Stone Mountain Park in Georgia is home to the largest high relief sculpture in the world. The profiles of Jefferson Davis, Robert. E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson impose from 400 feet above the ground, covering a space larger than a football field.
In the near future, a second memorial will be added to the mountaintop: a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. An elevated tower, which will feature a Liberty Bell replica, will grace the top of the mountain, in reference to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in which he said, “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.”
The addition of this tribute to a site of Confederate — and white supremacist — heritage has been controversial. Both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Sons of Confederate Veterans have spoken out against the memorial, but for markedly different reasons.
Developments at Stone Mountain raise questions of how physical space should be altered when its history is problematic. However, erasure or removal of historical monuments or spaces which evoke painful and dark moments in history is problematic. Such spaces should be reimagined, but not removed. The addition of this new memorial signifies such a reimagining of this space. While there are moments in history we might like to forget, doing so risks the possibility that these moments may be repeated.
The history of the Stone Mountain Confederate memorial disproves the misconception held by some that with the end of the Civil War came the end of Confederate ideology, or “Southern nationalism.” The plans for the monument were first drawn up by Gutzon Borglum in 1915, 50 years after the end of the Civil War. One hundred years down the line, we need to remember the lessons of the Confederate South. Slavery and the Civil War were part of a dark period in American history, and ought not be minimized (in discourse nor in our physical spaces). In fact, the effects of this time should not be delimited.
Berlin — a city whose recent history is defined by fragmentation both physical and ideological — has been the site of such erasure. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989, more than 180 buildings in the inner city have been demolished. These buildings, representative of communist East Germany, symbolize a time in German history which many would like to forget. According to NPR, “the unified government has worked to erase all signs of the division.” Additionally, the divisions within German society, particularly in Berlin, retain relevance today, particularly in terms of cultural differences between those who grew up in or lived in East versus West Berlin.
While the Confederate South and divided Berlin might seem like disparate examples with which to forge a comparison, they both represent periods in history when ideology which is starkly in contrast with the prevailing ideology today was the ruling force in society. In both cases, unification occurred by force. The erasure and removal of all symbols of the time before unification supports the misconception that the political triumph of one side erases ideological divides.
There is a distinction to be made between physical spaces and monuments and — for example — flags or road names. While flying the Confederate flag evokes current values, the Stone Mountain memorial is grandiose and immovable without a sustained and expensive effort.
Juxtaposing a champion of the Civil Rights Movement — such as King — with the Confederate leaders creates a physical space that marks the ebb and flow of time in a way that erasure cannot. History is layered, and so our commemorative physical spaces should be layered as well. To destroy the original Stone Mountain Memorial would be to purport that the legacies of Davis, Lee and Jackson hold no significance today. But the addition of the King memorial signifies brings the advances of the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent area to the forefront.
Mary Russo is a Senior Associate Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at m.russo@cavalierdaily.com.
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