Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard were not heroes. Sure, they've been treated as such. They've been immortalized in bronze and placed on pedestals as if they did something worthy of their elevated status. But they didn't. They have been wrongly celebrated for supporting a cause that was abominable. And, no, their cause was not less abominable because some of their contemporaries approved it. The Africans and African-descended people whose enslavement they fought to preserve weren't any less human because the Confederates said so. Nor did their saying so make the Confederates' cause noble.

They were wrong. And they deserved the public's rebuke even way back then. The people who lived in New Orleans during the Civil War and in the subsequent decades should have condemned Lee and Davis and Beauregard for their participation in that war. They should have condemned slavery as an institution. But they took the opposite view of things. They reviled those men who helped preserve the Union. They reviled those people whose emancipation was brought about by the Civil War. They chose to honor men who not only wanted to preserve slavery but expand it.

Now is the time that their error, their benightedness, their unquestioning devotion to white supremacy and African inferiority gets corrected. The New Orleans City Council, in December 2015, voted 6-1 to remove from public property monuments celebrating Lee, Davis and Beauregard and a fourth monument celebrating the white supremacists who attacked the city's integrated police force in 1874.

After a protracted court battle forced by those who want to see the monuments remain, a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the city was well within its rights to bring those monuments down. Well, three of them. The future of the Liberty Place monument - unquestionably the most offensive of the four - will be decided by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier. That judge has previously ruled that the city could move ahead with its plan to remove the monument in question because it's unlikely that the groups fighting the removal will come up with a winning argument.

So we can anticipate the removal of all four of the monuments. How sad it is that there was such a fight to keep them.

Haley made her announcement after Dylann Roof, a millennial segregationist who loved the racist flags of the Confederacy and Rhodesia, visited a Bible study at Charleston's Emanuel AME church and massacred nine people. He killed the church's pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. He also killed Emanuel members Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., Sharonda Singleton and the Rev. Myra Thompson.

But so what, right? That's how some of the monuments' most vocal supporters responded to news of Roof's obsession with the flags of both domestic and foreign Apartheid regimes. Their non-alarm shouldn't have been a surprise. After all, the White League monument is believed to be the only monument in the country celebrating the murder of police. And there are folks who are fighting even for its preservation. So why should the murders of nine churchgoers weigh heavily on their spirits?

Would Roof have murdered those nine people if South Carolina hadn't given prominence to the Confederate battle flag? Probably, but that's not the point. It isn't the flag itself that's the problem; it's the thinking that so often accompanies it. Similarly, when groups of people are fighting to preserve monuments to Confederate leaders there must be some among them who like what the Confederates stood for, namely the inferiority of black people.

In a March 1861 address, Alexander H. Stephens, Davis' vice president, said many of the nation's founders thought of slavery as an evil that they were forced to accept but that would eventually fall out of favor. "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

That wasn't the truth, though. It was a lie. So was the depiction of Lee and Davis and Beauregard and the White League as men of honor. No lie can last forever, though. That truth will be reaffirmed when their statues come down.