The Lafayette council meeting this past Tuesday night was one of the longest in recent memory.

It actually spilled into the wee hours of Wednesday morning when the Lafayette City Council voted unanimously to support Mayor-President Josh Guillory's effort to remove the statue of Confederate General Alfred Mouton from its current space on city property in downtown Lafayette.

According to a report from Claire Taylor at The Advocate, a unanimous vote from the council adopted the resolution of support requested by Guillory after he asked city-parish attorneys to look into how the city could get the Mouton statue to a place where it could be "displayed in the proper historical context" back on July 2.

The vote was met with a standing ovation from about a dozen residents who had been in attendance since 5 p.m. Tuesday, some of whom have been fighting more than four years to have the statue removed.

You can read more details on the background of the statue and its controversial history on city property in downtown Lafayette in Taylor's report via The Advocate here.

Mayor-President Guillory believes that moving the statue is an opportunity to heal "as a community."

If you want to preserve history, do so, but without harming an entire class of people.

Move the Mindset president Fred Prejean has led efforts to get the statue removed for years now and their work may pay off next month as an important hearing on the statue lawsuit is set for August 17.

Councilman Andy Naquin thanked Prejean for their efforts, noting that he grew up with the Mouton family and considered the statue as iconic, but admittedly did not know its history nor Alfred Mouton's history until recently."

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