it was who are less less than it's an excellent It's an excellent thing to understand it was much less about what they said because my mother and father were not preachy Right, it didn't go like look at this is the way But basically if you asked me to synthesize what my father and mother taught us it said love other people and be fair That was really just kind of the way they were but one of the the stories that I tell in the book is people said Well, how did you how'd your day to get like that and the truth is that he when he went to law school at Loyola he became friends very early on with Dr.

9:22Norman C. Francis. People now know Norman C. Francis as the longest serving president of a university in America. He was, as you know, the presidential award for taking Xavier University from where it is to where it is today. They graduate more African-American doctors than anywhere else. That's the great Norman Francis. Well, he was just my father's best friend back in 1956, 57, 58. And my father and Norman, Norman helped form my father's consciousness about what another human being who was smarter and better looking than him looked like. And so when I asked my father, you know, people said you were courageous.

9:57He goes, I didn't necessarily just do it for Norman because it was the just thing to do that the Jesuits taught us about it. He was my friend. And if I couldn't be with Norman, I was the worst for it. So I was fighting myself just as much as I was fighting for Norman. And so Norman married a woman named Blanche. Blanche and Norman and Moon and Verna had children together and me and all of my brothers and sisters and all the Francis kids grew up together so I tell a story in the book about when I was a kid I would listen to white people talk to me about black people they're basically criminals they don't love God they're really not patriotic my personal experience was completely opposite of that the Francis kids and all the other kids that we live with was smarter looking better better athletes better musicians better and I kept thinking well Who are they talking about?

10:43Yeah, even, and I remember when you and your wife were first campaigning that first time you were out, and she said it's the people of color, the black folks who were inviting you into the home, and even the people who had the least were the people who offered you the most of themselves. It was generally true that when we went into, and when you run for the state legislature, at least in Louisiana, in New Orleans, in a city, you go door to door. Door to door. You knock on door. Hi, my name is Mitch. I'm running for state. Would you please vote for me? And you do it over and over again. And by the way, there were about at the time.

11:17And you try to stay out of the bars even when your dad tells you to. That's a whole other story. But generally, there are 10 ,000 homes that you have to go knock on. And you have to tell these folks hello and who you are. And my wife, who was from a suburb, was moved by how welcoming people with less means were, who were mostly African-American than people who were wealthier, who felt like we were interrupting that cocktail hour. And that was a very instructive moment for her during that period of time. Well, one of my intentions for this conversation is to provide a space for, as you just said, discernment and the path forward.

11:51And I believe that you are one of the people leading the way. Congratulations. Thank you. For being on the bestseller list. I know when you're writing a book. How's that happen? I thought it would happen. No, it's amazing. It's amazing. I thought it would happen. I'll never ever. But let me at least say the name of the book. Thank you. In the shadows of statues, a white southerner confronts history. Not only confronts history, but confronts your personal upbringing and what you thought you knew about race. One of the things that moved me, you say, here's what I know about race. You can't go over it.

12:23You can't go under it. You can't go around it. You have to go through it. and I think for many years we thought in this country that we had been through it and had now arrived at a space where things were so much better. When did you recognize that you can't go under it, over it, around it? You have to go through it. That's something I really have understood my entire life. You know, back to my dad, Norman, I remember them because they were young lawyers. When they would talk, they would say, you know, when Brown versus Board of Education was decided, it said, let's integrate the schools with all deliberate speed.

12:55And I remember them saying oh my god it's over it's we're there and then of course we went through the incredible you know civil rights movement and I have always had this sense that we we just talk around race and it's just a very uncomfortable conversation and just having the conversation is not going through it it's the uncomfortableness with which people deal with the issue and so one of the things I tried to do about that when I was lieutenant governor and mayor was to try to see whether or not there was a way that we could talk about it in a meaningful way that was structured. But did you start out wanting to talk about race when you wrote In the Shadow of Statues, or did you just start out...

