(AmericanProsperity.com) – The Confederate monument in Stone Mountain in Georgia has been the place for a lot of debate as racial tensions continued even years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech.
Stone Mountain Georgia has the largest Confederate monument in the world and it is the origin of the Ku Klux Klan’s 20th-century rebirth. The Stone Mountain monument features three of the top Confederate leaders from the Civil War. It features the faces of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
This is one monument of about 2,000 that are still left across the country. In the year 2023, 49 different monuments were removed including nine Department of Defense forts. The Congressional Naming Commission Report stated that hundreds of Confederate monuments were to be removed in 2024.
These include plaques, statues, memorials, and the controversial Reconciliation Monument in the Arlington National Cemetery. This is just the beginning of a growing movement where people are looking to remove these Confederate monuments due to their distortion of history and for their praising of Confederates for slavery.
Rivka Maizlish, from the Southern Poverty Law Center, said “These memorials serve the purpose of rewriting history, telling a different story of that war and remaking Confederate heroes as American heroes. You can imagine the psychological impact, especially on African Americans, but on anyone who does not believe that white supremacy is an American value, and seeing these memorials all over the country.”
With this being said, the controversy continued as Martin O’Toole of the Georgie Branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans spoke out about it. “When this current upsurge of destruction of monuments, historical monuments, and the like took place, then many of the members became convinced that our charge that we got from General Steven D. Lee … required that we do something in the legal realm to defend these monuments,” he said.
O’Toole continued to say that they have filed a notice to say that the changes are unlawful.
Beverly Jones, Mayor of Stone Mountain, pointed out that these changes have been getting backlash. “We don’t ever want to have any cities to have monuments children have to look at every day and feel like ‘[Confederate figures] were powerful and you know, this is someone to look up to.’ We don’t want that to ever happen in the city of Stone Mountain.” Jones said.
The debate on the Stone Mountain monument and many others is still controversial as people are fighting for both sides of this.
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