New Orleans Mayor Defends Removing Confederate Monuments

When the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis first broached the idea of removing the Confederate monuments in New Orleans to Mayor Mitch Landrieu in 2014, the mayor was skeptical.

“I really rejected it, to tell you the truth,” Landrieu told TIME in an interview Wednesday. But he says it soon became “painfully obvious” that several of New Orleans public monuments' commemorating Reconstruction-era white uprisings and defenders of slavery had to go.