Stone Mountain: Is It Time To Remove America's Biggest Confederate ...

A white neighbor of Brown’s living one block over (past Venable Street), George Coletti, 79, says he remembers his parents telling him about growing up in the time of the KKK. His mother had to hire a genealogist in order to prove that her Lebanese roots defined her as Caucasian, so that the KKK would allow her to attend the white school.

In the 1960s, there was more sentimentality for the civil war than there is today, Coletti said. When he was a child, the KKK’s burning crosses could be seen on Stone Mountain from neighborhoods around Atlanta – and he says that in his community it wasn’t considered to be a big deal.

“Michael Thurmond is doing a lot to help blacks understand what’s going on out here” on Stone Mountain, Coletti said. “Why are people trying to take away history?”

'Take it down, but preserve it as an artifact'

The act of the KKK burning crosses, which caused terror and threatened violence, might not have been a big deal to Coletti’s neighbours, but others would strongly disagree with that view. Nor is the carving only representative of a time past. As recently as 2015 – even before President Donald Trump invited white nationalists to the White House, and failed to condemn white nationalists in Charlottesville – a pro-Confederate flag rally at Stone Mountain drew hundreds of people.

Supporters of the Ku Klux Klan march. Photograph: Paul Harris/Getty

“It’s outlandish, it’s absurd, it’s ridiculous,” said Joseph Crespino, professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, of the monument, “given our change in voice, our change in values, our understanding of the moral limitations … or just our understanding of history.”

“The Confederacy and the cause of the Confederacy is not something that we want to celebrate today.”

The engraving would need a change in state law to remove it, and Professor Crespino would like to see that happen immediately – though he doesn’t want it destroyed. “As a historian, I’d like to see it preserved as a historical artifact, so that future generations can remember how deluded older generations were. And how different the past has been,” he says.

“It can serve as a kind of reminder about the folly of humanity and our ability to be deceived – to be so clueless as to create this kind of memorial to a cause that was clearly unjust.”

Guardian Cities is live in Atlanta for a special series of in-depth reporting. Share your experiences of the city in the comments below, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using #GuardianATL, or via email to [email protected]