Confederate Statue Removed From Louisiana City Hall After 99 Years | Louisiana

Onlookers cheered on Saturday as a stone statue of a Confederate general was hoisted by a crane and removed from a pedestal where it stood for 99 years outside a city hall in southern Louisiana.

The withdrawal came a day after the United Daughters of Confederation signed a bylaw agreeing to either move the statue of General Alfred Mouton or let the city do so. A trial was scheduled for July 26.

“The Confederation has surrendered,” lawyer Jérôme Moroux told Lawyer. Moroux represented the town and 16 townspeople who wanted the statue to disappear.

The 2020 Minneapolis Police murder of George Floyd sparked new calls across the country to remove Confederate statues, many of which were erected decades after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era, when the States imposed new laws on segregation, and during the “Lost Cause,” when some historians and others mistakenly described the southern rebellion as a fight to defend the rights of states, not slavery.

Mouton, whose full name was Jean-Jacques-Alfred-Alexandre Mouton, was a slave owner and the son of a former governor of Louisiana. He died leading a cavalry charge in the Civil War Battle of Mansfield.

“It’s been 99 years now, and it’s far too long for that to have stayed in place,” reported Fred Prejean, president of Move the Mindset, a group created to lobby for the statue’s removal, reported the ‘advertiser.

In 1980, outgoing mayor Kenny Bowen wanted to move the statue to what was then Lafayette’s new town hall. Although the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated the statue to the city in 1922, the group fought the move, in part because Mouton’s father had previously owned the site of the statue.

The group delayed the move until Dud Lastrapes took office, then obtained a permanent court order prohibiting any move unless it was necessary for road works or the land had been sold, the group reported. ‘advertiser.

The inhabitants asked the city in 2016, during a national movement to remove the Confederate statues, to remove Mouton from the town hall. But, after the United Daughters threatened to take legal action, the city and parish council backed down.

This prompted the creation of Move the Mindset and other groups to raise awareness of the history of the statue during the Jim Crow era, the treatment of black people during this time, and the negative implications of having a Confederate statue in it. entrance to downtown Lafayette.

Sixteen members of Move the Mindset filed documents in 2019 to intervene in the 1980 injunction, arguing that the group’s unconditional donation of the statue left it without any legal right to fight a movement.

Mayor-President Josh Guillory has asked lawyers to study the options and in 2020 city council approved the removal. The city joined Move the Mindset in the legal fight against the 1980 injunction.