A Accomplice heritage group has filed a lawsuit in opposition to Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park, arguing {that a} new exhibition analyzing the location’s connections to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy violates state legislation.
The lawsuit was introduced by the Georgia Division of the Sons of Accomplice Veterans, which claims that the Stone Mountain Memorial Affiliation’s resolution to relocate Accomplice flags and construct what it calls a “truth-telling” present is at odds with the park’s authentic mandate to honor the Confederacy—protections that stay enshrined in Georgia legislation, in response to the Related Press.
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Stone Mountain’s bas-relief carving—believed to be the biggest Accomplice monument within the nation—options Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on horseback. Whereas defenders say the monument honors Southern heritage, critics have lengthy pointed to its ties to the Misplaced Trigger mythology, which reframes the Confederacy’s secession as a struggle for states’ rights relatively than the preservation of slavery.
After the racial justice protests of 2020 prompted renewed scrutiny of Accomplice symbols, the park’s board voted in 2021 to make restricted modifications. These included transferring Accomplice flags from a distinguished strolling path and commissioning an exhibition that will contextualize the location’s historical past—together with its hyperlinks to the Ku Klux Klan, which famously held a cross-burning atop the mountain in 1915, the identical yr work on the monument started.
The Stone Mountain Memorial Affiliation later employed Warner Museums, a Birmingham-based agency recognized for its civil rights work, to develop the exhibit. In keeping with the agency’s proposal, the venture would look at how the trauma of conflict and Reconstruction created fertile floor for the Misplaced Trigger motion, and the way teams just like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Accomplice Veterans helped advertise via public monuments, schooling campaigns, and help for segregation legal guidelines.
The exhibit will even characteristic tales of a Black neighborhood that lived close to the bottom of the mountain after the Civil Battle—an try and broaden the narrative past the standard concentrate on the monument’s creators and topics.
The Georgia legislature authorised $11 million in 2023 to fund the exhibit and renovate Memorial Corridor, the park’s museum constructing. Although the set up isn’t but open to the general public, the modifications have already sparked backlash from Accomplice heritage teams.
“Once they come after the historical past and try to alter every part to the current political construction, that’s in opposition to the legislation,” stated Martin O’Toole, a spokesperson for the Sons of Accomplice Veterans.
Stone Mountain Park, situated simply east of Atlanta, is marketed as a household attraction and climbing vacation spot. The carving itself measures 190 ft broad and 90 ft tall and was accomplished in 1972, a long time after sculptor Gutzon Borglum—who would go on to carve Mount Rushmore—started work on the venture.
In 2021, the board additionally voted to alter the park’s brand, changing the carving’s picture with a extra impartial depiction of a lake on the property.
The lawsuit argues that the proposed exhibit quantities to a “full repurposing” of Stone Mountain Park and disregards the Georgia legislature’s authentic intent in preserving the location.
