The leftist crusade against Confederate monuments continues as they set their sites on Stone Mountain in Georgia.
Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor in the state as a Democrat, issued the following Twitter thread calling for the removal of Stone Mountain: (H/T: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Located outside of Atlanta, Stone Mountain is the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1915, and the memorial — which features Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson — was designed to be “a symbol of the white South” and momentum for the monument gained steam during the civil rights movement as “a reminder of white supremacy,” per Georgia Encyclopedia. In fact, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jay Bookman:
The man who donated his land to the project was head of the national KKK. The original sculptor was a KKK member. The head of the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, the woman who helped envision the project, wanted it to serve as an explicit monument to the Klan.
Clearly, there is a lot of evil, ugly racism associated with the Stone Mountain monument.
And yet, Bookman argues that it should not be taken down.
“It is easier and simpler and more emotionally gratifying to say it should just be removed, but removal would itself be a form of whitewashing of our history every bit as deceptive as the carving itself,” wrote Bookman. “While the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP is right to condemn the carving itself as ‘a glorification of white supremacy,’ that glorification happened.”
In other words, the monument serves as an ugly reminder of the evil racism that took place in the state and in the country and as a teaching opportunity to ensure that the state and the country doesn’t fall back into that evil time period.