Confederacy group sues Georgia park for planning an exhibit on slavery and segregation

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — The Georgia chapter of a Confederacy group filed a lawsuit this week against a state park with the largest Confederate monument in the country, arguing officials broke state law by planning an exhibit on ties to slavery, segregation and white supremacy.

Stone Mountain’s massive carving depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on horseback. Critics who have long pushed for changes say the monument enshrines the “Lost Cause” mythology that romanticizes the Confederate cause as a state’s rights struggle, but state law protects the carving from any changes.

After police brutality spurred nationwide reckonings on racial inequality and the removal of dozens of Confederate monuments in 2020, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which oversees Stone Mountain Park, voted in 2021 to relocate Confederate flags and build a “truth-telling” exhibit to reflect the site’s role in the rebirth of the Klu Klux Klan, along with the carving’s segregationist roots.

The Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans also alleges in the lawsuit filed Tuesday that the board’s decision to relocate Confederate flags from a walking trail violates Georgia law.

“When they come after the history and attempt to change everything to the present political structure, that’s against the law,” said Martin O’Toole, the chapter’s spokesperson.

Stone Mountain Park markets itself as a family theme park and is a popular hiking spot east of Atlanta. Completed in 1972, the monument on the mountain’s northern space is 190 feet (58 meters) across and 90 feet (27 meters) tall. The United Daughters of the Confederacy hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who later carved Mount Rushmore, to craft the carving in 1915.

That same year, the film “Birth of a Nation” celebrated the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, which marked its comeback with a cross burning on top of Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving night in 1915. One of the 10 parts of the planned exhibit would expound on the Ku Klux’s Klan reemergence and the movie’s influence on the mountain’s monument.

The Stone Mountain Memorial Association hired Birmingham-based Warner Museums, which specializes in civil rights installations, to design the exhibit in 2022.

“The interpretive themes developed for Stone Mountain will explore how the collective memory created by Southerners in response to the real and imagined threats to the very foundation of Southern society, the institution of slavery, by westward expansion, a destructive war, and eventual military defeat, was fertile ground for the development of the Lost Cause movement amidst the social and economic disruptions that followed,” the exhibit proposal says.

Other parts of the exhibit would address how the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans perpetuated the “Lost Cause” ideology through support for monuments, education programs and racial segregation laws across the South. It would also tell stories of a small Black community that lived near the mountain after the war.

Georgia’s General Assembly allocated $11 million in 2023 to pay for the exhibit and renovate the park’s Memorial Hall. The exhibit is not open yet. A spokesperson for the park did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The park’s board in 2021 also voted to change its logo from an image of the Confederate carveout to a lake inside the park.

Sons of the Confederate Veterans members have defended the carvings as honoring Confederate soldiers.

The exhibit would “radically revise” the park’s setup, “completely changing the emphasis of the Park and its purpose as defined by the law of the State of Georgia,” the lawsuit says.

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Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon.