Stone Mountain Park, the site of the world’s largest Confederate monument, will undergo several changes after a meeting this week of the board that manages the property near Atlanta.
The board of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, the Georgia state authority that oversees the park, passed resolutions Monday to make adjustments and additions to the site – but will not change the monument itself.
Completed after several decades in 1972, the monument consists of a massive rock carving of three Confederate leaders on horseback: Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
The board voted to move Confederate flags from a busy trail at the base of the monument and to create an exhibit at the park’s museum dedicated to the “honest telling of the whole story” of the site.
More specifically, the exhibit would address the site’s century-old association with the Ku Klux Klan, whose members staged cross-burning ceremonies there since before the sculpture was started.
The board also voted to lose the association’s logo, which currently includes the monument, and to seek historic designation for a bridge in the park built by a Black designer, Washington W. King.
“We’re just taking our first step today, to get where we need to go,” said the Rev. Abraham Mosley, the first Black chairman of the SMMA board, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.
The board passed the measures one day shy of the first anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a White police officer while being arrested in Minneapolis.
A total of 168 Confederate symbols, including 94 monuments, were removed from public view in 2020, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February, all but one in the aftermath of the Floyd death.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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