As North Carolina debates the fate of Confederate monuments, ponder this perspective from Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, on why he pushed successfully to remove four Confederate monuments in his city.

In “What I learned from my fight to remove Confederate monuments,” Landrieu (a potential Democratic presidential candidate) wrote:

“The statues were not honoring history, or heroes. They were created as political weapons, part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side not just of history, but of humanity.

“The monuments helped distort history, putting forth a myth of Southern chivalry, the gallant ‘Lost Cause,’ to distract from the terror tactics that deprived African-Americans of fundamental rights from the Reconstruction years through Jim Crow until the civil rights movement and the federal court decisions of the 1960s. Institutional inequities in the economic, education, criminal justice and housing systems exist to this very day.

“The misuse of history is inflamed by the anger burning through demonstrations today, anger fueled by white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have stolen the meaning of Southern heritage from many whites who abhor their ideology but still hold hard to a rose-colored nostalgia for the past.

“I am well aware of the emotional investment of many Southerners whose ancestors fought in the Civil War, of the popular interest in historical events, of how families lost loved ones, came through, and coped. I do not mean dishonor to these people. My concern is with the political meaning of the monuments in New Orleans, who put them there, and why: the perversion of history.

“Once I learned the real history of these statues, I knew there was only one path forward, and that meant making straight what was crooked, making right what was wrong. It starts with telling the truth about the past.”