Protests are planned in Georgia in remembrance of the United States’ South’s pro-slavery heritage.
ATLANTA, Georgia (Reuters) – Hundreds of civil rights activists are going to Stone Mountain in Georgia on Saturday to protest the return of an annual Confederate festival at the foot of a huge monument to the South’s pro-slavery heroes.
The state branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) anticipates about 200 supporters for the event, which they claim respects their forefathers’ sacrifices. The Atlanta NAACP wants to get more people to show up at the event, which it sees as a tribute to the South’s racist past.
The event, which returns after a two-year hiatus, is held at the foot of a 90-foot-tall bas-relief sculpture representing three Confederate commanders on horseback that is carved into the granite face of Stone Mountain.
The Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which operates a portion of the large park approximately 20 miles northeast of Atlanta, cancelled the 2020 and 2021 gatherings because of the COVID-19 outbreak and the possibility of violence during the event.
For white nationalists, Stone Mountain has long had symbolic significance. The Ku Klux Klan, a hate group founded by Confederate Army soldiers with a history of lynchings and terror against African-Americans, conducted their rebirth ceremony atop the mountain in 1915, complete with blazing crosses.
Tensions between the two sides “began to manifest a clear and present threat” in recent years, the group said in a statement. Nonetheless, it would let the event take place this year and invite peaceful gatherings “from all directions.”
Martin O’Toole, a spokeswoman for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, warned anybody disrupting the peace would be asked to leave. “I am not afraid of violence, at least not on our side,” he said. “This is a matter of history and honour, end of story.”
O’Toole, the event’s main speaker, is also a leader in the Charles Martel Society, an Atlanta-based self-avowed white nationalist organisation.
O’Toole maintains that the gathering is not about race, but rather remembers individuals who fought on the Confederate side during the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865. The Confederacy intended to break from the Union in order to choose its own future, he said.
“The South pays tribute to its dead,” O’Toole said. “They were their era’s patriots.”
It was Richard Rose, head of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, who said that he personally wanted the images of General Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to be taken down from the mountain.
He said that it was clear to him that the memorial service was meant to honour the pro-slavery movement.
“We must be present and take a stance against this,” Rose said. “Silence confers permission, and they extol the virtues of a bygone era of chattel slavery and its heinous atrocities against mankind.“
