All contents © 2021 The Slate Group LLC. Georgia Minutemen LLC, based in Henry County, reported that it has filed suit against Henry County officials who voted to remove the Confederate statue from the McDonough square. The carving is a monument to many kinds of 20, Ensconced in Tendons, Ligaments, and Muscles, failing to gain much traction for a few years, Biden Has Already Fired Three of Trump’s Worst Appointees, Jen Psaki Is Praised for “Not Crazy” First Press Conference, Barely Any Trump Supporters Showed at Inauguration Protests Around the Country. In 2019, Georgia passed a law that prohibits anyone, including local officials, from removing, defacing or changing Confederate monuments. Slate relies on advertising to support our journalism. These include many of the typical pedestal-shaft-soldier monuments found throughout Georgia. Newnan’s Confederate soldier monument, erected in 1886, is one of those. Georgia and Virginia have the most remaining monuments — more than 100 each, according to the SPLC — and they have attracted activists like magnets in recent weeks. GWINNETT COUNTY, Georgia (Gwinnett Daily Post) — A controversial Confederate monument that has stood on the grounds of the Gwinnett Historic Courthouse for nearly 30 years is coming down. Georgia state law states that "No publicly owned monument honoring Confederate soldiers shall be relocated, removed or altered in any fashion," according to Fox 5 Atlanta. The only monument in Hanover Square, a tree-lined park centrally located in Brunswick’s historic district, is of an unnamed Confederate soldier. Decatur’s unwanted Confederate monument isn’t going anywhere soon Maggie Lee April 1, 2019 2:42 pm Different visions for Georgia’s Confederate monuments aired in state Senate committee It’s 400 feet above the ground; it’s the largest bas-relief carving in the world—blah, blah, blah, this thing is big. If you value our work, please disable your ad blocker. A commemorative postcard from the period emphasized the mountain’s bigness and used its commanding presence to amplify the Klan’s message: “Stone Mountain, Largest Solid Stone in the World, one mile from Base to Summit. Georgia city dismantling Confederate monument from 1872 Workers have begun dismantling a monument to Confederate soldiers in Athens, Georgia, that has stood in the median of a busy street since 1872 5 months ago School changes Confederate name to honor local black heroes But the racism of mainstream American culture in the 1920s—the culture that surrounded Borglum as he carved—wasn’t just about the Klan. It would be hard to do, both physically and legally, but boy, would it be satisfying. MCDONOUGH, Ga. (AP) — A Confederate monument in Georgia was removed overnight on Wednesday by workers who used a crane to pull the figure off … While dozens of Confederate monuments have been removed since 2009, as of 2019, more than 775 remained, along with hundreds of names on roads, schools, parks and the like. But of course, “no message” is a message of its own. Doug Ducey to remove the monuments … Web. The idea for the monument came at a time of intense racist ferment in Atlanta and the greater South. The city of Atlanta will install markers next to Confederate monuments to give context to the painful history they represent. The letters “BLM” are spray painted on its base. The monument was erected April 26,1902. It’s etched on the side of a 280-some-million-year-old monadnock: Stone Mountain, seven miles around at the base and covering 1,000 acres. In May 1922, the city hosted the seventh “klonvention” of the organization and hosted thousands of Klansmen (by historian Kenneth T. Jackson’s count) for a series of activities that included “a pilgrimage and barbecue at Stone Mountain.” The Atlanta “klavern” had at least 15,000 members by 1923. In April 1928, the association held a ceremony to unveil the entire figure of the general. He took over, removed Borglum’s head of Lee entirely, and began again. The Gwinnett County Confederate Monument Committee raised funds to erect the structure, which was installed in 1993. Located throughout the state, they include government historical markers, markers installed under the Works Progress Administration (a, Inscriptions, ranging from the simple to the highly political, adorn Georgia's monuments. Macon-Bibb commissioners voted 5-4 on July 27 to move two Confederate monuments in downtown Macon. Georgia's Confederate Monuments is the product of two decades of work, during which time the author traveled throughout the state to photograph the memorials to the men and women of the Confederate States of America, to study their inscriptions, and to document information about each monument's construction. Efforts to honor Georgia's Civil War veterans began almost as soon as the war ended, but the great majority of Confederate monuments were dedicated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period … It’s etched on the side of a 280-some-million -year-old monadnock: Stone Mountain, seven miles around at … Nationally, the Second Klan, after failing to gain much traction for a few years, grew strongholds in Indiana, Colorado, and across the country. When a journalist asked Borglum how he could go from carving a bust of Lincoln for the rotunda of the United States Capitol