Officials voted two weeks ago to keep the monument on courthouse property in Lake Charles, La., but Hurricane Laura toppled its statue from the base.
As protests against police violence and white supremacy swept away dozens of longstanding memorials to the Confederacy this summer, a 105-year-old monument on the courthouse lawn in Lake Charles, La., remained standing. Until Hurricane Laura tore the statue atop it down. “It is a blessing, a small blessing, in a very devastating situation,” said Davante Lewis, who grew up in Lake Charles and supported the monument’s removal. The debate over what to do about the South’s Defenders Memorial Monument, which depicted a Confederate soldier on a marble pedestal, had been the “hottest thing in the city” in recent months, Mr. Lewis said on Thursday, until residents turned their attention to preparing for one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit the region. The monument was the object of anger and protests after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by the police in Minneapolis. The political decision over its fate largely broke down along racial lines, although Lake Charles’s mayor, Nic Hunter, a Republican who is white, had expressed support for removing it. But two weeks ago, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, an elected body that acts like a county board of commissioners and has jurisdiction over the courthouse property, voted 10 to 5 at a special meeting to keep it.
