Look for the Stone Mountain Memorial Association’s nine-member Board of Directors to vote Monday afternoon on the future of the park’s numerous confederate symbols and imagery.
It’s an early test for Rev. Abraham Mosley, the first Black chairman of the board, who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp last month and will lead Monday’s meeting.
As the AJC’s Tyler Estep has detailed, some of the changes up for a vote Monday include a proposal from Association CEO Bill Stephens that he says he designed to “tell the whole story” about the park’s past, including its past associations with the Ku Klux Klan.
Among the changes being considered are adding a new museum exhibit about the park’s full history, renaming “Confederate Hall” as “Heritage Hall,” relocating the Confederate flags that have long flown at the base of the mountain for decades, and changing the Association’s logo to remove the image of the mountain’s massive carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Those changes are bound to offend the people who want the park to remain as it is, but they also won’t go nearly as far as some critics want.
Richard Rose, the president of the Atlanta NAACP, said in a statement, “It’s time for Georgia and other Southern states to end the glorification of slavery and white supremacy paid for and maintained with the taxes of all its citizens.
As to Stone Mountain specifically, Rose said, “There are monuments all over the South, of which Stone Mountain is the largest. They were erected to demonstrate and celebrate white supremacy. They must be removed immediately.”
The changes to Stone Mountain will be watched nationally as an example of how a Southern state, with a rapidly changing demographic and political landscape, navigates its path into the future.
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U.S. Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were at Fort Valley State University Saturday for a press conference with U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsak to detail the new $4 billion federal aid program to Black farmers.
Warnock sits on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee and was instrumental in adding the program to the COVID relief package that passed earlier this year.
Bishop, as the chair of the House Appropriations Agriculture subcommittee, holds the purse strings on the House side for Agriculture programs.
The lawmakers were joined by Black farmers. After telling them earlier this spring that, “Help is on the way,” Warnock told them Saturday, “Help is here.”
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Politico’s top story today leads with U.S. Rep. Jody Hice as one of multiple Trump-supporting Republicans who pushed voter-fraud claims now looking to run the elections in their home states. Hice is challenging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the 2022 GOP primary.
While Hice wouldn’t talk for the article, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan definitely did. Duncan is fast becoming one of the highest profile Republicans ready and willing to bash Trump and his fellow GOPers doing Trump’s bidding in pushing false claims of election fraud. From Politico:
“The danger is you're lying to either yourself or to millions of people when you try to run for these large, statewide elected offices," Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican, said of the false electoral fraud claims.
Duncan, a vocal critic of Trump and other Republicans who push the election fraud myth, recently announced he would not seek reelection and instead focus on his “GOP 2.0" initiative. He said a fixation on it will only hurt Republicans in the long term.
“There is a vacuum of leadership, and folks wanting to put themselves into even higher leadership positions, continuing to carry on with the lies and misinformation, continues to create an even bigger vacuum around our party," he said.
Duncan, who was in Washington D.C. last week to take meetings about GOP 2.0 (he declined to say with whom) said he believed the party would come around: “They're just going to get tired of losing. They're going to get tired of running people out there that just are unelectable."
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Even though Republicans will be in charge of the state’s redistricting process, Democrats will be in the rooms where (most of it) happens.
State Rep. Carl Gilliard, D-Garden City, who sits on the state Reapportionment Committee, gave the Savannah Morning News some insight into what he’s expecting when the process fires up this fall:
“My posture will be to not only make sure things are fair, but to fight for those districts that we have in place to make sure that there is no gerrymandering," Gilliard said.
He expects the most change in districts in the Atlanta area.
“The big battle lines are going to be up toward Atlanta and Fulton County, DeKalb and all those areas that actually brought in the election for the president and the U.S. Senate, I'm expecting to see some very strategic requests being made just to be able to hold on to those seats, and on our side, to garner more votes."
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CNN’s Dana Bash featured Democratic U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath’s ongoing fight for gun safety restrictions over the weekend. Along with an emotional interview about how she learned about the shooting death of her son, Jordan, McBath also spoke to CNN at the site of her son’s grave.
“That is his legacy. Even though I thought I was sowing the seed into him to live that out, his legacy is my legacy.”
McBath called the road to changing gun laws, even with a Democratic White House, House and Senate, a “long, long” one, and hammered state Republicans for Georgia’s new election law, which could affect turnout all over the state, including her 6th Congressional district.
“Shame on the Republican Party for putting these kinds of pieces of legislation in place that deter people’s ability to vote,” she said.
State Republicans have said their goal was to “make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
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VICE.com reviewed the public comments of all 50 state Republican Party chairs and, no surprise, found a pattern of the top officials spreading former President Donald Trump’s false election fraud claims. They had this to say about Georgia:
Georgia GOP chair David Shafer actively spread false information about the results in Georgia, buttressing Trump's repeated false claims that the state had been stolen from him.
He filed a lawsuit objecting to the state certifying the election results, and after Georgia finished a full statewide hand recount of its ballots that confirmed Biden's win and showed no evidence of voter fraud, Shafer led a letter that expressed “grave concerns" about voter fraud.
He's bragged about suing Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and he encouraged Republicans to primary him because of Raffensperger's refusal to help Trump try to steal Georgia's electoral votes.
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Georgia U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson is looking to compensate the victims and heirs of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which destroyed one of the most prosperous Black neighborhoods in the United States.
Johnson, D-Lithonia, introduced the Tulsa-Greenwood Massacre Claims Accountability Act to require that legal judgements related to the event “forward the United States policy of compensating” victims and their heirs. It would also allow legal claims to move forward without regard to statutes of limitations.
“Their lives, their land and their liberty were stolen from them, and then these victims were erased from our national history,” Johnson said during a congressional hearing last week. “This massacre undoubtedly had a devastating toll on the Black community in Tulsa, but creating a cause of action to recover compensation for these wrongs is just one step in our path towards healing.”
Johnson, along with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, will host an event Thursday to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the massacre.
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CAMPAIGN WATCH: Albany firefighter Tracy Taylor has announced his run against U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, the Albany Herald reports.
Taylor has previously run for mayor, the Dougherty County Commission and state Senate and now serves as chairman of the Dougherty County Republican Party.
“It’s time for a change,” he told the Herald.
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Add “New York Times Best Selling author” to Stacey Abrams’ list of accomplishments. Her latest novel, “When Justice Sleeps,” debuted at the top of the Times’ Best-Seller list last week.
“When Justice Sleeps” is also ranked “#1 best seller” in the political thriller category on Amazon and is No. 7 on the overall fiction list for highest sales.
Abrams still hasn’t announced what her plans are for a 2022 gubernatorial run, but Democrats in Georgia are banking on her leading the ticket.
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Veteran Republican strategist Stephen Lawson is starting his own firm, Battleground Strategies, to specialize in communications and public relations work for political and corporate clients.
Lawson’s name will be familiar to Jolt readers as a top deputy for former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler during her 2020 Senate campaign. He is also a former operative for Florida Sen. Rick Scott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
He’ll continue his role as a communications lead for Greater Georgia, the voting group Loeffler launched this year, and will also continue to advise the former senator as she weighs whether to launch a comeback bid in 2022.
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As always, Jolt readers are some of our favorite tipsters. Send your best scoop, gossip and insider info to patricia.murphy@ajc.com.
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