13:37This all started because you wanted to take down the statues after a conversation with Wynton Marcellus. Yeah, well, the book is really about race. It's not about the statues. And I specifically put in the title a white Southerner's perspective. I did that on purpose because I wanted to speak to white people. I really wanted to speak to the notion that it's important for a white person to say clearly and unequivocally something that I think should be really, really simple, which is that the Confederacy was fought to destroy the United States of America as we knew it. it was fought for the cause of preserving slavery, and the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

14:18Can't we just at least admit today, in the second decade of the 21st century, that that is a historical fact? Because we continue to debate that issue. And I don't think it's debatable. And when you say it in the book, the first time I read it, I thought I'd read it again, because it's so rare that a white person admits that it was just wrong. Correct. It was just wrong. But it shouldn't... Not only wrong, the wrong side of history. It was, first of all, it was... And you lost. And you lost. So, but not all white... See, here's the thing. Not all white people who lived in this South were on the side of the Confederacy.

14:55I know that. And not all white people today believe that the Confederacy was a good thing. So what I'm trying to figure out is why it's so hard for us even today to say that in just a kind of a thoughtful, respectful way so that we can move to the next thing. And I felt like I needed to, which is strange because I didn't feel when I started my mayorship. I think they don't say it because people think we've already said that. Anytime I've ever tried to do a show about race, a conversation about race, people, white people always say, we're already through that. How many years we want to talk about that?

15:29That's already done. Right. Well, that's that's kind of a pass. And that's kind of a well, we didn't really say it. We didn't really as a nation say. And this is one of the reasons why I formally said, I am sorry for slavery. And they said, well, who are you to make that determination? And this is my answer to that. I happen to be the duly elected mayor of the city of New Orleans, a continuous government. It's existed in this country since 1718. Thank you very much. And we're about to celebrate our 300th anniversary. And the city of New Orleans was a place where more people were sold into slavery than any other place in America.

16:02They docked right there. Since I am the one who has been given the constitutional right to speak for the people and the government, not every individual citizen, but writ large who we are, I thought it was appropriate for the city of New Orleans to recognize, so that it could be in the history books, that we recognize that it was wrong, and that for whatever part we played in it, we say we're sorry. Because the other part is about reconciliation. How do you actually reconcile? Not how do you dance through it, but how do you actually come into communion so that you can move forward to the next place?

16:33how do you do that? And I thought it was important for the historical record to write down why we did what we did. And then as I started writing it, obviously the book got to be much less about the monuments themselves than about the entire history of race as I kind of experienced it in my life. It starts out about finding a crane and then, which we'll get to. But I love what you said on early in the book, page four, race, the word, its many meanings, the constellation of issues that the word connotes does something to the human eye. Sometimes it's hot and uncomfortable when you're around people who can only see color.

17:10People of color become objects or problems and not humans. But this is what I love that you said. It's often these same people who, when asked about history, insisted themselves and us that they are not at fault, that history happened before them, and that it's time to move on. That's exactly what I was talking about. Every time I've had this conversation, people say, when do we get to move forward? We don't get to move forward until... Correct. Well, you don't really get to move forward until you acknowledge that what happened in the past was wrong. You know, I think people do. I've learned more about people.

17:45People don't understand why. Why does that need to be said? Okay, so it was wrong. Why do I need to say that? So that we don't repeat it. because a lot of times if people say, no, it wasn't wrong, then you don't really recognize what you have to do to change. Now, one of the things I think people are afraid of, and I think this is a fear that we are sensing that some white people have in the country. The country's getting browner and it's getting darker. And by 2040, if the demographers are correct, the country's going to be majority-minority. Now, for some reason, that scares folks. And I say to them...

18:17It scares folks who've been in the majority all this time. Correct. And some folks, and I say to them, I said, listen, based on my life's experience, I can assure you that African-Americans and Hispanic people are not nearly going to treat us the way we treated them, part one. You don't have to be afraid of it. And by the way, we're not all white or all black or all, I'm from New Orleans. And you know that our history is that we're all mixed up in like a really special way. And that there's a better way when we're together than there are parts. So why are you afraid? But the fact is people do feel this sense of anxiety, and I think they feel like in some reason, for some reason, they're feeling blamed.