to taking on this project, Borglum both-sides’d it, saying that he had “the deepest respect for the great men of the other side.”, The sculptor, historian Grace Elizabeth Hale writes, seemed to be “more intent on his own rather than the Confederacy’s glory.” What Borglum wanted was for this monument to get recognition as a great American landmark. Photo by Lee Shearer, courtesy of Athens Banner-Herald. The kind of Southern history to be found on this “historic” plantation was to be of the classic “moonlight and magnolias” variety. You’ve run out of free articles. Readers like you make our work possible. Athens-Clarke County officials have said the move is necessary in order to widen a busy pedestrian crosswalk. If Borglum’s full vision were to have been realized, the monument would have symbolically hollowed out the mountain—filling it completely, inside and out, with Confederate memory. It took the midcentury civil rights movement, and the white backlash against it, to bring the state of Georgia back to the idea of finishing the carving on Stone Mountain. Georgia law prohibits moving Confederate monuments. (Sam Venable had been part of the group of people on the summit with Simmons when the KKK was reborn, the year before.) The Confederate memorial carving—Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis on horseback—is on the north face, comprising 3 acres in area. A removal of this particular monument would truly be a victory. "Lest We Forget" or "Our Confederate Dead" are examples of simple sentiments found on numerous monuments. Macon-Bibb commissioners voted 5-4 on July 27 to move two Confederate monuments in downtown Macon. The monument … Numerous Confederate statues and monuments to American slave owners have come down across the South amid recent protests against racial … For many Georgia communities, including Decatur and Atlanta, the continued presence of white-supremacy monuments in high-profile places is an insult, but it is an insult they have to accept. It also noted that a 2019 Georgia law protects monuments that are “established by federal, state, local and private agencies” from being moved. Confederate Monuments Arizona A monument to Arizona Confederate soldiers stands amid other memorials at Wesley Bonin Memorial Plaza on the grounds of the Capitol complex in Phoenix Monday, June 5, 2017, presented by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1961. Examples exist in, Between 1980 and 2005 dozens of Confederate monuments were dedicated at sites statewide. Even as McQueen (who chafed at Hollywood’s racism in offering her only “maid” roles) greeted visitors from the kitchen in the plantation at Stone Mountain, Martin Luther King Jr., in his Aug. 28, 1963, “I Have a Dream” speech, invoked the spot on his stirring list of Southern hills and high places that he hoped would soon witness a new wave of human equality: “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia …”, Vice President Spiro Agnew dedicated the carving in May 1970, giving a speech that the New York Times called “subdued and nonpartisan”—but would now seem anything but. Protesters at the Confederate carving in Stone Mountain Park on June 16. Some onlookers in the 1930s thought that the mountainside, after all that public mess, would never host a Confederate memorial. The Civil War monuments across the American South are dead monuments. The march is to protest confederate monuments and recent police shootings. I would give this an average rating, but for one inscription on one of its four sides. These included Stone Mountain, purchased by the state of Georgia in 1958 specifically to create a Confederate monument. Brian Kemp last year that prevents Confederate monuments from being discarded or altered, multiple cities have elected to … Confederate monument removal A Confederate monument is being removed from downtown Athens. Over the years, however, mostly due to changing traffic patterns, many monuments have been moved to safer locations; the monument in, One of the earliest Confederate memorial services was held in April 1866 at, More than sixty monuments were built and dedicated during the first two decades of the twentieth century. One legislator remarked on Stone Mountain Park’s intended audience: “A Yankee tourist is worth a bale of cotton and twice as easy to pick.” Those creating the park constructed a “historic plantation” out of buildings brought in from around the state. For many “polite” white people, inside and outside of the South, the idea that the Confederates were somehow also patriots was not a foreign one. Randolph and the SMCMA canceled Borglum’s contract in February 1925. The commission voted to move both statues to Whittle Park outside of Rose Hill Cemetery to make road improvements. “For there to be racial progress, there need to be drastic improvements in failing schools in minority communities,” Martinez exclaimed. The Borglum monument was also supposed to have a Memorial Hall, “carved out of solid rock,” at its base, a “vast womblike space” with a “chamber” for every Confederate state—to preserve Confederate records and commemorate the “sacrifices” of Confederate women during the war. It had been in place since 1908, but more recently became a flashpoint for protests over police brutality and racial injustice. The group tried to bury the Borglum embarrassment by hiring a relatively unknown artist from Richmond, Virginia, Augustus Lukeman. 