The Stone Mountain Action Coalition and Southern Poverty Law Center are again calling on Gov. Brian Kemp and the Stone Mountain Memorial Association to cancel the annual Confederate Memorial Day event at Stone Mountain Park.
The Stone Mountain Memorial Association has granted the Sons of Confederate Veterans a permit to hold the event April 29, said association CEO Bill Stephens.
“The group has a First Amendment right to express their opinion,” Stephens said. “They followed the permitting process that’s in place and our legal counsel has been clear that they have a right to do this annual ceremony of theirs, and that’s what we’re planning for.”
The same groups and the DeKalb County NAACP tried unsuccessfully last year to have the event canceled.
Brian Morris, a member of the grassroots Stone Mountain Action Coalition, said the group plans to call for the event’s cancellation every year and show up to counter-protest until things change.
“Just because the law says it’s OK doesn’t make it OK,” Morris said. “It is hurtful.”
Kemp appoints the memorial association’s board, which manages the park and oversees event permitting. A Kemp spokesman referred questions to the association.
The ceremony’s keynote speaker this year is John Weaver, pastor of Freedom Baptist Ministries in Fitzgerald. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project calls him “a racist and anti-Semitic preacher.” According to the organization, he is affiliated with neo-Confederate hate groups including the Southern Cultural Center, the Council of Conservative Citizens and the League of the South.
The League of the South participated in the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Council of Conservative Citizens opposes interracial partnerships and has referred to Black people as “animals,” “savages” and a “retrograde species of humanity.”
“Providing a platform for his racist ideas at Stone Mountain helps Weaver and the movement normalize their ideas, which gives the perception that their ideas are supported by officials in Georgia,” said Jeff Tischauser, senior research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
The memorial association denied a permit for a white supremacist rally that would have coincided with the 2019 Super Bowl in Atlanta, and instead closed the park that day. The park closed its gates again the following year to far-right militias planning a rally.
The association denied the Sons of Confederate Veterans a permit for Confederate Memorial Day in 2021, citing “a clear and present danger to public health or safety.”
“Now more than ever Stone Mountain Park should not hold this event as it will disrupt day-to-day operations, create bad publicity and add excessive costs to deal with public security needs that occur when groups like the SCV hold provocative public events,” the Stone Mountain Action Coalition said in its call to cancel the rally.
Stephens said the association relies on the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Federal Bureau of Investigation to monitor the events and the law enforcement agencies have not warned of a clear and present danger this year.
“Law enforcement decides that,” he said. “I don’t.”
Stone Mountain is not relevant to any Civil War battle or historical figure, but has become a modern battleground due to its controversial 17,000-square-foot carving of Confederate leaders.
The carving was conceived around the same time that the Ku Klux Klan was reborn on the mountain in 1915. It went unfinished for decades, but weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s integration ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, former Gov. Marvin Griffin vowed the state would buy the mountain and complete the carving.
The memorial association has vowed to relocate Confederate flags from the base of a popular walk-up trail, but has not yet done so. The association also recently picked a firm to create a museum that will “tell the truth” about the mountain’s racist history.
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