Despite public outrage and calls for its removal, the world’s largest Confederate monument has reopened just in time for the July 4 celebrations.
Featuring a nine-story bas-relief stone of the Confederate “heroes” and slave owners, General Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial welcomes visitors this weekend, though the laser The light show (which illuminates the carvings and tells the story of the Confederacy) is still waiting.
The mountain is a notorious meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan, who “reborn” upon it.
In 1915, the KKK was brought back to that mountain with a burning cross, and the defenders of the carvings were members of the hate group carrying cards. After the mountain was completed, “a ‘neo-Confederate theme park’ emerged around the site, including a plantation house, a” Gone with the Wind “museum, according to a report from the Atlanta History Center, the New reported. York Times Since then, KKK members have gathered at Stone Mountain annually to hold protests, according to the Times.
The opening has angered Black Lives Matters protesters and civil rights groups, which have long called for the destruction of the monument.
“Here we are in Atlanta, the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement and we still have the largest confederate monument in the world,” Gerald Griggs, vice president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP civil rights group, told the Daily Mail. “It is time for our state to get on the right side of history.”
In 2017, during his failed run for governor, Stacey Abrams wrote a series of tweets detailing the mountain’s history and calling for the relief to be removed.
“The removal of the Bas-relief from the Stone Mountain Confederates has been an ongoing debate since the state purchased the property in 1958,” Abrams wrote. “Paid for by the founders of the 2nd KKK, the monument had no other purpose than to celebrate racism, terror and division when it was carved in 1915.
“We should never celebrate those who defended slavery and tried to destroy the Union,” he continued. “Confederate monuments belong to museums where we can study and reflect on that terrible history, not in places of honor throughout our state.”
Adding insult to injury, Stone Mountain’s population is over 78% African American, according to the United States Census, with whites representing just 18%, and African Americans also making up the majority of workers in and around the monument. .
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