Nothing to see here. Just a friendly Klan rally at Stone Mountain in 1948
There's one little problem when permanent monuments to people and causes that deeply offend entire segments of the American population are built—towns change, sometimes drastically, and new generations of people arrive to either cringe at your offensive memorial or work to see it removed.
When Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the KKK who proudly massacred hundreds of surrendered black soldiers in the Civil War, was buried with a public memorial in Memphis in 1877, little thought was given to the reality that in 2015, the mayor, the police chief, the majority of the city council, and 67 percent of the city would be African Americans. Or hell, maybe they did see it coming and the monuments were a big fuck you to the future?
What we do know is this: the establishment of Stone Mountain Park, just a dozen miles from downtown Atlanta, the mecca of black America, was not some historically racist accident. Its origins are deeply rooted in violent racism. Now, though, the city of Stone Mountain is over 75 percent African American, in the middle of Southwest Dekalb County, which has one of the highest concentrated populations of wealthy African Americans in the nation.
Confederate heroes Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis—hewn into Stone Mountain
For over 300 million years, Stone Mountain, five miles around in circumference, 1,700 feet tall, sat as an undisturbed granite enigma in the middle of what we now know as the American South. In early 1887,
it was purchased by two businessmen, the Venable brothers, who owned rock quarries throughout Georgia. One of the brothers, Sam, was central to the revitalization of the KKK in Atlanta and throughout the American South. In 1915, Stone Mountain hosted a cross burning and Klan rally
that is widely credited as being the pivotal moment in explosion of the KKK in the 20th century. The KKK was then given
an official legal easement by Sam Venable to hold its local and national meetings and rallies at Stone Mountain in perpetuity.
During this period, the idea of creating a massive monument to the Confederacy on the prominent face of the mountain took hold. By massive, we're talking about the size of three football fields, carved 12 feet deep into the mountain. They hoped it would soon become the largest carving of its kind in the world and, early on, was primarily funded and advocated by the Klan and its many benefactors. By 1930, though, only the head of Robert E. Lee was carved into the mountain. The Great Depression came, people died, and the funds dried up to complete it.
As the civil rights movement grew, so did the calls, exclusively by staunchly racist segregationists, for the monument to the Confederacy be finished. In 1958, in the wake of Brown vs. the Board of Education and other civil rights advances, the state of Georgia purchased the park with the expressed intent to finish the monument as a sign of white supremacy. The work took over a decade and actually continued all the way into the 1970s. Before it was finished, knowing its racist past and present, Dr. King actually mentioned Stone Mountain in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
The KKK's permanent agreement to be able to hold its meetings, rallies, and gatherings at Stone Mountain was actually in full force until the 1960s. By this time, its reputation as a racist and even dangerous place for people of color was firmly established.
When Tyrone Brooks was a child growing up in rural Georgia, he learned from his elders that the freakish outcropping of granite east of Atlanta known as Stone Mountain was a frightful--even evil--place.
The Ku Klux Klan marked its rebirth early this century by torching a cross upon its peak. And in olden times, his grandmother told him, black people had been lynched and thrown from the mountaintop. "I did not grow up with a good feeling about Stone Mountain," Brooks said. "I still don't have a good feeling about it."
Yet, there it stands today, the largest memorial to the Confederacy in the world.
Now surrounded by African Americans on every side, Stone Mountain doesn't even attempt to hide its racism. Hell, it's damn near impossible.
That's why the Atlanta NAACP is calling for the entire monument to be removed:
"My tax dollars should not be used to commemorate slavery," Rose said.
Rose said his group wants Confederate symbols removed from all state-owned buildings, parks and lands.
Rose told Petersen he would start with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
"Those guys need to go. They can be sand-blasted off, or somebody could carefully remove a slab of that and auction it off to the highest bidder," Rose said.
Shackelford said she is all for a discussion as long as it's not based on emotion.
I agree.
This monument was built with bad intentions. With good intentions, we can take it down and make it the universal natural wonder it was for 99.9999 percent of its history.
