The cover of “Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans’s Confederate Statues” is an iconic reminder of the events in 2017 surrounding the end of Confederate monuments ...

James Gill and Howard Hunter discuss and sign “Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans's Confederate Statues,” Tuesday, June 22, from 6-7 p.m. at Octavia Books.

Bureau chief James Gill, left, and assistant metro editor Lanny Thomas, second from left, are seen with members of the staff of The Times-Picayune's East Jefferson bureau in Metairie on June 3, 1980.

I first connected with James Gill, the longtime New Orleans columnist who died last month, as a college student who read his work in the 1980s. It was a decade James Gill was one of a kind: Danny ...