Stone Mountain: World’s largest Confederate monument problem
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. — The Rev. Ferrell Brown, a white pastor at a suburban Atlanta megachurch, stood on the big bald top of Stone Mountain on a warm Saturday morning, sharing a stage with two relatives of those murdered at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, three years ago.
In front of him were 2,000 evangelical Christians — mostly a mix of black and white Southerners — who had come to the mountaintop to worship across racial barriers.
Below them, etched across 3 acres of granite on the mountain’s north face, was the carving of Southern Civil War leaders that literally is the largest Confederate monument problem in the world.
Brown spoke of his family’s history, divulging that he was a descendant of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and founder of the Ku Klux Klan. He spoke of his grandfather, who, he said, would throw a meal in the trash at a restaurant if he saw a mixed-race couple walk in.
Brown told the audience that he knew as a child that he wanted to be different. He said he changed with the help of God.
“I stand here today as a representation of the racism of the white man against African-Americans, against Jews, against Hispanics,” he said. “And I’m asking forgiveness, I’m asking you, I repent. I repent! I’m asking you to forgive!”
This late August gathering at Stone Mountain Park, just east of Atlanta, was organized by a group called the OneRace Movement, whose leaders sought to “depoliticize and bring restoration and healing” to the place. They gathered in the heat of a governor’s race in which Stone Mountain, with its controversial carving and ugly racist history, has come to play a complicated role — not as a central issue, exactly, but as a looming presence, imbued with the volatile power of Confederate remembrance and racial resentment.
Stacey Abrams, a Democrat and former state House minority leader, is the first black woman in the country to win a major party’s nomination for governor, and it was Abrams, 44, who injected Stone Mountain into the contest.
It happened in August 2017, just after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, organized to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. In a flurry of posts on Twitter, Abrams declared the Stone Mountain carving “a blight on our state,” and called for it to be removed.
The reaction has been palpable. Even some black Georgians oppose Abrams’ idea, saying that erasing the carving would amount to erasing history. But even if she had never run, Georgia may have been due for a reckoning with Stone Mountain, a gargantuan reminder of how the past continues to haunt a state that is hurtling toward the future.
After a neo-Confederate gunman massacred nine people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the governor at the time, Nikki Haley,
persuaded the legislature to remove the Confederate battle flag from the front of the State House. It came down with a simple crank.
Not so Stone Mountain. It took decades to carve the depiction of Lee, Jefferson Davis and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson on horseback into the mountainside, and it could probably be removed only through a yearlong process that would involve blowing it off piece by piece with explosives.
Moreover, the carving is explicitly protected by state law, and is the centerpiece of Georgia’s most visited tourist attraction, Stone Mountain Park, with 3,200 acres of walking trails, lakes and amusement rides. The park officially opened to the public on April 14, 1965 — the hundredth anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
And yet, this signature attraction is increasingly at odds with the state being reborn beneath it, and Georgians like Brown are impatient to turn the page.
According to census projections, Georgia will probably be the first of the Deep South states where the white non-Hispanic population will cease to be the majority, a demographic trend that Abrams is hoping will work in her favor in November.
Around Atlanta, particularly, it can feel as though the future already has arrived. In suburban DeKalb County, the site of Stone Mountain, whites became a minority in 1991; today, the chamber of commerce boasts that DeKalb is one of the most diverse counties in the Southeast, with 64 languages spoken, and the park’s patrons are similarly diverse.
While Abrams has taken pains to argue that she will protect the state’s inclusivity, her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, has chosen a different focus, winning his party’s primary with a series of provocative ads in which he brandished a shotgun and said he might use his own pickup truck to deport “criminal illegals.”
Kemp, who is white, has, like President Donald Trump, denounced the movement to take down Confederate monuments. In July, as the Atlanta NAACP planned a protest calling
“I stand here today as a representation of the racism of the white man against African-Americans, against Jews, against Hispanics. And I’m asking forgiveness, I’m asking you, I repent. I repent! I’m asking you to forgive!”
— THE REV. FERRELL BROWN
for the removal of the Stone Mountain carving, Kemp said on Facebook that he would protect it from “the radical left.”
“We should learn from the past — not attempt to rewrite it,” he added.
Yet as the candidates head into November in a race that is too close to call, neither has been particularly keen to make Stone Mountain a central issue. It is a polarizing topic with the power to motivate both parties’ bases, but in recent weeks the candidates have seemed more keen to woo voters in the middle, especially suburban women who care more about issues like health care than about Confederate history. Still, some Democrats wonder whether Abrams’ call to remove the carving was an unforced error that will have an impact.
A recent report on the history of the Stone Mountain carving published by the Atlanta History Center shows its “strong connections to white supremacy, Confederate Lost Cause mythology, and anti-Civil Rights sentiments.”
The idea to carve the side of the mountain was hatched in 1914. The next year, the Klan, which had faded after first emerging during Reconstruction, was revived atop the mountain with a cross burning.
Proponents of the carving had strong Klan ties, with one early booster, Helen Plane, even suggesting that Klansman be included in the carving. The group, she wrote, “saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule.”
The carving effort stalled during the Great Depression, but in 1954, Marvin Griffin, a candidate for governor, stumped on a promise to uphold segregation in the wake
of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling — and to finish the carving.
After Griffin’s election, the state bought the land in 1958, writing into law that it was meant to be operated as a “perpetual memorial” to the Confederacy.
In subsequent years, the report states, a “neo-Confederate theme park” grew around the mountain, replete with a plantation house, anodyne versions of antebellum life, and a “Gone With the Wind” museum.
Since then, changing times have forced the park to scrub many of its politically incorrect trappings, and today, it walks an awkward line between embracing and ignoring the Confederacy. The gift shop features T-shirts with images of the carving, but others simply state “I climbed Stone Mountain.” Streets are named after Confederate figures — Robert E. Lee Boulevard, Stonewall Jackson Drive — but a building called Confederate Hall is nearly Confederate-free, given over instead to an exhibit on the geology and ecology of the park.
Historical exhibits do not avoid the ugliness, but do not dwell on them, either. Amid presentations on indigenous peoples, 19th-century life and the feat involved in the carving, a plaque entitled “A Dark Side of Our History” dedicates two paragraphs to the Klan’s influence.
One of the most discussed alternatives to Abrams’ idea of removing the carving would involve using the museum spaces around it to tell a more complete, unvarnished story of Stone Mountain’s past.
The leading proponent of this idea is Michael L. Thurmond, chief executive officer of DeKalb County, and the only black member of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which governs the park.
Thurmond also has proposed adding a bell tower on top of the mountain. It would evoke, he said, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech, in which he dreamed of a country where crooked places would be made straight, and rough places made plain, and where freedom might ring out from a multitude of American places — including Stone Mountain of Georgia.