Left to right: Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are carved into the side of Stone Mountain. (Image from Stone Mountain Memorial Association proposals summary)
STONE MOUNTAIN – The state board that oversees Stone Mountain Park voted Monday to tone down its Confederate imagery but stay in keeping with a state law prohibiting the removal of historic monuments from public property.
The Stone Mountain Memorial Association’s Board of Directors passed four resolutions to give the giant carving of three Confederate leaders on the side of the mountain historic context with a museum exhibit to be located at the park’s Memorial Hall.
The resolutions also call for relocating the Confederate flags that line the park’s main walk-up trail to the base of the mountain, designing a new logo for the park and seeking national historic site designation for a covered bridge at the park designed and built by a Black contractor from Athens.
“By law, Stone Mountain Park is a Confederate memorial,” Bill Stephens, the association’s CEO and a former state senator, said following Monday’s votes. “But there were things we could do to tell a complete story that’s acceptable to the 3 million Georgians who come here every year.”
The Stone Mountain carving was sculpted during the last century over a period of decades, a time that saw the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan at a 1915 gathering atop the mountain and the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court order desegregating schools.
The project was conceived during the Jim Crow era, when Confederate monuments sprang up across the South glorifying the “Lost Cause” of the Civil War as an honorable struggle for Southern independence rather than a fight to preserve slavery.
That interpretation of the war later fell into disfavor, particularly during the Civil Rights era and – more recently – during the protests against police brutality that spread across the nation last year following the murder of George Floyd, a Black man from Minneapolis, by a white police officer.
With Confederate statues toppling across the South, critics of Stone Mountain’s depictions of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson have called for the carving to be removed.
Representatives of the Stone Mountain Action Coalition and other groups showed up at Monday’s meeting with signs carrying messages including “Don’t Celebrate Treason” and “Tell the Truth: Remove the Carvings.”
Dennis Collard, a member of the Stone Mountain Action Coalition, said Stone Mountain Park is the wrong place to honor the Confederacy.
“This is not a battlefield. This is not a cemetery,” he said. “People come here for recreation. … It is time to stop pretending this place is about Civil War heritage.”
But Grady Vickery, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said Stone Mountain is an appropriate place to remember the war dead.
“This carving is a monument,” he said. “This carving is to stand for 80,000-and-some unknown soldiers who put it all on the line to go fight. … That monument Is for all of those who never came home.”
Rev. Abraham Mosley, who took the reins recently as the association’s first Black chairman, said there was no way the board could please everybody, given such polarized views on the park’s purpose.
“We want to tell the whole story, the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said. “History isn’t good and pleasant to all of us. But it’s history.”
The proposed museum exhibit provided for in one of the resolutions approved on Monday will be developed by a seven-member advisory committee, to include members of the board as well as community leaders.
The board is due to adopt a design for a new logo by July 1.
The resolution calling for the Washington W. King Bridge to be designated a national historic site sets a goal of Sept. 1.
Voters trickle in to cast ballots during the early-voting period at State Farm Arena in Atlanta on Oct. 28, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – A court ruling Friday set the stage for another review of Georgia’s election results.
Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ordered Fulton County to unseal more than 145,000 absentee ballots to be examined for possible fraud.
Friday’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by Garland Favorito, a longtime election watchdog, and several other plaintiffs.
It comes more than five months after Georgia’s Electoral College members met at the state Capitol and certified the state’s 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden and more than four months after Biden’s victory was certified by Congress in a session interrupted when supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, fought with police and vandalized offices inside.
The ruling drew praise from former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., who founded and chairs the voter registration group Greater Georgia.
“Voter confidence in our election system is the bedrock of our republic,” Loeffler said. “Unfortunately, inconsistencies in Fulton County’s November 2020 absentee ballots cast serious doubt on voters’ faith in our elections.
“The integrity of future elections is critical, and Judge Amero’s decision is a helpful step in restoring transparency, accountability, and voter confidence.”
Democrats accused Republicans of continuing to grasp at straws to overturn an election Biden clearly won.
“The votes have been counted multiple times, including a hand recount, and no evidence of fraud has been found,” Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said.
“The fact remains that Fulton County safely and securely carried out an election in the midst of a public health crisis. It’s a shame to see that the ‘Big Lie’ lives on and could cost the hardworking taxpayers of this county.”
Biden’s razor-thin margin of victory of 11,779 votes over Trump in Georgia last November touched off a flurry of about 130 complaints of alleged voter fraud.
But lawsuit after lawsuit was dismissed, including a case in Cobb County where the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found no evidence of fraud following an audit of more than 15,000 absentee ballots.
Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – all Republicans – defended the outcome of the election as legitimate.
But none of the dismissals satisfied either Trump or many other Georgia Republicans, who continue to insist the election was stolen.
The review of Fulton County absentee voters ordered by Amero mirrors an ongoing Republican-driven audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Ariz., another state Biden carried by a close margin.
The Kia plant in West Point, Ga., employs more than 2,700 workers.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s two U.S. senators are urging Senate leaders to fast-track legislation aimed at preventing shortages of semiconductors, citing next week’s temporary closure of the Kia plant in West Point for the lack of those electronic components.
Semiconductors are vital to the approximately 340,000 Kia cars manufactures in Georgia each year. But the coronavirus pandemic has strained the global supply chain, prompting a shortage of semiconductors that is forcing Kia to close the West Point plant on Monday and Tuesday.
Georgia Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock wrote a joint letter this week asking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to speed up consideration of a bill providing $52 billion to incentivize U.S. businesses to produce more semiconductors.
“American dependence on foreign suppliers of semiconductors is a strategic vulnerability for both our national and economic security, and ongoing shortages of this vital technology are directly harming workers and businesses in Georgia by disrupting operations of the Kia plant in West Point,” Ossoff and Warnock wrote.
“We must act swiftly and in a bipartisan manner to pass this legislation, which will boost American manufacturing of semiconductors and safeguard auto manufacturers like Kia Georgia against disruptions to the global supply chain.”
Kia and Hyundai Motor Co., also shut down several of their plants in South Korea this week, citing the shortage of semiconductors.
Supply chain issues forced the Kia West Point plant to shut down temporarily in March and April of last year. Company officials also cited the outbreak of COVID-19 at the time.
The $1.1 billion plant along Interstate 85 near the Alabama border employs more than 2,700 workers.
Environmental advocates say springtime harbor dredging in Georgia would harm nesting loggerhead sea turtles.
ATLANTA – Environmental advocates opposing a plan to dredge coastal Georgia shipping channels starting this month have won a court victory.
U.S. District Judge Stan Baker granted a preliminary injunction Thursday blocking the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from dredging activity in Brunswick Harbor that had been due to begin May 28.
In a lawsuit against the Corps filed on behalf of the group One Hundred Miles, the Southern Environmental Law Center argued dredging this time of year would harm endangered loggerhead sea turtles. The Corps historically has limited dredging to the winter months, when the turtles are not nesting.
In a brief filed last week, the Corps conceded that One Hundred Miles was likely to succeed in forcing the Corps to do more work to explain its reasons for wanting to change the dredging schedule.
“We are pleased that the court recognized what’s at stake here for Georgia’s protected loggerhead sea turtles,” said Catherine Ridley, coordinator for the St. Simons Island Sea Turtle Project and Vice President of Education and Communications at One Hundred Miles.
The Corps has said the plan is part of a more holistic effort to protect a larger number of endangered species in coastal waters, including the North Atlantic right whale that comes to the area for its calving season each year.
“The goal is to try to figure out how to do everything better for all the species,” Nicole Bonine, an environmental compliance sustainability and energy program manager for the Corps’ South Atlantic Division, said in March.
The Georgia coast is home to the oldest loggerhead sea turtle nesting project in the world, started in 1964 on Little Cumberland Island.
ATLANTA – An approach to teaching that emphasizes the existence of systemic racism in the United States that has caught the attention of the Biden administration is coming under attack in Georgia and other Republican-led states.
Gov. Brian Kemp sent a letter to the state Board of Education Thursday opposing the teaching of “critical race theory” in Georgia schools.
“It is ridiculous that the Biden administration is considering using taxpayer funds to push a blatantly partisan agenda in Georgia classrooms,” the governor wrote. “Parents, educators and local communities here in the Peach State know best how to educate their students – not the federal government.”
Critical race theory is also drawing fire from Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, who has joined 19 other GOP attorneys general in opposition to a proposal by the U.S. Department of Education to prioritize critical race theory in the awarding of federal grants.
“I believe in history by addition, not history by revision,” Carr said. “This newly proposed rule would impose the flawed, radical teachings of critical race theory in Georgia’s schools. It must be rejected.”
The philosophical underpinning of critical race theory stems from The 1619 Project, developed by writers for The New York Times who believe the full history of Black Americans isn’t being told in U.S. classrooms. Critical race theory holds that racism is rooted in the nation’s history and continues today.
Conservative critics say the notion that the United States was founded on white supremacy and oppression is wrong.
