The mother of all Confederate monuments looms in Georgia. It’s etched on the side of a 280-some-million-year-old monadnock: Stone Mountain, seven miles around at the base and covering 1,000 acres. The Confederate memorial carving—Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis on horseback—is on the north face, comprising 3 acres in area. It’s 400 feet above the ground; it’s the largest bas-relief carving in the world—blah, blah, blah, this thing is big.
The armed, mostly Black protesters who peacefully marched in Stone Mountain Park demanding the removal of the carving on the Fourth of July hit social media hard, but the idea that the carving, big (and legally protected) as it may be, needs to go has been gaining traction in recent years. In 2017, Stacey Abrams, then running for governor of Georgia, called for the carving to be removed. Richard Rose, president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, interviewed by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Debra McKinney in 2018, called the carving “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world,” and said it should be brought down.
Looking at the history of this piece of public art, which is rich with twists and turns, it becomes clear that the carving is a monument to many kinds of 20th-century white supremacy—the overt racist violence of the second Ku Klux Klan; the decades-long tolerance of the Southern Jim Crow regime by Northerners, who wanted badly to look the other way in the name of “unity”; and later, the consumption-oriented “Lost Cause” nostalgia that reframed all of Southern history as a playground for pleasure seekers. A removal of this particular monument would truly be a victory. It would be hard to do, both physically and legally, but boy, would it be satisfying.
The idea for the monument came at a time of intense racist ferment in Atlanta and the greater South. In August 1915, a mob lynched Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent, in Marietta, for a murder he probably didn’t commit. In November, William Joseph Simmons led a small group of men up Stone Mountain, to swear allegiance to the idea of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan and to burn a huge cross, where it could be seen from the city. A commemorative postcard from the period emphasized the mountain’s bigness and used its commanding presence to amplify the Klan’s message: “Stone Mountain, Largest Solid Stone in the World, one mile from Base to Summit. On its highest pinnacle the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Organized at Midnight, Nov. 25, 1915.” The movie Birth of a Nation, which had premiered in Los Angeles earlier that year, opened in Atlanta to great acclaim on Dec. 6, 1915—two weeks after the cross burned.