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●  ‘They Should Be Lynched’: Miss. Lawmaker Karl Oliver on La. Leaders Taking Down Confederate Monuments

● Transcript of Mayor Landrieu's remarks 

They are all gone now. On Friday, the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee became the last of New Orleans’s four contested monuments to go, an end to more than 130 years of publicly honoring a man who embodied Southern pride and racial oppression.

The monuments sat at the entrance to the city’s largest park, on a vaunted greenway, in a major traffic circle in one of this city’s squares. They occupied places where you won’t find many tourists meandering with long-necked frozen cocktails.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu marked the historic moment with a rousing speech that sought to end nearly two years of heated debate in the city over what the monuments said about its past.

“They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for,” Landrieu said, adding that Lee and the Confederate army fought against the United States. “They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.”