Editor's Note: Authored by Liz Vinson, this article was first published by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
 |
| Fred Prejean |
Looming over the heart of downtown, a statue of Confederate Brigadier General J.J. Alfred A. Mouton stands austerely on its pedestal, his arms folded stiffly across his chest, his hardened expression etched in stone and locked on the city of Lafayette, Louisiana, as if he’s still at war.
The memorial to Mouton has loomed over the grounds of what used to be city hall for nearly a century in this Deep South parish, where, in the days before the Civil War, the number of enslaved people who were forced to work on the sugarcane plantations nearly equaled the population of free people.
Now, in a moment of national reckoning over the painful reality of Confederate memorials, Mouton’s symbolic reign might be finally coming to an end.
After a four-year battle, community activists are pinning their hopes on litigation that could result in an order allowing city officials to take down the statue of Mouton, ridding Lafayette of its public display of white supremacy. A judge is expected to rule on the issue following a Jan. 11 hearing.
That moment can’t come soon enough for Fred Prejean, who has long been a leader in the movement to educate local residents and overcome legal roadblocks to the statue’s removal. Like other activists engaged in similar battles across the South, he and his allies have met fierce resistance in Lafayette, where about a third of the 135,000 residents are Black.
“There are people who have a cultural attachment to Alfred Mouton,” Prejean said. “They don’t want to see the statue moved. They say, ‘Hey, this guy represents part of our heritage.’ But the heritage he represents is of a slave master – a kind of person who would lead vigilantes. They don’t think of that when they talk about their heritage.”
A ‘bad guy’
Prejean, 74, has felt Mouton’s foreboding presence since, as a child in the 1950s, he would go with his mother to pay the utility bill at city hall. He recalls asking about the statue, but his mother wouldn’t say much, only that Mouton was a “bad guy.”
As he grew older, Prejean realized why his mother didn’t say more. Though change was on the horizon, the oppressive codes of Jim Crow segregation in the Deep South were still in full force, and it was dangerous to speak ill of white people.
As an adult, Prejean became involved in the civil rights movement. He was inspired by the late Congressman John Lewis, a longtime family acquaintance, and by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech, which he witnessed in Washington, D.C. Later, he worked to organize cooperatively owned businesses to encourage economic development in the town’s Black community.
Through his work and having lived in Lafayette his entire life, Prejean knew that many Black residents felt the same way his mother did about the Mouton statue.
So in early 2016, he began doing something about it.