18:57To which I say this is how I deal with this. That's why people can't talk about it. I say, look, I'm not blaming you. I'm not saying that you, white man today, had anything to do with what happened in the Confederacy. So why do you keep acting like I'm blaming you? And I can't litigate whose fault it was, but I can litigate whose responsibility it is to fix it. It's all of our responsibility. But we have to recognize, if you're a person that's been hurt, and the other person won't even recognize that what was done was wrong, how does that person then have a conversation with you about how to go forward together?

19:29And if going forward together is important, which I would argue strenuously it is, because I don't think we can go forward at all, then why can't you say, somebody say, I'm sorry, and why can't somebody say, I forgive you? Now let's go to the next thing. I think you're so right, Mr. Mayor. And I think if people just could think of it in terms of their own family life, if your husband betrays you or your wife betrays you or friend betrays you and you are really deeply hurt by that, if they don't apologize, there's no chance you can ever actually move forward in that relationship. And so you're talking about the relationship that we have with each other in this country is the same, cannot be mended.

20:13I think that that's true. It's also true, I think, for countries. So you asked, people have asked me, well, what did Germany do? What did South Africa do? Right. People have their opinions about how well each of those countries succeeded in recognizing, for example, that the Holocaust was an awful tragedy that we never want to repeat or apartheid in South Africa. Some people have opined that South Africa didn't do a great job. But one of the things they did do as a country is they actually tried. Yeah, the reconciliation. There was a recognition that there has to be a reconciliation before we can actually move forward.

20:44And we really haven't had that in the country. And so when we began curating the 300th anniversary for the city and thinking about what we're going to do to celebrate it. As you know, the city was completely destroyed by Katrina. 500 ,000 homes were hurt. 250 ,000 were lost. 1 ,800 people died. We had to rebuild the city. and I think that we had to acknowledge in the city that we weren't perfect before Katrina hit us and so as we were rebuilding the amazing thing that the people of the city of New Orleans have done that I'm not sure has been replicated in any place else is they actually took a moment to stay longer in pain so that we could get it right and rebuild the city the way it should have been had we not messed up the first time which as you know is hard because if you have anybody in your life that has been involved in a near-death experience, a child that's been sick, a friend that has died.

21:35All you want to do is go back to the moment before it happened and act like it didn't exist. That's right. But that's not what happens in people's lives or in cities' lives. And so as we started to rebuild the city, I started thinking about using the 300th anniversary as something to kind of like build towards. So for the last four years, much like a city would build the Olympics or do something like the World Cup, I said, well, what are we going to build that we're going to leave behind that's going to make us better? And how do we deal with our soul as well as the physicality? And so when I asked Wynton Morsellis, who was my buddy, to help me think about it, because I consider Wynton not to just be the greatest jazz musician, but he's a historian.

22:15His instrument is the medium with which he tells the stories of life, essentially. And Wynton's a great historian, and plus he is a great orchestrator of the creation of beauty. That's what he uses music to do. I said went and helped me think about how to organize this city and he just very plaintively said to me He said I'll help you I'll do it, but you need to do something for me And I said what he he didn't say I need you to take down the monument. He said I want you to think about Taking down the Robert E. Lee statue and I said Like my first response was like why would I why and then he asked me something that like a great friend would ask you he goes Do you know?

22:53Do you know? who put that up and why it's there and what its purpose is. And, you know, the truth is I didn't really know because I hadn't thought about it very much. And then he said... You said you'd passed by them all these years? Well, everybody did. They're in the four most prominent places in the city and you pass them by like it's a stone. And Wynton says to me, he says to me, have you thought about them or would you think about them from my perspective? And did you know? So these are all questions. These are all invitations to learn more. Not, you're a racist, you're stupid, you don't know what you're talking about, I can't believe this, how dare you, none of that.

23:30And he said, did you know that Louis Armstrong left here because of that and wouldn't come back? And when he told me that, it was like all of this information that had been in my head my whole life that I knew was there kind of exploded out because what he was talking about was the great diaspora. He was not only talking specifically about Louis Armstrong, he was talking figuratively about all of the people that had left the South and took all of their intellectual capital and all of their talent and all of their raw material and spread out across the United States of America. And I thought, that is exactly what happened to us and why we're at such a loss right now, because we lost basically all of our creative talent that African-Americans left and took with and came to Los Angeles, taught you how to cook, taught you how to second line in New York.

