I remember going to Stone Mountain with my grandma Kay when I was growing up in DeKalb County. She loved the fudge, and we both enjoyed the train. Even as a child, I felt uncomfortable and confused by the ambience and undertones present in Stone Mountain Park. I didn’t know what to make of it then, and I still don’t quite.
You enter the park on Jefferson Davis Drive and meet Robert E. Lee Boulevard, which snakes around the mountain. As you prepare for your walking ascent, you are greeted by a brigade of high-flying flags, including the Confederate Battle Flag and Georgia’s State Flag, which is the official flag of the Confederate States with the addition of the Georgia State Seal. In the year 2025, it’s a sickening sight to see it still flying at the home of the rebirth of the white supremacist terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan. It’s difficult to wrestle with the lauded memorialization of the Confederacy, knowing the state of Georgia funded the carving’s completion as a response to school desegregation. Inside the park, the scene of an antebellum-era town is set, featuring replica set pieces from “Gone With the Wind” and a square once labeled an “Antebellum Plantation.” It should make you uncomfortable. In many ways, it is meant to.
But it doesn’t make you uncomfortable in the way that a good museum does. It doesn’t make you challenge your beliefs or look at something in a different light. Looking up at the president of the traitorous Confederacy and his generals incised on Stone Mountain, casting a long and heavy shadow over our state, you are certainly meant to feel something. Just not something good.
Historians have found evidence that Stone Mountain was once an important religious and trading site for Georgia’s Indigenous peoples. Unbeknownst to many Georgians today, a stone wall once encircled the mountains peak. Before it was a Confederate memorial, it was a granite quarry, supplying the stone for Georgia’s State Capitol building, the Lincoln Memorial and the Panama Canal.
Today, Stone Mountain Park leaves a lot to be desired. It very much feels outdated as though it was conceived in the 20th century as a recreation of 19th century. That’s exactly what it is — an attempt to memorialize and re-create the era of slavery in Georgia and further the continuation of the “Lost Cause” today. Even as a light show dances on the faces of Confederate leaders and families enjoy attractions like Snow Mountain, it can’t hide what it is: 3,200 acres devoted to the Confederate cause and the oppression of Black people. It’s been described as the world’s largest monument to white supremacy.
There aren’t two sides to this space because there can’t be. Stone Mountain is carved with the likenesses of three men who were not from Georgia as a means to promote segregation and, worse, it is in a predominantly Black area. Frankly, I find it appalling and racist.
For years, a Freedom Bell on the top of Stone Mountain has been debated to realize the Rev. Martin King Jr.’s call to “let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.” There still is no Liberty Bell, but the football-field-sized carving born out of racism remains. In principle and in practice, freedom will not ring from Stone Mountain Georgia until the stain of the Confederacy is removed from Stone Mountain Park.
When you look at it from high above, the carving looks small and insignificant, like a pockmark scarring the mountain. When you are looking up at it, it is larger than life. All the grandeur of Mount Rushmore, all the hatred of Jim Crow. Georgia’s most popular tourist attraction should reflect the best of our state, our history and our people, not our worst. One day, I want to be able to take my children or visiting friends to Stone Mountain and have them learn about the complex and rich history of our state: founded as an abolitionist colony by James Oglethorpe, our secession from the United States and our rebirth as the home of King and the Civil Rights Movement.
Stone Mountain is required by the Georgia Constitution to be a memorial to the Confederacy. Stone Mountain is owned by the state of Georgia and operated by the Stone Mountain Memorial Association. It’s past time the Georgia state Legislature considered changing the purpose of the site in the state constitution and changing Stone Mountain Park. Let this site honor the nuance of Georgia history and the natural space itself. The space would be well served as a Civil War and Civil Rights Georgia history museum.
We should not forget or hide Georgia’s history, but we must reckon with it honestly. It’s time we reconsider Stone Mountain.
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