Town Votes to Keep Confederate Monument…Then Hurricane Laura Shows Up

Citizens of Lake Charles, Louisiana, bucked a national trend this year, as a Confederate monument in the city came up for a vote.

Around the country, monuments and statues depicting leaders and members of the Confederacy have been coming down – sometimes at the behest of local officials, and other times by the hand of angry protesters who topple the structures in the heat of the moment.

But in Lake Charles, citizens voted to allow their own Confederate statue to remain.

Then, in a strange twist of irony, Hurricane Laura arrived and cast her own vote.

Hurricane Laura toppled a Confederate monument in Lake Charles, La., — just two weeks after local officials voted to keep it in place.

As the storm made landfall with 150 mph winds early Thursday morning, it ripped through buildings, vehicles, trees and power lines.

It also knocked the statue of a Confederate soldier off of the South’s Defenders Monument outside the Calcasieu Parish Courthouse, the Lafayette Daily Advertiser reported.

The statue depicted a young Confederate soldier carrying a flag over his left shoulder. After the storm, it was on the grass along with nearby tree limbs, as seen in photos posted to social media. The storm left the soldier bent, dented and sideways.

The imagery was striking.

My dad sent me some pics of the South’s Defenders monument in Downtown Lake Charles post-Laura and… I think some people may be happy about this. #HurricanLaura #HurricaneLaura2020 #Louisiana #lakecharleslouisiana #LakeCharles pic.twitter.com/dzHd5dSwNH

— Andrew Beam #PrayForLakeCharles (@dancemachine48) August 27, 2020

Hurricane Laura arrived amid a heavy blanket of doomsday predictions by meteorologists, but, once the skies began to clear, Louisiana’s citizens found that the storm hadn’t been quite as severe as experts predicted.