24:13And I thought to myself, he's exactly right. And I promised him that I would do, was I thought about it. And then when I really got into actually who put them there, why they were there, what was going on, I pretty much knew that they had to come down. And then I just had to figure out how to get it done. And a lot of people had tried this before. A lot of people had worked on it. So I was standing on the shoulders of lots of people that had been through this issue for many, many, many years. I certainly wasn't the first person to enunciate it and wasn't the only one. There were huge numbers of people that were involved in this.

24:49but it took some legal maneuvering, and then it just took some work to actually get the authority to take them down. And then I thought that was the end of it. That was actually just the beginning. Just the beginning. The decision to do it, the votes to do it, the authority to do it. They're all different things. The right to do it, first of all. So I honestly, and somebody the other day said, oh, you had courage. I said, actually, my first response was, oh, hell no. Oh, this is going to be, I'm trying to rebuild the city. How did you think about it? How did you do that? Well, the first thing I thought was how not to do it.

25:21Because I was in the middle, you've got to think about this, in the context, we're rebuilding the entire city. We have rebuilt 33 brand new state of the art schools that our kids are learning in. We've built a new airport. We've built a riverfront. We've had these massive construction projects going on where we literally have rebuilt the entire city of New Orleans as a result of the devastation and thank the people of America for their blessings in helping us out. And I was in the middle of that. But when you introduce this, you know that, you know, forgive the expression, but all hell is likely to break loose.

25:54And my first reaction was, I don't know if I want to do that. Who wants to go stepping into that? Exactly. Why don't you walk past this? Yeah. And I asked a couple of people. I asked my father, you know. Went and said this thing. He goes, I don't know if I would do that. Now, he was talking to me like a father to a son. I have a pretty good premonition. I write this in the book. and I told him this. Yeah, but had you been the mayor at the time, you know you would have... He would have at least thought about it. This is an old man in the sea fight that we're about to have. So then I thought to myself, you know, I don't...

26:25I started doing the research on it and I realized that these three monuments were part of an initiative by what historians have called the cult of the lost cause. That's not my term, that's their term. And there were people, to be historically accurate, who well after the Civil War ended, well after the Civil War ended and was defeated, decided that they wanted to send a message that they were still not coming along and that they still controlled the land and they controlled the money and they controlled everything. And so, you know, the story of reconstruction, the black codes, all of the, Plessy versus Ferguson, all the laws that were put in place to send messages to black folks that, you know what?

27:02You might be free, but we still. Yeah, we control you. Right, so in 1890, many, many years after the Civil War was over, from 1890 to like 1911, These individuals went about systematically erecting these monuments to give reverence to the people who fought to destroy the United States of America and to preserve slavery. That's what they were for. It was their specific intent to do that. And the Confederacy clearly now, out of the mouth of the vice president of the Confederacy, said it was fought for the cause of white supremacy. So these are monuments that were put up for that reason. Now, when I learned that fact, I went, okay, that's wrong.

27:41That's a historical error. That's a lie. All right. That was my first conclusion And then secondly the way these things were put up would just put up because these well-financed people went to the mayor Who by that time by the way was a Confederate soldier? And so they just went and put them up and at the time New Orleans was not an all-white place And by the way, we would never we were never a Confederate town Union soldiers actually slept on the place So now I'm starting to get ticked thinking, wait a minute, this is not, not only is this a lie, but they basically stole a piece of land that people in New Orleans own, and notwithstanding the fact that the city was multicultural at the time, erected something and put a man up there who had actually never been to New Orleans.

28:21Robert Lee really had no connection to the city. When was the first one to elect him? 1890, right around there in New Orleans. And so all of a sudden, I started to learn the facts. Then I figured out, to be honest with you, I thought, well, you know what? Even now that I know that, I'm not going to go fight Congress to take these down. I'm not going to go fight the governor and the legislature. And if they have anything to say about it, I'm not going to do it. Well, it turns out through the research that the city of New Orleans owned the land 100%. And the mayor was the one. And the city council was responsible for putting them up so that we had responsibility for taking them down.

