Confederate monument removed in La.
LAFAYETTE, La. — Spectators cheered 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 in front of a city hall in south Louisiana.
The Advertiser posted video of the work that happened a day after United Daughters of the Confederacy
signed a settlement agreeing to move the statue of Gen. Alfred Mouton or let the city do so. A trial had been scheduled for July 26.
“The Confederacy has surrendered,” attorney Jerome Moroux told The Advocate. Moroux represented the city and 16 city residents who wanted the statue gone.
The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020 prompted new calls across the country to remove Confederate statues, many of which had been erected decades after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed new segregation laws, and during the “Lost Cause” movement, when historians and others inaccurately depicted the South’s rebellion as a fight to defend states’ rights, not slavery.
Mouton, whose full name was Jean-JacquesAlfred-Alexandre
Mouton, was a slave owner and son of a former Louisiana governor. He died leading a cavalry charge in the Civil War Battle of Mansfield.
“It’s been 99 years right now, and that’s way too long for that to have remained in place,” Fred Prejean, president of Move the Mindset, a group created to pushed for the statue’s removal, The Advertiser reported.