What we can do now about Stone Mountain’s
150ft Confederate carving? (Source theguardian.com)
The
icon of Stone Mountain Park is one of those memorials. It’s also the largest
bas-relief sculpture in the world. Occupying the steep northern slope of the
mountain and measuring 76ft tall by 158ft wide, the carving depicts the
president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, along with the
Confederate generals Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They are riding their
favorite horses with their hats over their hearts. Like most southern civil war
memorials, their real purpose is to instill in us a 20th-century romanticized
narrative about the American south that helps maintain white supremacy through
a segregated and unequal society. The story of the sculpture’s “heritage” began
one November night in 1915, 50 years after the end of the American civil war.
Fifteen men burned a cross atop the mountain and marked the founding of the
modern Ku Klux Klan. The next year, Samuel Venable, a Klansman and quarry
operator who owned the property, deeded its north face to the United Daughters
of the Confederacy (UDC), which planned the original carving. They commissioned
the work to a Klan sympathizer – a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum, who after
quitting the project in 1925, would go on to carve Mount Rushmore. Another sculptor
continued the project for three years until the UDC ran out of money. At that
point, only Robert E Lee’s head was complete, and the project languished for 30
years. In 1958, just four years after Brown v Board of Education and two years
after the Confederate battle emblem was added to Georgia’s flag (it was removed
in 2001), the state purchased Stone Mountain for the creation of a Confederate
memorial park. Five years later, in 1963 – the very same year that Martin
Luther King proclaimed in his I Have A Dream speech, “Let freedom ring from
the Stone Mountain of Georgia!” – the state restarted the effort to finish the
Confederate sculpture. Historian Grace Hale explains that to white state
leaders at that time, “the carving would demonstrate to the rest of the nation
that ‘progress’ meant not Black rights but the maintenance of white supremacy”.
Work
on the sculpture continued throughout the 1960s while nearby Atlanta emerged as
the cradle of the American civil rights movement, as the federal government
passed landmark legislation such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and even
after King was assassinated in 1968. Remarkably, only two years later in 1970,
Spiro Agnew, the vice-president of the United States, was a participant at the
sculpture’s unveiling. And over time, the park continued to evolve, with
additional homages to white supremacy, including the names of streets like
Robert E Lee Boulevard and Stonewall Jackson Drive, and a prominent role for
the still-flying Confederate battle flag. Proposed changes to the
Confederate carvings will not be enough. They are only a start, and only small
part of a larger effort to ensure that the design and use of public land and
public spaces reflect our highest values, and that those values actually shape
the laws that regulate our land. And while we don’t know if challenging the law
that protects Stone Mountain will work immediately, we do know that
eventually, change is going to come. We have this fleeting opportunity to try
to make it happen now, and to tell our children we stood up to hate.