Tempers Flare Over Removal of Confederate Statues in New Orleans

For Malcolm Suber, the Confederate monuments that dot this Deep South city stand for white supremacy, pure and simple. Instead of just taking them down, Mr. Suber, an African-American activist and organizer, would like to see the city pass out sledgehammers and “let everybody take a whack — just like the Berlin Wall.”

For Frank B. Stewart Jr., a white New Orleans native, the city government’s plan to remove the statues — an idea championed by New Orleans’s white mayor, Mitch Landrieu — feels like an Orwellian attempt to erase history. Last week, Mr. Stewart, 81, a businessman and civic leader, argued as much in a letter he published as a two-page advertisement in The Advocate, a local newspaper.

“I ask you, Mitch, should the Pyramids in Egypt be destroyed since they were built entirely from slave labor?” he wrote.