Nick Wooten

The (Shreveport, La.) Times

SHREVEPORT, La. — A man who has threatened to remove a Martin Luther King Jr. monument here if parish officials follow through on a vote to remove a Confederate memorial faced a crowd of testy but polite tea partyers Tuesday.

Rex Dukes of Keithville, La., who says he is founder of the Gulf Coast Patriot Network, was invited to Tuesday's We the People meeting because of two lightly attended rallies he organized for keeping a Confederate monument in front of the Caddo Parish Courthouse. We the People members also want the statue to remain.

During his speech, Dukes compared the removal of Confederate statues across the USA to efforts by Adolf Hitler, the Islamic State and various communist regimes to erase history.

He called Black Lives Matter, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood left-wing terrorist organizations coordinated by "antifa," anti-fascists who embrace violence. He contended that the organizations, with money from billionaire George Soros, are behind efforts across the USA to remove Confederate monuments.

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The removal of these statue is a slippery slope, he argued.

"It will not stop with just the Confederate monument," he said. "There will be no monument safe in the country."

In 2013, the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism registered Caddo Parish's Confederate monument, dedicated in 1906, in the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places program. As with many Confederate monuments across the USA, a local United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter raised money for several years in the late 1800s and early 1900s to finance its construction at a point when many Civil War veterans were getting older and dying.

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While the federal historic designation may add a layer of state rules and regulations to moving or removing a monument, federal law places no restrictions on what an owner may do with designated property, including destroying it, unless federal money has been used to preserve it, according to the National Park Service.

Throughout Dukes' Tuesday speech, he was interrupted with questions about his statements, including a Facebook video, now restricted from public viewing, in which he called for the removal of black historical statues. It's not clear whether the Gulf Coast Patriot Network believes in views similar to the patriot movement, armed groups that say they are the people's mechanism to defend the country and Constitution, or has more structure than a Facebook following.

"This right here needs to be pried out of the ground," Dukes said in the video, motioning toward a plaque in front of the King statue at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Hilry Huckaby Avenue in Shreveport. "It's time we put equality in equality. ...

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“Anything to do with black history, black culture, it needs to be gone,” Dukes said in the nearly 15-minute video. “It’s time that we, the white people, the white race, stand up for ourselves.”

He changed his tone in front of the crowd of about 70 people, which included conservative We the People members, about a dozen college students and some high schoolers. In past interviews, he has said he is not a white supremacist.

"Don't tear down one (monument) and think it's going to be fair for everybody," Dukes said Tuesday. "MLK was a good man. He preached unity. He preached peaceful protest."

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Haley Deshautelle and a group of students from United Methodist-affiliated Centenary College attended the meeting after receiving an email from college President Christopher Holman. After the students and others continued to ask questions during Dukes' speech, one member of We the People told them to hold their questions until the end.

Deshautelle said they came to promote civil discourse, not to cause trouble.

"We just wanted to see what exactly this group talks about," she said. "We wanted to see what (Dukes) had to say about the monument."

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Dukes said most of the people asking questions during his speech were respectful.

"I think tonight went pretty good," he said.

Follow Nick Wooten on Twitter: @ByNickEWoot