After being in Georgia for a little over 2 years now, I thought it was finally time to see what Stone Mountain was all about. It has great laser shows, people tell me. And during my first summer in Georgia when drought conditions were at an all-time high, it was front-page news when Stone Mountain considered canceling their show due to fire safety concerns. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I learned Stone Mountain was also known for its Ku Klux Klan and Confederate history. So when I found myself in Stone Mountain visiting a friend from high school I hadn’t seen in a while, my curiosity took me on a detour that landed me at the entrance to Stone Mountain Park.
At the gate, the parking attendant handed me a pamphlet outlining the history of Stone Mountain which, as a native of Massachusetts, I knew nothing about.
The central attraction in the park is arguably the Stone Mountain Confederate Monument, where the faces of Confederate stalwarts– President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson– are carved into the stone at 90 by 190 feet. It forms the largest sculpture of its kind in the world.1
“It’s a giant memorial to the Confederacy,” I thought, genuinely in shock.
I first wondered what specifically was the monument meant to memorialize. If you had a good history teacher (or someone at home to fill in the holes), you learned that there are complexities to the Civil War. The Confederate states in the South fought to maintain their economic infrastructure and for their “state rights,” the desire to remain free from interference of the federal government. But I have to wonder how a Confederate Civil War monument could memorialize its fallen heroes without inadvertently memorializing the bondage of Black people which was at the heart of the South’s economy.
At the forefront of the monument project was Helen Plane. After her husband died during the war, she went on to become the first president of the Georgia State Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Although the idea for a Confederate monument on Stone Mountain was not hers alone, it was Plane who organized the Stone Mountain Memorial Association through the UDC. It was to the Association that Samuel H. Venable, the owner of Stone Mountain, deeded the face of Stone Mountain to in 1916. “Georgia yields to none in its love and veneration for the departed heroes,” declared the first volume of the Stone Mountain Magazine published by the Association.2 On the surface, the monument does appear to be built to honor those who died during the Civil War, but if you look deeper, memorializing the bondage of Black people was not, in fact, completely inadvertent.
On the evening of November 25, 1915, William J. Simmons revived the Ku Klux Klan on the site of Stone Mountain, only days before Birth of a Nation was set to premiere in Atlanta.
After seeing the movie, the next month Plane wrote to Gutzon Borglum’s, the first artist commissioned to work on the monument. She said “. . . I feel that it is due to the Ku Klux Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpet-bag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?”
Though this never materialized, Borglum would later become an active member of the KKK, along with several other members of the Association. Venable, who still owned the remaining parts of the mountain, allowed the KKK free reign to gather each Thanksgiving on Stone Mountain. So though its primary purpose was to honor those who died fighting for the Confederacy, for many the monument also mourned the loss of slavery. 3 Incidentally, Stone Mountain helped boost his reputation and Borglund went on to create the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota in 1925, with the heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.
Today, the Stone Mountain Confederate Monument, as massive as it is, serves only as a backdrop to the other park festivities. Stonewall Jackson Drive, Robert E. Lee Boulevard, and Jefferson Davis Drive, circle what is now referred to simply as “Stone Mountain.” As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum, there was a push to finish the monument where work has ceased after the start of World War II. Purchased by the state of Georgia in 1958, the park is now a huge tourist attraction. But how many people know the history of Stone Mountain, or does the exhilaration of the lightshows and fireworks overpower it? Is it necessary to know this history, or is “forgetting your past” an indicator of progress? It was an eerie feeling to be at the entrance to Stone Mountain, questioning the purpose of a monument to the Confederacy and deciding what to do with this new bit of historical knowledge preceding the theme park.
Because my detour came at the end of a long day, it was admittedly brief. Now armed with a historical foundation, I plan to return and participate in some of the mountain festivities and see if the eerie feeling remains.
I wonder if they have a celebration for Juneteenth?
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