By Sam Gringlas
(Source NPR)
A group representing descendants of Confederate Civil War veterans is suing a Georgia state park over an exhibit they say won’t properly reflect the history of the Confederate monument there.
A group representing descendants of Confederate Civil War veterans is suing a Georgia state park. The park is home to the country’s largest Confederate monument. And the group argues that a planned exhibit there, which is focused on white supremacy and slavery and segregation, violates a state law that requires preserving the site as a Confederate memorial. WABE’s Sam Gringlas has the story.
SAM GRINGLAS, BYLINE: Fifteen miles east of Atlanta, a massive natural quartz dome juts 800 feet above a forested park. Carved on its face are three men on horseback – Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
BELINDA ALLEN-CLAUSELL: Stone Mountain is one of the places we bring visitors.
GRINGLAS: Belinda Allen-Clausell is about to hike to the top with her daughter.
ALLEN-CLAUSELL: My husband and I like to come fishing. My daughters and I – we like to come walking.
GRINGLAS: The town that surrounds Stone Mountain is roughly 80% Black. And for people who live in the area, like these two, this is a beloved local park with trails, golf, laser shows. The park even hosted a Juneteenth celebration last month. Gena Cornelius (ph) says she tries not to pay attention to the Confederate carvings.
GENA CORNELIUS: I can still remember coming with my dad, having our foods and snacks.
ALLEN-CLAUSELL: And the laser show?
CORNELIUS: Yeah, fireworks, laser show.
ALLEN-CLAUSELL: Celebrating America.
CORNELIUS: Yeah.
ALLEN-CLAUSELL: This is our country.
GRINGLAS: In 2021, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association agreed to install an exhibit about the park’s history, including Ku Klux Klan cross burnings. Allen-Clausell thinks that context will go a long way.
ALLEN-CLAUSELL: I’m a educator. So you can’t just get rid of history. You can’t grow if you don’t know. And there are a lot of things that are going on now that are turning back the hands of time.
GRINGLAS: Construction for the new exhibit is underway, but the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is suing to stop it.
MARTIN O’TOOLE: The entire tenor of their proposal is an attack on the Confederacy rather than a memorial of the Confederacy.
GRINGLAS: Chapter spokesperson Martin O’Toole has been coming to Stone Mountain since he was a kid. One of his ancestors served under Stonewall Jackson, and O’Toole remembers climbing the mountain with his grandmother.
O’TOOLE: And she’d walk at a rapid pace while we kids would haul behind her.
GRINGLAS: The group’s lawsuit is based on a Georgia law stipulating that Stone Mountain remain a memorial to the Confederate war dead.
O’TOOLE: The idea of a memorial is to emphasize the positive, not to accentuate the negative. They showed courage. They showed the willingness to sacrifice.
GRINGLAS: The idea for a Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain dates to 1915, when the KKK relaunched here with a mountaintop ceremony. The Atlanta History Center’s Gordon Jones says this era gave rise to the myth of the lost cause, which downplayed the South’s fight to preserve slavery and highlighted the idea that…
GORDON JONES: They may have lost the war militarily, but in fact, they were the moral victors.
GRINGLAS: Efforts to carve the memorial stalled until 1954, when a candidate for governor, Marvin Griffin, campaigned on a pledge to finish it. This was the same year the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated schools.
JONES: And that was part of the way that he appealed to his voters, who were very much concerned about the impact of desegregation.
GRINGLAS: It still took nearly 20 more years to complete the carving.
KELLY CLARK: You get to the top, you feel like you accomplished something. You feel like you’re on top of the world.
GRINGLAS: On a muggy morning, I met Kelly Clark (ph) coming down the mountain. She doesn’t like the carving.
CLARK: It’s very disturbing, you know, and we want it gone.
GRINGLAS: But for now, the carving isn’t going anywhere. The Stone Mountain Memorial Association hopes the new exhibit will tell a fuller story about why it’s there. Now it’s up to the courts to decide whether the plans can go forward.
