Today Stone Mountain Belongs to the Sons of Confederate Veterans
Today the Sons of Confederate Veterans will gather at Stone Mountain, Georgia to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day and Confederate History Month. The Southern Poverty Law Center and a local group called the Stone Mountain Action coalition have condemned the gathering.
This annual gathering takes place at the site of the largest Confederate memorial in the world and the site of the restarting of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. [Watch this excellent short video for more on the history of the site.]
The SPLC’s statement read as follows:
Despite pleas from the Stone Mountain Action Coalition and other local activists, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA) continues to authorize the presence of purveyors of hate, extremism, and revisionist history with little regard for the safety of park visitors or staff, and zero respect for the city’s majority Black community.
The SMMA continues to provide a permit and a platform to the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a group that exists to keep the Confederacy’s lies and propaganda alive. This year’s keynote speaker, John Weaver, is a prominent preacher in the neo-confederate hate movement known for supporting
succession[secession], slavery, and segregation in the South.As the SPLC has repeatedly stated, allowing SCV to celebrate the harmful ideals of the Confederacy, namely support for white supremacy and slavery, wrongly validates the rhetoric of SCV and its keynote speaker. This sends a dangerous message that Stone Mountain Park is not a safe space for all people to gather free of discrimination or harassment.
We support local activists calling for the SMMA to rescind the SCV’s permit to gather on Saturday, April 29. The SMMA should reject arrogant displays of revisionist history and the Lost Cause narrative in a public park, which should be accessible and safe for all patrons.
This week the state of Georgia allocated $11 million to transform Stone Mountain from a Confederate memorial to an educational site, where visitors can learn about the history of white supremacy and Confederate memory.
I continue to support this endeavor, but Governor Brian Kemp’s administration and the Stone Mountain Memorial Association must recognize that their vision and today’s gathering are not only incompatible, it throws into sharp relief any attempt at transformation as futile and even laughable.
The SCV may have a legal right to gather at Stone Mountain, but the SMMA could have used this opportunity to distance itself from the organization and to announce its plans for the site and the ways it hopes to make it unwelcome to such people.
Nothing. Silence.
How do you turn a site like Stone Mountain into a place where people from around the world can learn about the long history of white supremacy and Confederate memory when, at the same time, organizations like the SCV continue to gather to celebrate men like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and the people who helped to complete what eventually became a symbol of resistance against the federal government during the civil rights era?
Something needs to give.
Even more problematic is that few people in the majority-Black local community have any confidence that the SMMA understands their concerns. This must change.
The SMMA and state of Georgia could start with ending the popular laser show, which has entertained audiences for roughly 40 years. Recently it was announced that a new show is being developed for Memorial Day weekend next month. In fact, today is the last day you can see the classic show.
Nothing says celebration like a laser light show with members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, waving their Confederate flags in the audience.
What message does such an event send to young people in attendance about the three Confederate leaders at the center of the show?
Answer: That they are worthy of celebration.
While I continue to support plans for a new museum, I am troubled by what appears to be a complete lack of leadership when it is most needed.
Without it, the day belongs to the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Confederate heritage group at Stone Mountain faces protesters again
https://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-news/confederate-heritage-group-at-stone-mountain-faces-protesters-again/RV4LDNL3IFH7ZKPDTRYRPUMOWE/
(Via AJC News)
My visits to Stone Mountain in 2001 and to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin a year later inspired and enabled me to track down the Civil War ancestor I didn't know I had until nearly five years later. I also found my great great grandmother's younger brother and the place where he was wounded in Atlanta at what I call the Battle of Moreland Overpass. The rebels called it Bald Hill until the middle of June, 1864, when the Union army renamed it Leggett's Hill after Major General Mortimer Leggett and some guy named Manning Force got through with it. Now it's known as I-20.