People have been following the supposed effort by the administrators of Stone Mountain in Georgia to create a “Truth Telling” exhibit about the park’s connection to white supremacy. The “planning” has been going on for years. Now at least a small step is in progress. Stone Mountain Memorial Association announced that it will announce on November 14, 2022 which company had been chosen to build the “telling the truth exhibit.” The Board running the park had passed a resolution to create the exhibit more than a year-and-a-half ago. All members of the Board which administers the state site were appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp.
According to the AJC:
The massive mountainside carving of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee was first conceptualized in the 1910s, during the monument-building craze fueled by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. That group sought to immortalize a sanitized version of the Civil War South and its reasons for fighting while simultaneously promoting white supremacy.
Samuel Venable, whose family owned and operated Stone Mountain as a granite quarry at the time, provided the initial lease that allowed the Daughters to commission a carving. Around the same time — and on the same mountain — Venable helped reestablish the Ku Klux Klan. One initial suggestion for the carving involved depictions of Klansmen.
By the end of the 1920s, a world war, infighting and financial issues had doomed the initial version of the carving. But it was picked up decades later as Georgia Gov. Marvin Griffin and other white leaders sought a response to court-ordered desegregation and the brewing Civil Rights movement.
The state of Georgia purchased Stone Mountain in 1958 and work on the carving resumed. It was dedicated in 1970, more than a century after the Civil War.
The new museum exhibit would be built inside Stone Mountain Park’s existing Memorial Hall building.
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