“… let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia …”
For all the fuss about the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va., this week, the biggest of all the monuments to the Confederacy still stands, east of Atlanta in Stone Mountain Park.
It’s a Confederate Mount Rushmore of sorts, carved into the side of the mountain and picturing Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on horseback.
And as is the case with most of the Confederate monuments, it wasn’t until several generations had passed that it was built. It’s almost as if Germany was building massive statues of Adolph Hitler — now.
Most of the iconography of the Lost Cause came along during the Second Civil War, when white Southerners dug their heels in to oppose the Civil Rights movement. Georgia was the state where restauranteur Lester Maddox made himself famous — and made himself governor — for standing outside the door with an axe handle to prevent black people from trying to eat at his business.
He was elected governor in 1966, but before you say that’s Georgia for you, he succeeded a progressive governor on civil rights in Carl Sanders and was followed by another one in Jimmy Carter.
In his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, Martin Luther King referred to Stone Mountain, which was not yet completed as a monument to the Confederacy, when he called for a future of freedom, equality and tolerance between the races. Five years later, King was dead and Maddox was running Georgia.
Ironically, the completion of the Stone Mountain tableau didn’t come until 1972, when Carter was in the governor’s mansion.
By then, Republicans were taking advantage of the racial backlash against civil rights and winning elections all across the south. But in the last five or 10 years, we have reached a point where statues honoring Confederate heroes are coming down everywhere.
In fact, pretty much the only people making a real fuss about it are white supremacists and Donald Trump.
That isn’t to say there aren’t bad times ahead. I thought it would be a milestone when we elected an African-American president in 2008 and a mixed-race vice president in 2020, but all it seems to have done is further enrage the racist right.
The debate does seem to be changing, though, and if the secessionists are seen for what they were instead of American heroes, that will be a good step forward.
And as we know, journeys of a thousand miles begin with a single step.