LAFAYETTE, La. (AP) — Forty years ago, an incoming Lafayette mayor and a local Confederate history group quietly agreed to a plan that would ultimately make the city’s statue of Confederate Gen. Alfred Mouton untouchable for decades.
In April of 1980, outgoing-Mayor Kenny Bowen, who had recently lost his re-election bid to Dud Lastrapes, was planning to move the Mouton statue from its place in front of the old City Hall downtown to the new City Hall on University Avenue.
But Lafayette’s United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter, which donated the statue to the city in 1922 during a Jim Crow-era resurgence in white supremacy across the South, was searching for a way to derail Bowen’s plan.
The statue’s downtown location was poignant to the UDC since it stands on land once owned by Alfred Mouton’s father, Alexandre Mouton, who helped establish early Lafayette and served as the state’s first Democratic governor before leading Louisiana’s efforts to secede prior to the Civil War.
The Daughters lobbied the city’s council members and spoke against moving the statue publicly at the time, but even opposition from some council members could not sway Bowen from going ahead with the move.
Instead, the Daughters formed a plan to delay the move until Lastrapes could take office three weeks later, after he “assured (them) that he will cancel the order and the matter will be closed as far the city is concerned,” according to a report written by UDC chapter Chairman Betty Dugal on May 17, 1980, days after they got a court order to delay the move by 10 days.
“At the end of this ten days we will ask for an extension of the restraining order. When this extension expires Mayor-elect Dud Lastrapes will be in office and has assured us that he will cancel the order and the matter will be closed,” Dugal wrote.
The plan was to wait Bowen out and push the city to accept the UDC’s terms during their first court date on June 16, 1980, to install the permanent injunction that currently prohibits the city from moving the statue under nearly any circumstance.
“(We) will ask for a permanent injunction. The City will not oppose us and the matter will then be settled by the Court,” Dugal wrote.
“This was the only way to stop the statue from being moved Thursday, May 15 at 7:30 a.m.,” she added. “There was no other solution.”
When the Daughters and the city met in court over the issue on June 16, two weeks after Lastrapes swearing in, the city agreed to the Daughter’s permanent injunction prohibiting the statue from being moved unless the land was sold or needed for road improvements.
Reached Thursday, Lastrapes, now 91 years old, said he couldn’t recall any dealings with the Daughters about the initial lawsuit over the statue. Dugal did not return a request for comment.
The Daughter’s report on their plan for the 1980 lawsuit is now the latest subject of dispute in the ongoing lawsuit, launched in 2019, to lift their permanent injunction and allow the city to move the statue, which Mayor-President Josh Guillory has voiced his support for.
The city joined the suit last year after it was launched by activist group Move the Mindset, and is pushing to have the report admitted as evidence, particularly because the Daughters acknowledge a lack of legal standing to prevent the statue from being moved in their report.
“Had we held title to the property and/or the monument we could have had a legal say about the move. But we did not,” Dugal wrote in 1980.
Move The Mindset attorney Daniel Phillips is pushing to include the report in evidence for the case, which is set for a July 26 court date after more than a year of delays, though the UDC has objected without explaining its refusal to the court.
“(We) plan to introduce a copy of the minutes because they establish the key facts that UDC donated the Mouton Statue to the City of Lafayette in 1922, that UDC knew that it had no ‘legal say’ about moving the Mouton Statue, and that the City was not going to oppose the injunction,” Phillips wrote in a recent court filing.