Stone Mountain continues to teach lessons, admittedly in ways that its founders could not have envisioned. Monuments can be that way. Democracies too.
Georgia’s state-mandated paean to the Confederacy continues to make news, as only a mammoth memorial chiseled out of granite can do. In the year since an avowed young white supremacist allegedly went on a murderous terror rampage at a Charleston church, the great rock has become a symbol of America’s periodic, ongoing convulsions around matters of race.
Earlier this month, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Ernie Suggs provided an update on the latest effort to make Stone Mountain’s legacy and meaning better comport with sensibilities of this century – and not the world of 150, or even 50, years ago.
Quietly dropped is a broadly controversial, though well-intentioned, idea to install a bell tower honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Confederate sympathizers and some African-American leaders alike condemned that plan as being out of place at the park. They had a good point.
Stone Mountain officials, however, are continuing on with planning for a proposed museum honoring black Civil War soldiers. That seems a noble goal on its surface, but it quickly runs into inconvenient facts of history. As in how can a memorial only to the Confederacy accommodate the tale of black soldiers who, in their entirety as far as any legitimate historian can tell, fought only on the side of the Union?
In the Civil War-era South, the few blacks in uniform all appear to be slaves or servants who followed their masters into service. That reality can be difficult to absorb today. Force-fitting history, though, to fit modern sentiments is always a tricky affair.
Honestly interpreting that history is the conundrum facing Stone Mountain officials, even as Memorial Association CEO Bill Stephens rightly notes that the Civil War “impacted everybody, black and white, North and South.”
As part of their consideration, we believe park officials should ask whether the effort to diversify the park’s prevailing narrative is worth the effort. Especially in a time when opinions on all sides are so hardened.
The smallest of incremental actions anywhere around the Confederate Battle flag – or Stone Mountain — are likely to once more draw activists on both sides to the big rock. The latest protests in April, triangulating a white supremacist group against opponents, led to several arrests and some injuries as police struggled to keep multiple groups away from each other.
Rock-throwing activists and white supremacists alike both do a disservice to the memory of a long-ago war which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives on American soil.
Stone Mountain was a last great attempt to thumb a Southern nose at the rolling tide of history. The fought-for causes of slavery, and later, legal segregation, are long gone. The majority of the world’s accepted that and moved on.
As we wrote last fall, Stone Mountain is perhaps best left as it is — a nice park, as well as a tombstone to an idea and way of life now long dead.
Free people of all colors each day pass the Confederacy’s waving banners as they march up the mountain. Most, if not all, don’t give a moment’s thought to the flags and what they symbolized. Their carefree daily actions speak more loudly to society’s progress than a museum’s addition to Stone Mountain ever could.
