Earlier today I was interviewed by a local NPR station in Atlanta on the situation at Stone Mountain. The story and interview should be available tomorrow morning. While plans for a monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. appear to be on hold, an exhibit on black Union soldiers is moving forward. Our conversation focused on this exhibit and the significance of its location on the grounds of Stone Mountain.
Over the weekend a relatively small rally took place at Stone Mountain to protest the King monument. Those in attendance offer another example of why the very people who claim to defend the memory of Confederate soldiers and the flag have done more than anyone else to provide the impetus for communities to remove reminders of the Confederacy from public places.
Here is the face of Confederate heritage: men dressed in military-style garb brandishing automatic weapons.
A reporter caught up with one protester, who summed up his group’s view of the potential conflict between the carvings of Lee, Jackson, and Davis on the side of Stone Mountain and the addition of a monument to a slain civil rights leader.
“I don’t want Martin Luther King’s stuff on it, not because I am racist, but because this isn’t a civil rights mountain, this is a Confederate mountain.”
I couldn’t have said it any better than that.
No Bell tower, no USCT. Period.
The purposes of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association shall include:
(1) To preserve the natural areas situated within the Stone Mountain park area;
(2) To provide access to Stone Mountain for Georgia citizens; and
(3) To maintain an appropriate and suitable memorial for the Confederacy.
O.C.G.A. § 12-3-192.1.
To maintain an appropriate and suitable memorial for the Confederacy, segregation, inequality, Jim Crow, lynching, racism and IGNORANCE !
Billy,
Times change, purposes lose relevancy and monuments are and can be, repurposed.
“Adapt or die” is the mantra that should be paid attention to. The Confederacy was an attempt to hold onto the past and deny the future. The above purposes are attempting to do the same.
Neil
http://www.myajc.com/news/news/local/stone-mountain-marching-toward-museum-black-civil-/npPtG/
Stone Mt. was formerly owned by the KKK Venable family and Venable Granite Co. and they used the promontory as a site for huge KKK rallies and the burning of enormous crosses , visible for miles around !
Bless your heart, darlin’, Dr. Martin Luther King wasn’t a Confederate. Well, sweetheart, neither are you. That ship has done sunk…
They probably could make it plainer…I am just not sure how.
Golf clap
Perfect.
At one of their previous rallies a month or so ago, a female supporter asked one of the organizers on Facebook if she could wear her Klan tshirt. The organizer said that he would rather than she not, that he didn’t want to give the press fodder to use against them. Her reply was: “That’s okay, I’ll just wear my Confederate Flag shirt instead.”
Interestingly, he also suggested that they leave assault rifles at home since the state park had asked them not to open carry. I guess that didn’t last very long.