A large group of civil rights activists rallied and yelled at Georgia’s Stone Mountain on Saturday, carrying posters denouncing “racist traitors” as they protested the restoration of an annual Confederate festival, Reuters reports.
The demonstration occurred at the foot of a colossal monument commemorating the heroes of the South’s pro-slavery past, where 200 supporters of the state chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) came for a commemoration honoring their forefathers’ efforts.
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the possibility of violence during the gathering, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which manages a portion of the large park approximately 20 miles northeast of Atlanta, canceled the events in 2020 and 2021.
The celebrations and protests were held in a calm manner, with the opposing sides divided by fencing and merely shouting at each other. A large security presence had been set up, with scores of state and municipal police officers, including SWAT teams with armored trucks and a police helicopter flying overhead.
Civil rights activists in addition to the Atlanta NAACP sought to put a stop to the celebration, which they saw as a tribute to the South’s racist history.
The gathering took place at the base of a 90-foot-tall bas-relief monument of three Confederate officers on horseback carved into Stone Mountain’s granite face.
The controversial Stone Mountain has long been a symbol of white supremacy. With blazing crosses, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a hate organization founded by Confederate Army troops with a history of lynch mobs and violence against Black people, staged their rebirth ceremony high in the mountains in 1915.
The Director of the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Timothy Pilgrim, spoke over demonstrators’ booing and expletive shouts to “shut up.”
The portraits of General Robert E. Lee, Confederate Head Jefferson Davis, and General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson should be removed off the mountainside, according to Richard Rose, president of the NAACP’s Atlanta branch.
He stated that the memorial ceremony is glorifying the pro-slavery ideology.
“We have to be there and stand against this,” Rose said, as quoted by Reuters. “Silence gives consent and they glorify a past of chattel slavery and its horrendous violence against humanity.”
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