28:53So then we legally owned them. And then once I figured that out and I started to have the conversations and I reiterated in the book the story about the 12-year-old girl. The 12-year-old girl standing there. with a lot of people that were helping me curate it, and a friend of mine told me that story about her daughter. And you should tell the story for the people who have a great initiative. Well, the story is I was actually talking, I consulted with a lot of people, just to make sure that my sense of the law was right, that my sense of history, my reading of the history was right. So I talked to Ken Burns, I talked to Walter Isaacson.

29:24I talked to a lot of people before. So I started thinking about this in 2014, and I didn't pull the trigger until late 2015. So a year and a half, two years, I thought about it, researched about it and one of the things that really got me locked into you got to do it was that in a room of people whites and African Americans who are all friends we were having conversations and the room did not divide racially there were some African Americans that said you know what it's no big deal don't take them down we learned how to live with them it's like the Edmund Pettus Bridge it's important for people to walk by some African Americans and no you got to take it down right away some white said don't even think about doing it some white said absolutely take them down so it's a very interesting discussion but one mother African-American mother told me the story of driving by the Robert E.

30:08Lee monument and the little girl says to the mother mommy mommy mommy that's a beautiful statue what is that statue and she says oh honey that's the statute of Robert E. Lee oh well who was Robert E. Lee oh honey he was a great general well what war did he fight in oh he fought in the Civil War well what side did he fight on well honey he fought on the side of the confederacy and she said mommy he he didn't fight for me and she said no baby he he fought for the other side she said you mean the side to protect slavery she said uh-huh and then she just says to the mother well mama why is he up there you've got social dialed in search is doing its thing so why do your marketing results look the same as six months ago that's because you're fishing in the same pond as everyone else.

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31:30I love that story. It's a true story. It's a little bit paraphrased, but it is essentially a true story. And so the mother said, I could not answer that question for that child. Yeah. And she hadn't thought about it herself. And she hadn't thought about it herself because we just walk by these things and so out of the mouths of babes, just like Parkland. And so when she told me that story, I said, you know, my whole life has been preaching about inclusion and lifting people up and giving people a platform. That became the center of your speech. And it became the center of my speech. So I thought to myself, oh my God, if you can't answer that question to that little girl, then why is that stat?

32:06Why is it there? Why do we have him in a place of reverence? And that is essentially what this is. Let's be clear about this. When he was fighting to eliminate He was fighting to destroy the country for the cause of protecting slavery and stop that child from becoming. And I write in the book and in the speech, do you think that that girl felt uplifted? Do you think she felt encouraged? Do you think that that statute was there to help her become who she's supposed to be and for her to realize a God-given talent? So then I thought to myself, you know what? There is no way you cannot do this. And then I began to prepare for it.

32:43And I was prepared. But what about, though, Mr. Mayor, the other side, the people who are descendants of Robert E. Lee, who believed that the South should have won? What about those people who say that did also happen, that was also history? It's an excellent question. That is a point that I understand and I hear. Except that if those people who were there to preserve history, so New Orleans is 300 years old, remember. Right. The Civil War lasted four years and we only have one prominent circle. It's not like a faraway corner. It is the most prominent place in New Orleans. How did it come to be that only for four years of our history and only the Confederacy got to occupy the prime space?

33:29That's like a big fat guy sitting at a table eating a steak and nobody else gets a piece of it. And you say to yourself, well, that's interesting that your theory is because for the last however many years we've been here now, 300, nobody's ever thought about adding anything to that space. So like our friend Bryan Stevenson is about to do something that is just gonna, you know, I think edify this country in a meaningful way. I saw the story, it was incredible, of all the people that have been lynched. There are no monuments or places of reverence before in two weeks from now where we actually thought about this.

