STONE
MOUNTAIN, Ga. — The idea is suffused with a simple poetry: A bell would
be placed atop Stone Mountain, the massive granite outcropping east of
Atlanta invoked by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
in his “I Have a Dream” speech — one of the places from which, as Dr.
King imagined it, a nation no longer divided by racism might “Let
freedom ring.”
But
this “Freedom Bell” proposal, unveiled this month by a state government
authority as a tribute to the civil rights leader, has become mired in
complications and controversy, the latest skirmish over Southern symbols
prompted by the racially motivated massacre of nine black churchgoers
this summer in Charleston, S.C.
Opposition
came quickly, and perhaps expectedly, from the Georgia division of the
Sons of Confederate Veterans, who said that the mountain, which is
adorned with a huge carving depicting Confederate heroes, is classified
as a Confederate memorial by state statute. “The erection of monuments
to anyone other than Confederate heroes in Stone Mountain Park,” the
group said in a written statement, “is in contradistinction to the
purpose for which the park exists and would make it a memorial to
something different.”
Perhaps more surprisingly, civil rights groups, including two local branches of the N.A.A.C.P. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, are also opposed, largely because a carving of Robert E. Lee,
Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis etched into the mountain’s
northern face — a display that is larger than Mount Rushmore — would
remain.
Dr.
Charles Steele Jr., the chief executive of the S.C.L.C., a group that
Dr. King helped found, said the proper solution would be to remove the
carving altogether.
“Take
this sucker down,” Mr. Steele said in an interview. He dismissed
criticism that removing the carving by sandblasting or some other means
might be prohibitively expensive: “That’s no cost when you compare it to
the cost of slavery and destroying a whole race.”
The dispute was probably inevitable: Stone Mountain, as Dr. King well knew, is no mere geological curiosity. A former Ku Klux Klan
stronghold, the mountain — 825 feet high and five miles around — is the
centerpiece of an eponymous state park that is designated by the state
as a “Confederate memorial.”
It
is also in a suburban Atlanta county, DeKalb, that has become one of
the most racially and ethnically diverse areas in the South, and these
days, the 3,200-acre park, with its extensive hiking trails and tram to
the mountaintop, has a broad multicultural fan base.
“You
come out here at 7 o’clock in the morning, and the place is just packed
with people of all shapes and sizes and colors,” said Bill Stephens,
the head of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which oversees the
park.
Mr.
Stephens rejects the idea of removing the carving. He said the park was
“into addition and not subtraction” and that state law prohibited the
park from removing the carving or a display of Confederate flags at the
base of the mountain.
Mr.
Stephens, a Republican former state senator who is white, said the idea
for the tribute to Dr. King grew out of conversations with his group
and the private company that operates the park, which began before the
Charleston massacre but picked up steam thereafter. The discussions took
place as a wave of anger over Confederate symbols was sweeping across
Georgia and the South.
Indeed,
just before the Fourth of July weekend, when the park hosts a popular
fireworks display, an African-American state lawmaker, LaDawn Jones, had
called for a boycott of the park to protest the fact that it still
displays Confederate battle flags.
The proposal for the King tribute was reported earlier by
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Mr. Stephens said it would be paired
with a new museum exhibit commemorating black Civil War soldiers.
The
effort to turn the granite dome into a Confederate memorial coincided
with the resurgence of the Klan in the early 1900s, said Timothy
Crimmins, a history professor at Georgia State University. The hate
group’s rallies at Stone Mountain began in 1915, he said, around the
time that the D.W. Griffith film “Birth of a Nation” spread the myth of
the Klan as a noble protector of Southern whites. The carving was begun
in 1915 and finished, after numerous delays and plenty of drama, in
1972.
But
as the complexion of DeKalb County, which includes Stone Mountain,
changed over the next few decades, so did public sentiment. The black
population in the county has nearly tripled since 1980, with
African-Americans now a majority of the more than 700,000 residents.
Many object to the tribute to the Confederates.
Some
have come to live with the carving and the flags, ignoring them or
resigning themselves to the fact that they probably are not going
anywhere.
“I
don’t like it, but to each their own,” said Camille Coakley, an
African-American who was power-walking along the park’s Robert E. Lee
Boulevard on Monday afternoon. “I love Stone Mountain Park.”
Others have responded with good humor: A MoveOn.org petition
that calls for adding Big Boi and Andre 3000, the members of the
Atlanta hip-hop duo OutKast, to the side of the mountain (riding in a
Cadillac beside the three Confederates on horseback) has gathered more
than 12,000 signatures.
Ms.
Coakley is one of roughly four million people who visit the park each
year, according to park officials, making it the most visited attraction
in Georgia. Most day-to-day operations are handled by Herschend Family
Entertainment, a private company that runs an Antebellum Plantation
tour, museum exhibits and several seasonal events.
The
carving of the horse-mounted Confederates, however, which is 90 feet
tall and 190 feet wide, is an unavoidable showstopper, and the park
operators are faced with the difficult task of acknowledging its
centrality while offending as few people as possible.
The
main gift store sells some T-shirts that depict the Confederate heroes,
and some that do not. American flag-themed items are for sale, but not
Confederate ones. A mile or so away, the park’s Confederate Hall
building is given over mostly to exhibits on geology and ecology.
The
park’s Lasershow Spectacular, an Atlanta summer tradition, projects
light patterns on and around the three Confederate heroes, to a
carefully balanced soundtrack of black and white pop stars: R.E.M.
followed by James Brown, Ray Charles singing “Georgia” followed by
Willie Nelson’s take on the standard.
Ray
McBerry, a spokesman for the Georgia Sons of Confederate Veterans, said
this week that the group would consider suing to stop the construction
of a King memorial at the park. Dr. Steele, along with representatives
from the DeKalb County and Atlanta chapters of the N.A.A.C.P., have met
with Gov. Nathan Deal to express their displeasure with the plan.
A
spokeswoman for Mr. Deal, Jen Talaber, said Tuesday that the governor
would seek to arrange a meeting between civil rights groups and the
nine-member board of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association and
Herschend Family Entertainment, both of which would have to approve of
the King memorial. Mr. Stephens said that the board had not yet held a
vote on the proposal.
The
idea has its black supporters, including Andrew Young, the former
Atlanta mayor and United States ambassador to the United Nations, who
told The Journal-Constitution that a Martin Luther King bell atop Stone
Mountain would be “wonderful symbolism” that would reflect Dr. King’s
goal of reconciling “races and opinions.”
There
was some grumbling at the park Monday afternoon. A white woman visiting
from Virginia, who was shooting photographs of the carving and declined
to give her name, said that she opposed any change to the park. “I’m
not racist, but I think it’s ridiculous,” she said.
Several
African-Americans at the park said they agreed with Mr. Young. Shannon
Murray, 39, said the King tribute would be a “fair” addition to the
mountain. “That way I think they’d be representing all of our history,”
she said.
Ms.
Murray had just come from the gift shop, where she had bought her
daughter a commemorative T-shirt — the kind, she said, without the
Confederates on it.
Source: NY Times
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