Lawsuit Filed Over Stone Mountain Confederate Monument Changes

US-HISTORY-MONUMENT — Source: DANIEL SLIM / Getty

I will never understand the intellectual dishonesty of white people who still celebrate the Confederacy. The whole reason the American Civil War was fought was because the Confederacy felt entitled to their slaves, yet those who still celebrate the Confederacy get all apoplectic when that fact is brought up. This is what’s currently happening in Georgia, where the Sons of Confederate Veterans have filed a lawsuit against the state over adding an exhibit that addresses the history of slavery, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan to the Stone Mountain Confederate monument.

According to AP News, the lawsuit is over the carving in Georgia’s Stone Mountain depicting Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on horseback. In 2021, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association voted to relocate Confederate flags at the monument and to build an exhibit informing how the monument contributed to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the role segregation played in its creation.

So obviously, the Sons of Confederate Veterans had an issue with the Confederate monument being honest about the Confederacy. The group believes that the removal of the flags from the Stone Mountain Confederate monument is a violation of Georgia law.

“When they come after the history and attempt to change everything to the present political structure, that’s against the law,” Martin O’Toole, the chapter’s spokesperson, told AP.

Bro, they’re not coming after the history, they’re finally being honest about it. The Confederacy waged and lost a war against their own country because they couldn’t stand the idea of Black people having the same freedoms as white folks. You can’t be mad that this glorified participation trophy is truthful about the cause it was dedicated to.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned the Stone Mountain Confederate monument in 1915. The carving was done by Gutzon Borglum, the same man who later went on to carve Mount Rushmore. The monument, along with the release of the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, were integral to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, to the point that the Klan burned a cross on top of the Confederate monument on Thanksgiving night that same year.

Birmingham-based Warner Museums, which specializes in civil rights installations, was hired by the Stone Mountain Memorial Association to build the new exhibit.

“The interpretive themes developed for Stone Mountain will explore how the collective memory created by Southerners in response to the real and imagined threats to the very foundation of Southern society, the institution of slavery, by westward expansion, a destructive war, and eventual military defeat, was fertile ground for the development of the Lost Cause movement amidst the social and economic disruptions that followed,” the exhibit proposal says.

The removal of flags is probably not the main reason the Sons of the Confederate Veterans are big mad about the exhibit. One of the planned parts of the exhibit addresses how both the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans helped perpetuate the “Lost Cause” ideology and contributed to segregation efforts throughout the South.

With that context, this whole lawsuit can’t help but feel like the legal equivalent of the “Wait. Is this f-ing play about us?” meme.

Over the last decade, Confederate monuments have become a source of great debate. Last year a poll unsurprisingly found that the majority of white people think Confederate monuments should stay up. There have been efforts across the country to preserve Confederate monuments, including a bill that was passed in Florida last year that aims to preserve the monuments in order to “protect white society.”

No matter how hard Confederacy stans try to convince everyone that their “rebel pride” is not about racism, the truth always manages to reveal itself.

Anti-DEI Alabama Celebrates President Of The Confederacy’s Birthday