Arlene Barnum said her race has nothing to do with her support of the Confederacy and the statues in New Orleans that preserve its memory.
“It’s about being on the right side of history,” said Barnum, a black woman from Oklahoma who grew up in Louisiana.
Barnum was at Thursday night's protest in front of the Jefferson Davis statue, one of three remaining in the city that is scheduled to be removed. The first statue, the Liberty Monument, was erected in 1891 and commemorated the Crescent City White League. It was removed late Sunday.
Thursday night, Barnum was standing in front of Jefferson Davis, wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt and waving a large Confederate flag. She wants the statue to remain standing.
"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," she told WGNO. "He's the most significant of all the monuments to be taken down."
Asked what she hopes to achieve with her trip to the monument, Barnum says she’ll “stay out until the sun comes up to make sure Jefferson Davis lives to see another day.”
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