July 7, 2025
The confederacy group claims that the exhibit will undermine the mountain’s preliminary goal and historical past.
A Accomplice group has sued Georgia officers over plans to debut an exhibit specializing in white supremacy, slavery, and segregation at Stone Mountain Park.
The Georgia Division of the Sons of Accomplice Veterans filed the lawsuit July 1, claiming that the state park’s affiliation broke state regulation with its plans to put in the exhibit. Prompted by the racial justice protests of 2020, the Stone Mountain Memorial Affiliation voted in 2021 to develop an exhibit that tells the historical past behind the notorious mountain. In keeping with the Related Press, in addition they eliminated the Accomplice flags as soon as situated on the park’s strolling grounds, which the Sons additionally sued about in Might.
Stone Mountain has a darkish historical past in Georgia. The state park options the biggest Accomplice monument in the USA, an enlarged engraving of Accomplice generals on its aspect. The park, a preferred mountaineering vacation spot, additionally has ties to the Ku Klux Klan’s re-emergence. The identical 12 months the carving was created in 1915, commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan held a comeback celebration on high of the mountain.
The exhibit aimed to tell guests of the mountain’s connection to this racist previous, whereas additionally exposing how the monument contributed to the “Misplaced Trigger” ideology that makes an attempt to romanticize the Confederacy and its white supremacist values. Georgia’s Common Meeting permitted an $11 million price range to curate the exhibit, which might additionally spotlight a Black group that resided within the space following the Civil Conflict, in addition to renovations to the park’s Memorial Corridor.
“The interpretive themes developed for Stone Mountain will discover how the collective reminiscence created by Southerners in response to the actual and imagined threats to the very basis of Southern society, the establishment of slavery, by westward growth, a harmful conflict, and eventual army defeat, was fertile floor for the event of the Misplaced Trigger motion amidst the social and financial disruptions that adopted,” the exhibit proposal said.
The exhibit has but to open, nonetheless, as the brand new authorized problem hopes to stop its unveiling. Within the submitting, the Sons of the Accomplice Veterans consider the exhibit will “fully repurpose” Stone Mountain and its goal in sustaining a particular a part of Georgia’s historical past.
RELATED CONTENT: ‘Sinners’ Not-So-Refined Nod To Voodoo Is Simply One Extra Method Ryan Coogler Connects The Diaspora