Parts of a monument to Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard were found in a city maintenance yard next to piles of trash after the city removed them over the past week.
They were spotted by locals and people began to take photos of them. The parts of the statues are amid some scrapped vehicles and trash.
It all started when liberals in New Orleans ran a campaign to have them removed, citing them as racist among other things.
New Orleans crews began taking them down last Thursday. It was the second of four such removals in the area as officials seek to erase all vestiges of the era. I guess we should just forget about our history, good or bad…
Crews, wearing masks to cover their faces, worked under a heavy police presence starting at 3 a.m. to dismantle the statue, which was erected in 1911, nearly 50 years after the end of the war, and commissioned by the Jefferson Davis Memorial Association.
It cost a total of $2.1 million — half of it public money — to take down four Jim Crow-era monuments in New Orleans, according to records the city released Friday.
About half of the money was spent on the removals themselves and the rest on security and support services that included paying a private security contractor more than $710,000 to monitor and infiltrate various protest groups.
The records also indicate the contractor who took down three of the four statues found itself out by about $217,000 after the city refused to increase the $600,000 contract to account for additional time spent on the jobs, each of which stretched on several hours.
The city cut the $90,000 cost of removing the Battle of Liberty Place monument — the first to be taken down — by more than 25 percent during negotiations with another contractor after the obelisk had been removed.