14 January 2021. Workers remove a Confederate monument with a crane Thursday, June 18, 2020, in Decatur, Ga. In 2017, Stacey Abrams, then running for governor of Georgia, called for the carving to be removed. A monument to fallen Confederate soldiers in downtown Gainesville was brought down on August 14, and carried away by workers hired by the United Daughters of … Klan infighting became endemic in the mid-1920s, as the Second Klan dissolved into corruption and scandal. The Gist: All of Georgia is being slammed with a major outbreak of coronavirus cases, but North Georgia is showing the highest number of cases per 100,000 residents. One of the panels on the base of the monument reads: “A tribute of love from the Ladies Memorial Association of Brunswick, Georgia to the heroes of the Confederacy, 1861-1865.” Another panel reads: “In honor of the Confederate Soldiers. Now, a local group plans to boycott the crane companies that removed them. A program of Georgia Humanities in partnership with the University of Georgia Press, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO, and the Office of the Governor. The march is to protest confederate monuments and recent police shootings. When Georgia voted to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag in 2001, it threw a bone to supporters of Confederate imagery by reaffirming the protected status of the Stone Mountain carving, which was never to be “altered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion.” This is exactly the permanence that the UDC leader Caroline Helen Jemison Plane wanted for this memorial. Georgia law prohibits moving Confederate monuments. Borglum was appointed sculptor and got to work on his plans. “With his flair for the dramatic,” Hale writes, Borglum smashed his models of the monument, leaving his ax alongside the wreckage, and crossed state lines with law enforcement in pursuit. He completed only the head of Lee before getting in a fight with the head of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association at the time, Hollins Randolph. At Stone Mountain—Georgia’s most visited attraction—visitors navigate race and responsibility in the shadow of a massive Confederate carving. In a unanimous decision, Gwinnett County commissioners in Atlanta, Georgia voted on Tuesday to remove a confederate statue in Lawrenceville's square. Republican lawmakers in Georgia appear ready to cave and work with Democrats on the removal of yet another Confederate statue. Looking at the history of this piece of public art, which is rich with twists and turns, it becomes clear that the carving is a monument to many kinds of 20th-century white supremacy—the overt racist violence of the second Ku Klux Klan; the decades-long tolerance of the Southern Jim Crow regime by Northerners, who wanted badly to look the other way in the name of “unity”; and later, the consumption-oriented “Lost Cause” nostalgia that reframed all of Southern history as a playground for pleasure seekers. View NGE content as it applies to the Georgia Standards of Excellence. What does Georgia law say about moving Confederate monuments? Georgia state law states that “No publicly owned monument honoring Confederate soldiers shall be relocated, removed or altered in any fashion,” according to Fox 5 Atlanta. In intellectual culture (histories, historical fiction), white Southern interpretations of Southern history dominated. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary, and criticism you won’t find anywhere else. Join Slate Plus to continue reading, and you’ll get unlimited access to all our work—and support Slate’s independent journalism. For more of Slate’s news coverage, subscribe to What Next on Apple Podcasts or listen below. Workers secured a Confederate monument with straps after removing it from its base Thursday in Decatur, Ga. In Georgia, there are believed to be at least 140 Confederate monuments, with most of them erected between the 1890s and 1920s. The Venable family, which owned the mountain, gave the United Daughters of the Confederacy a time-limited deed to its north face in 1916. Copyright 2004-2021 by Georgia Humanities and the University of Georgia Press. Crews began removing the monument that stood in McDonough Square Tuesday night and finished it off early Wednesday morning, WSB-TV reported. The period from 1895 to 1960 in Georgia was characterized by a widening support for and interest in the state's art and artists. LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — Gwinnett County's board of commissioners will vote today on whether to remove a Confederate monument in Lawrenceville's city square. The Legislature mandated that Stone Mountain should be administered as a Confederate memorial and created a new Stone Mountain Memorial Association to handle the project. Atlanta, Georgia 1,347 contributions 414 helpful votes A nice monument You can't miss this massive 76 ft monument with a granite base topped by a shaft of Carrara marble. By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. They've faded following multiple attempts to remove the months-old graffiti. On its highest pinnacle