Fact Check

Is a Jefferson Davis Statue to be Replaced with Obama Likeness?

A satire site posing as a Fox News affiliate falsely claimed a statue of the Confederate leader would be replaced with one honoring Barack Obama.

Published May 17, 2017

Flickr/Paul Sableman (Flickr/Paul Sableman)
Flickr/Paul Sableman
Claim:
A recently removed statue of Jefferson Davis is being replaced with a large bronze tribute to Barack Obama.

On 12 May 2017, a web site using the Fox News logo reported that a recently removed statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was being replaced with one honoring President Barack Obama:

Workers in New Orleans dismantled the city’s Jefferson Davis monument early Thursday, removing the prominent statue of the Confederate leader that had stood for more than 100 years.

As workers slung a strap around the statue’s waist and lifted it off its pedestal, at least 100 people cheered from across the street, outnumbering the few dozen protesters of the removal, some waving Confederate flags.

“This historic moment is an opportunity to join together as one city and redefine our future,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said as he announced that crews had begun removing the statue, the second of four planned removals of Confederacy-related monuments.

The Mayor also made an announcement that the statue would be replaced with a bronze statue of the 44th President Barack Obama.

“It will be nice”, Landrieu said, “to see a monument to our first African-American President in the same spot that used to be a place to memorialize old racist White privilege.”

jefferson davis barack obama

The item referred to a recent controversy surrounding the removal of several Confederate monuments in New Orleans. However, there was no truth to the story about a Barack Obama statue replacing one honoring Jefferson Davis. As we reported in January 2017, the depicted bronze statue of Barack Obama was installed in Puerto Rico in 2012.

Both the web site and Facebook page Fox News The FB Page use visual elements taken from Fox News, but neither are linked with the network and they exist largely to satirize its reporting.

Fox News the FB Page previously published claims that President Obama signed an executive order to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance; and that Carly Fiorina said without Christopher Columbus Americans would all be “speaking Indian,” among other false stories.

Kim LaCapria is a former writer for Snopes.