'Move the Mindset' advocate Fred Prejean remembered

LAFAYETTE, La. (KLFY) The Lafayette community is remembering a civil rights leader who passed away last week.

Fred Prejean played a key role in removing the Confederate General Alfred Mouton statue that stood in the heart of downtown Lafayette for nearly a century.

"I'm going to cry. One of the things he wants known in his legacy is that in all of his activism and in the whole process of bringing the statue down, it was in a non-violent and in a unity way. He wanted the community to want it as much as he did," Move the Mindset Membership Chairman Arlene Vansant said.

Members of the Move the Mindset said their founder and president, Fred Prejean, did just that.

"As a young person in the 1950's, I can recall coming to this building behind us, which was the city hall, and I can remember asking my mother, 'Who is this man?' And my mother's reply was always, 'He was a bad man. Let's go home,'" Prejean recalled in an interview last year.

70 years later, Prejean led the fight to take down the statue and won.

"He saved this downtown from the notoriety of continuing to have a Confederate Jim Crow symbol as its greeting post, and who wants that?" Move the Mindset Vice President Francesco Crocco said.

Honoring his life and legacy, community members remembered Prejean with a candlelight vigil at the very spot where he made his last mark in Lafayette.

"What would most honor Fred is to honor is to follow in his footsteps. He called us change agents. Step up. Be a change agent. Don't let his passing close the chapter on the progress we have made as a community," Crocco added.

Prejean died peacefully in his sleep last Thursday.

He was 75-years-old.