A Confederate general's forgotten cause, Beauregard and unification

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A bronze statue depicting the uniformed general astride his horse was erected at the Esplanade Avenue entrance to City Park in 1915. It is one of four monuments targeted for removal by Mayor Mitch Landrieu, amid a national debate about symbols that lionize men who fought to preserve slavery.

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Largely forgotten, though, is that Beauregard also was an early proponent of equal rights in Louisiana, serving as the outspoken leader of the short-lived and ultimately failed unification movement.

The movement was a coalition made up of prominent white and black New Orleanians that called for integrated schools, public places and transportation and voting rights for black men, two years before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and nearly a century before the enactment of major civil rights legislation in the 20th century. Beauregard was the group's chairman.

"I am persuaded that the natural relation between the white and colored people is that of friendship," Beauregard said in an address published in July 1873 in papers including The New Orleans Republican and The Daily Picayune. "I am persuaded that their interests are identical; that their destinies in this state, where the two races are equally divided, are linked together; and that there is no prosperity for Louisiana which must not be the result of their cooperation.

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The movement failed to get enough support and soon collapsed. Just over a year after Beauregard's address was published, a group of paramilitary white supremacists briefly overthrew the state government in what is remembered as the Battle of Liberty Place, considered the beginning of the end of Reconstruction.

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