Landrieu held a news conference outside the New Orleans Police Department's headquarters after the city began the process of removing four Confederate-era monuments.
The first statue that was removed was the Liberty Monument, an 1891 obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League, an organization started in 1874 to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate freedmen from voting and political organizing, which Landrieu said was the most offensive and "revere [d] white supremacy".
The Liberty Place monument, which is a 35-foot-tall white obelisk that stood on Iberville Street, was just one of four Confederate monuments that are being taken down. Other cities' plans to remove monuments, including those in Memphis, Tenn. and Birmingham, Ala. have been thwarted by state officials.
The identities of the contractors removing the monuments are not being revealed due to reported death threats.
There are three other monuments scheduled to be removed, including a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Lee Circle. "We can remember these divisive chapters in our history in a museum or other facility where they can be put in context -and that's where these statues belong".
In June that year, a white supremacist fatally shot nine African-American parishioners at a black church in SC, prompting a national debate over Confederate symbols in the formerly slave-owning South.
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U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier issued a 38-page ruling the same day a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit affirmed for the second time Barbier's original ruling that the monuments could go.
Pierre McGraw, head of a group called the Monumental Task Committee, speaks during a candlelight vigil at the statue of Jefferson Davis in New Orleans, Monday, April 24, 2017.
As with the battle over the Confederate flag in states like SC, many call the monuments a piece of the slave-owning past of the Southern states, others defend the as a piece of history that should be protected.
"We will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put on a pedestal in the heart of our city", said Landrieu. The University of Texas at Austin removed a statue of Jefferson Davis in 2015, and officials in Lousiville, Ky. removed a Confederate monument late previous year.
The city council voted 6-1 to remove the monuments, but legal battles to save them have dragged on for several years.
While it may be popular with New Orleans' city council, Mayor Landrieu's stance has drawn a severe degree of backlash from opponents as well, a force which has now even spread to affect numerous construction workers involved in the removal project.
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