Miss. lawmaker: Leaders ‘should be lynched’ for taking down Confederate statues

Karl Oliver, a Republican state representative in Mississippi, last week said leaders in Louisiana who have removed Confederate statues and monuments from public property should be “lynched.”

“If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, ‘leadership’ of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED! Let it be known, I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening in our State,” Oliver wrote in a Saturday Facebook post. 

{mosads}New Orleans last week removed the last of four Confederate statues the city decided earlier this year to bring down. The final statue was of Robert E. Lee, the general who lead the Confederate Army.

Confederate flags and statues have received fresh criticism following the racially motivated 2015 shooting at an African-American church in Charleston, S.C., that killed nine churchgoers.

Oliver called the monuments’ removal “heinous and horrific.”

“The destruction of these monuments, erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans, is both heinous and horrific.”