34:02There are no slave ships. Barack Obama, when he was president, gave the speech at the opening of the African-American Museum about the slave block that was commemorated, that I write about in the book, where the only thing we remembered about it was that two white guys who were running for president stood on it and gave a speech from it and never once mentioned that there were more men and women sold off of that block than anywhere else. So the same piece of material, two completely separate stories. One piece would remember, the other piece was forgotten. And so my question to the historians who were yelling at me about tearing down history, because I'm somehow trying to pervert history, is that you have committed historical malfeasance because you've only told this little bit of a story.

34:40So that's the first answer. The second answer is this, that there is clearly a difference between remembrance of history so that we'll never repeat it and revering it and praying that that history comes back again. And that's what that monument was. And in a city that's 60 % African American. Celebrating it. Celebrating it and lifting it up. Hoping that that history will come back again. I don't want to get into politics too much, but make America a great comma again. And when you say that in the South, the comma again part, you don't have to be African American to understand that that is a dog whistle of epic proportions.

35:16And many people saying, we don't want to go back there. That wasn't a great time, not just for African Americans, but for the rest of us. And so I make the point that I think I stand by is that there is a difference between remembrance and reverence. And remembrance is for where we bury people. and remembrance is for museums so that you can put them in context. So there's a place for them. There's an absolute place to remember. Just not in the center of town. First of all, there were many people that were killed in the Civil War. We should remember all of those people. We should remember the sacrifice that each of them made and they were fighting for causes they felt were important and all of them should be remembered and never forgotten or diminished.

35:56That is not to say, though, that we should treat with great reverence the people that ran that war to destroy the country. And I would just ask people very just gently and respectfully, can you point out to me one other monument in America that reveres the general that lost whatever cause they were fighting for? Anywhere. Just one. It would be helpful to know. And so in that context, I thought it was important. You usually don't get a monument when you lost. Well, Abraham Lincoln. Right. George Washington is the one that's on the mall, not King George. It's kind of interesting. But as importantly as that, is that when you're recreating a city, which we've been in the process of doing, and you ask yourself, and every city in America can ask themselves this question.

36:41I can't answer it for them. Every community's got to do this themselves. Is the way that your public space is curated, does that really reflect the totality and the beauty and the depth and the richness of your history? Of the people who live there. And it is more likely than not that the answer to that is no. And the next question is don't you think that it would be better if it were in proportion in context in its richness and it's deeply because my theory of life is that It's not black and white equals gray It's red and blue and orange and yellow and brown and black are all woven together in a deeply entwined Tapestry that makes the whole thing so strong that you can't ever separate it And doesn't that sound like what the idea of America is about out of many we are one Not out of many we hang out in different places and meet up from time to time not a church You know, but like what does that really like look like and haven't we demonstrated to each other and to ourselves that when we get together And open ourselves up that were better.

37:40I love that you called it in the shadow of statues, too I mean, I think that there is there layers of meaning there are layers of there are yes They are and I would just say this that I realize because we have been living in the shadows of those statues All of us. I think that they're oppressive. I think they get in your head. And these are not, look, mostly what I did was I listened to my friends. So I was inundated with trumpet players. So Terrence Blanchard, who's another great, wonderful jazz musician, is from New Orleans. He and his wife, Robin, have beautiful daughters. And we've gotten to be really dear friends.

38:17And Terrence, I did not know. Terrence couldn't believe it. I did not know this when I was writing this speech. It took me quite a long time. There are a lot of iterations to it. But it wasn't until like two or three days before I actually gave the speech that I actually included the part of Terrence Blanchard in it because it wasn't finished until Terrence told me this story. Because remember, these monuments came down over a couple of months, period of time after two years of legal fighting. We had public hearings. The story of him not being able to believe it. All this stuff. So Terrence was on his way home from Los Angeles.

38:53in a plane and he lands and he sees on the social media that were taken down the P.T. Beauregard statute which was taken down before the Robert E. Lee statute and Terrence tells the story it's in the paper that he called Robin and told him to wake up his daughters and he taught them brought them out there 12 o 'clock at night and they watched them take it down and Terrence said Terrence said I felt like the world had been lifted off my shoulders I'm paraphrasing. And so when I called him the next day. Something had shifted. Yeah, something had shifted in his life. I said, Terrence, because I had known Terrence forever.

