I thank you all for coming today. The soul of our beloved city is rooted in a

history that has evolved over thousands of years.

This is New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landro, addressing a city back in May.

He's speaking at the end of a long ugly debate, one that involved threats against his life. And he's trying to get people to understand

the distinction between remembering and revering southern history.

To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places, in honor is an

inaccurate recitation of our full past, is an affront to our present

and it is a bad prescription for our future.

In June of 2015, a week after Dylan Ruth killed nine black people at church in Charleston, South Carolina,

having posed with a Confederate flag, the mayor proposed that the city remove four

Confederate monuments from public places. It was the start of something. Barack Obama was still

president. We'd just been through months of public mourning and outrage over

police violence and Roos terrorist attack got many Americans thinking anew about

Confederate symbols and icons. New Orleans took action. The City Council

voted with the mayor and this spring the monuments came down.

It is our acknowledgement that now is a time to take stock of and then move past a painful part of our history.

Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and

soul searching a truly lost cause. The Battle of New Orleans was something of a

marker and not just for racial justice. The white nationalist movement has

focused intensely on the debate over Confederate iconography. It has been a

rallying point and to anyone who's been watching, Charlottesville was no surprise.

We begin tonight with that breaking news, a horrific scene in Charlottesville, Virginia,

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