New Orleans Mayor Landrieu gave an amazingly frank speech regarding the history of the city, the pulling down of the confederate monuments, and the hypocrisy of the people who say these statues are history.

“These statues are not just stone and metal. 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. And after the Civil War, these monuments were a part of that terrorism, as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn. They were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.”

Watch the speech in full here.