39:27We talked about this a lot. He said he never thought he would see the day in his lifetime where that was happening. Correct. And I said, walk me through that. And he said, you know, he's a couple years younger than me. He went to John F. Kennedy High School, which is on the other side of that statue. He had to go by that statue every day. And he told me when he was a little boy, every day he walked by that statue, he felt less than. He used those words less than. Now, Little Mitch, who's two years older than Terrence, drove by that statue every day with his daddy in the morning because that's into a park where I was learning how to play tennis.

39:59So Terrence and I walked the same pathway almost every day. Me walking by it, ignoring it, because it was just a nice, beautiful statue, and Terrence feeling less than every day. So this young boy, who later became a man, every day, that statue made him feel like, you know what, like Louis, I've got to get out of here if I'm going to be somebody. Now, if I'm the mayor of a city and I'm trying to rebuild a great American city and I want it to be big and wonderful and inclusive And I have people leaving because they feel less than who's actually losing All of us are. Yeah, but even for those who don't leave because they feel less than you tell a beautiful story in the book about A man whose name I'm forgetting right now.

40:36He's a pastor of the biggest church there and he was he was like four years or three years under you and in school and You're both in the same school you have a completely different experience than he does. And I loved his explanation of what, when you asked him whether or not he'd experienced racism. And he said... Well, so you'll remember just the back channel of this story is that when I was 13 in that school, this woman showed up at school and threatened my life. And she threw a card at me and said, you know, you're the son of an lover. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Your father's ruined in the city.

41:12It was that school, a white Catholic Jesuit school we had African Americans at the school. As a matter of fact, Mark Morio, who became mayor of the city of New Orleans, who was one of my dear friends, went to this school. So the school was integrated, but it was mostly white. And so many, many years later, as I've been thinking through that, we've worked through that with Jesuit in some instances, as I was writing the book, I started to, again, think back through what was it really like at Jesuit for black kids that went there. So this pastor who is just a wonderful guy, I asked him, I said, Twan, I said, when you were at Jesuit, because you remember, I mean, the rules do still apply.

41:54Seniors don't really talk to eighth graders. Racicide. No reason. Racicide. He was a little, you know, I said, I said, tell me about, tell me about your experience at Jesuit. I said, were, was it uncomfortable for you? And he said, you know, most of the kids are pretty nice to me. There were a couple of kids that were out of the way. He said, but it was mostly a pretty good experience for me. He said, however, I never really felt totally part of the school. And I said, why? And this actually made me cry. And it really hurt me because I could tell that it still hurt him at 54 years old. Yeah, you said you're looking in the face of this 50 year old man.

42:29I looked at him and I could, and he didn't, I don't know that he thought, I don't know that, that he knew I saw it, but I could see in his eyes when he told me this when he said the entire time that I was there I never got invited to anybody's house for a party I never got I never got to sleep over and I could see even though he had he had moved through that spiritually in his life that that little boy who was hurt he still experienced that pain and it made it really kind of broke me down and I thought to myself you know what that's what that looks like when people say yeah it's integrated but it's not really integrated.

43:06That's what about the reason I tell the story about the cranes is because that's what institutional racism is that you can be in you can be kind of in the room but really not there. We can act like you're included but you're really not included and you don't feel a part of it which is where some of that anger and frustration comes from. Our conversation will continue in the next episode. You can listen by downloading part two. Hey there podcast listeners I have exciting news. We're launching a brand new podcast in addition to Super Soul Conversations. It's called Oprah's Masterclass. The Masterclass podcast allows you to hear the greatest life lessons from some of the most respected and renowned actors, musicians, public figures and athletes in their own words.

43:51Listen as Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Ellen DeGeneres, Shaquille O 'Neal, Reba McIntyre, Dwayne Johnson, and Jane Fonda, just to name a few, share what they've learned about life and their own insights into their personal stories and challenges. I believe that there's something to be learned from every experience, and everyone can use their life as a class. Oprah's Masterclass Podcast will be available July 19th on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe now and listen free. Go to applepodcast.com slash Oprah's Masterclass. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast.

44:32You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation. Thank you for listening.

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