I love being in Atlanta. Catching up with old friends, meeting new ones and most of all: roller skating. There is one of the best roller skating rinks here, Cascade. By a fluke arranged by the universe, I landed here on the night they were having a big celebration for their 23rd anniversary. I landed at the airport, checked into the hotel, changed clothes, grabbed my skates (yes - I brought them with me) and headed to the rink, where at the parking lot I was asked the quintessential Atlanta question: Ma’am, you here for Popeye’s or Cascade? Cascade, please.
There is a joy and level of exuberant creativity in Black skating culture that is life-sustaining and so very different from white skating culture. I’m not sure I have the language for it yet, but it has to do with music and as my friends André Brock and Kevin Winstead were explaining to me, it has something to do with syncopation, music as resistance, and the libidinal economy of Black life. André and Kevin agreed that we would co-author an academic article about all this, or maybe start a podcast. Who knows. There was a lot of talk over coffee and cannabis.
I’m here to give a talk and do some research. There was a good crowd for the talk. These lectures I do are all hybrid now - a combination of in person and online. I’m not sure who all was on the zoom link, but in the room no white women showed up. It’s not always the way these talks go, but it happens. I’ve got a complex set of feelings around all that. On the one hand, it kinda hurts my feelings. On the other hand, this is clearly white women telling on themselves. I’m just going to keep it moving. I didn’t do a great job on advance-planning for the research for this trip so several of the interviews I’d wanted to do didn’t pan out. The happy side of that is it means I’ll be back in Atlanta again sometime soon.
Today is my last full day here and I decided to go out to Stone Mountain, which I’d never visited.
What I knew about Stone Mountain is that in 1915, inspired by the film Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan reemerged and used the spot to “light crosses” and galvanize their movement. This is what historians refer to as the second KKK, following the original Reconstruction Era version. I also knew that Helen Plane, a white woman and member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), advocated for a memorial featuring Robert E. Lee on the side of the granite mountain. Of course, she was not alone. Almost every monument to the Confederacy that exists is the result of the efforts of the nice white ladies of the UDC who saw them as a way to advance the ideology of the Lost Cause.
Right now, we’re in a moment when there is significant push back against these monuments. As you may remember, the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 was ignited by a move to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee and the far right showed up to protest that removal. A study from 2022 found that 75% of all Americans agree that Confederate monuments should not remain as they exist now, saying they should either be contextualized in place with historical information, moved to a museum or destroyed. In other words, a huge majority of us want these gone.
I wanted to go to Stone Mountain today because I was curious about what the place looked like in person and because it’s the largest, and perhaps most intractable of all Confederate monuments.
How do you taken down a monument carved into the side of a granite mountain? What I learned today is that it’s worse and more complicated than that. You see, Stone Mountain is an entire recreational complex , that includes a Sky Ride up to the top of the mountain, a restaurant, a souvenir shop selling reproductions of the carving, and group tours for young children. On the path leading to the mountain are smaller granite monuments to each of the thirteen states who fought for the Confederacy. The streets in this 3,200-acre park have names like Jefferson Davis Drive and Robert E. Lee Drive. From this fact sheet from the Stone Mountain Action Coalition (a group working to reclaim the park from white supremacy), I learned that the park still flies Confederate flags, which have been banned by both the US government, and surprisingly, NASCAR.
In that terrible, invigorating summer of 2020, Stone Mountain became a focal point of protests and counter-protests. On July 4, 2020 nearly 200 demonstrators, mostly Black, some with weapons entered the park to challenge white supremacy groups. Later that summer, the state closed and deployed the Georgia National Guard to protect the park from a planned white supremacy rally. It is, as historian Hasan Jefferies points out, a way of normalizing white supremacy.
The people of Georgia, and all of us, deserve better than this pertinacious cenotaph to the defenders of seditious treason. As Bryan Stevenson has observed, the “North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”
We, white women, were a crucial part of that narrative war. Today, I think we must take some of the responsibility for this and join with others who are doing the work of dismantling this monument. It will not be easy but together, we - the 75% majority who want these monuments gone - can make a difference. If you want to do something, you can support the Stone Mountain Action Coalition here.