More than 100 people gathered Wednesday evening at the downtown Lafayette monument to Gen. Alfred Mouton calling for the marble statue of the slave-owning Confederate to be relocated to a museum.
“We decided now was the time to act,” Move the Mindset President Fred Prejean said Wednesday before the rally began.
Prejean said the rally had been planned weeks ago and scheduled for October, but the long-simmering issue gained new urgency following violent clashes and the death of a counter-protester earlier this month at the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Virginia rally was ostensibly planned as a response to that city’s decision to remove statues of Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson but devolved into a series of violent melees between the white nationalist marchers and counter-protesters, including radical left Antifa members.
“The statue has to go,” Prejean said of the Mouton monument. “Where it stands, it does not depict the correct context to understand what it really means.”
Prejean announced during the Wednesday rally that the group, which includes local chapters of the NAACP and Indivisible, has issued an open letter to Mayor Joel Robideaux, the City-Parish Council and United Daughters of the Confederacy urging them to agree to the monument’s relocation. The UDC fund-raised, commissioned and erected the monument at the prominent downtown intersection in 1922.
“We don’t want to deny history. We support the relocation of the statue to a museum where our full, shared history can be told,” Prejean said, reading from the letter. The letter also argues that Confederate monuments have become “rallying points for white supremacists, neo-Nazis and others who espouse hatred, bigotry and violence.”
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But the coalition seeking to relocate the monument faces an obstacle possibly more intractable than unwilling elected officials or public sentiment: The city of Lafayette consented in 1980 to a permanent injunction against moving the monument after the United Daughters of the Confederacy filed suit to prevent the city from relocating the monument to the then-new City Hall building on West University Avenue. The UDC donated the Mouton monument to the city after it was erected at the intersection.
Citing the injunction, a Lafayette attorney who represented the United Daughters before the City-Parish Council a year and a half ago when talk of relocating the monument was first publicly aired, warned council members they could personally face contempt of court charges if they tamper with the monument — a warning that some council members interpreted as a threat.
The injunction stipulates that the monument can be moved only in the event of road work or sale of the land on which it currently stands. But city-parish attorney Paul Escott told council members at the time that they might have some wiggle room and could contest the injunction on the basis of a “change of conditions,” although he didn’t elaborate on what the legal grounds for that might be. The council ultimately deferred taking any action on the monument.
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“Slavery was the most abusive and wrongful system ever in the annals of human history. Today we embark on a great task of righting that wrong,” Lafayette NAACP President Marja Broussard said at the rally.
Move the Mindset’s Prejean took a conciliatory approach in comments before the rally began, saying he wants to sit down with the UDC to find a solution.
“There’s never been a face-to-face meeting between us,” he said. “And the whole idea for having this is, there are times people can sit down and talk and reconcile differences or compromise, and that attempt has never been made.”
Yet even among Lafayette’s progressive left, the call to remove and relocate General Mouton is not doctrine. Russell Hiltz, a Vietnam War veteran who operates an eponymous barbecue-sauce company, said in an email interview before that rally that one of the few political issues that unites him and President Donald Trump is their shared opposition to removing Confederate memorials.
“It is sad that so many good-hearted liberal people have embraced the cause to take down our monuments,” Hiltz says. “There are so many more worthy ways to spend liberal energy. I was a poll watcher for Obama both times, and am as progressive as they come. I am a combat veteran and believe in every citizen's right to express their beliefs. It is sad that these old monuments offend some people. I am offended at the prospect of losing links to our past because some say they are politically incorrect.”