the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Organized at Midnight, Nov. 25, 1915.” The movie Birth of a Nation, which had premiered in Los Angeles earlier that year, opened in Atlanta to great acclaim on Dec. 6, 1915—two weeks after the cross burned. Safe in North Carolina, Borglum looked on as the UDC, Venable, and the SMCMA fought among themselves about financial mismanagement of the money donated for the project (including the money raised by the purchase of those commemorative coins), flinging accusations of embezzlement back and forth. Reporting his book Confederates in the Attic in the 1990s, journalist Tony Horwitz attended the laser show at Stone Mountain, which is projected right on top of the three Confederate generals. And you'll never see this message again. A change to the law aside, those who don’t want Confederate memory to dominate Stone Mountain any longer might have to get creative to undermine that permanence. Georgia lawmakers adopted a measure last year to make it harder to move Confederate markers. Confederate memorials honor those who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War (1861-65), and are located across the state, in both large cities and small communities. The two bickered over payment and timing, but it seems that the power struggle had other roots—Hale writes that Borglum, Sam Venable (the Klan member and owner of the land), and Randolph had all aligned themselves with different Klan leaders on the national level. July 29, 2020, 9:41 AM • 2 min read. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Georgia has exorcised some of its Confederate ghosts in recent years, although many still haunt the state's public spaces, ... “I think [Confederate monuments] … “The message,” Horwitz wrote, “seemed to be that there was no message.”. You can cancel anytime. ... Atlanta, Georgia 1,347 contributions 414 helpful votes. All rights reserved. Black Lives Matter protesters gather in front of the Confederate carving in Stone Mountain Park on June 16, 2020 in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Despite a law signed by Georgia’s Republican Gov. The idea was to completely transform the monadnock—to appropriate some of its ancientness, to secure a permanent place in honored memory for a nation that had lasted for fewer than five years. "The state legislative effort to remove the figure of Alexander Stephens from the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol and replace it with a likeness of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis will begin in earnest on Wednesday with a bipartisan … Caroline Helen Jemison Plane, leader of the Atlanta chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, put forth the idea for the memorial carving in 1912. Black leaders in Arizona are pushing Republican Gov. Lee “broke his sword across his leg,” and the two halves turned into a map of the North and then South, then merged into one nation, as images of random Americana—the Statue of Liberty; JFK’s grave; even, amazingly, Martin Luther King Jr.—danced across the monolith. The bill is co-sponsored by fellow Democrat state representatives Mary Margaret Oliver, Shelly Hutcheson, Teri Anulewicz, Sandra Scott, and Derrick Jackson. In 2001, when Georgia scrapped its segregation-era flag (complete with the stars and bars), part of the state code was changed to make it unlawful to remove Confederate monuments. Confederate memorials in Georgia include depictions of Georgia's military leaders and battles in the stained-glass windows at Rhodes Hall in, Markers consist primarily of signs or plaques that provide information about war-related individuals or events. The 30-foot obelisk in Decatur Square, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1908, was ordered by a judge to be removed and placed into storage indefinitely. Plane told the Philadelphia Public Ledger that her idea was for the UDC to “cease the erection of small and perishable local monuments” (prescient!) Marvin Griffin was in office when the state decided to purchase Stone Mountain and the land around it for a park, to the tune of $1.1 million. City officials want the Confederate monument on Broad Street in Athens moved to storage despite a state law that says it is illegal to move such memorials. A.D. 1300-1850), Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Confederate monument went up in 1878 with the help of The Ladies Memorial Association of Augusta, a group of women grieving the death of … and instead “concentrate on one which shall be a shrine to the South, and which all Americans may be justly proud.” Gutzon Borglum, the Western sculptor who was later to carve Mount Rushmore, was hired in 1915 as a consultant to the project. Last weekend, as protesters again demanded the carving’s removal, AP reporters Kate Brumback and Russ Bynum interviewed an Atlanta urban designer, Ryan Gravel, who suggested withdrawing the maintenance budget from the carving, allowing plants to creep through the sculpture, year after year, eventually obscuring and pulling it apart. Confederate memorials honor those who fought for the Confederacy during the, Most memorials are monuments or markers, but others take different forms. All rights reserved. Robert E. 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