Black Woman Protests Removal Of Confederate Statue In New Orleans

Photo via WGNO

A black woman is currently in New Orleans to protest the removal of a Confederate statue.

Arlene Barnum, who once lived in New Orleans but now resides in Oklahoma, has been in the former to protest the city's removal of Jefferson Davis, who was the President of the Confederate States of America.

Barnum has stated that her race has nothing to do with the support of the Confederacy, but rather "about being on the right side of history."

"I felt I needed to be at the [monument] for Jefferson Davis because he was the one and only president of the Confederate States of America," Barnum said in an interview with WGNO. "He's the most significant of all the monuments to be taken down."

Barnum has been documenting her time in front of the statue alongside other protesters through Facebook live. The Davis statue is one of three remaining statues in New Orleans that is slated to be removed. The others are monuments of Gens. Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard.

Early Monday morning, city workers started working on taking the Liberty Monument down first. The Liberty Monument was made in 1891 to honor the Crescent City White League, an organization created in 1874 to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate freedmen from voting and political organizing.

"There's a better way to use the property these monuments are on and a way that better reflects who we are," New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in an interview Sunday with the Associated Press.

"The monuments are an aberration," Landrieu added. "They’re actually a denial of our history and they were done in a time when people who still controlled the Confederacy were in charge of this city, and it only represents a four-year period in our 1,000-year march to where we are today."