Stone Mountain's Troubled Past

One of the things that interests me a great deal wherever I go is the effect that history has on how we live today. For those of you who are saying, 'yeah - but you're more interested in barbecue, right?', I answer - 'only around lunch time'. In fact, I would argue that barbecue falls firmly into the axiom that 'past is present'. Right now though, it's Stone Mountain that still has me thinking about our shared history and how we deal with it. To deal with it, though, we must know about it.

I mentioned in a previous post that Stone Mountain was the place in 1915 where the Ku Klux Klan was revived. The Klan was originally founded in 1865, by disgruntled Confederate veterans from Tennessee.Some of you might even remember the name of the first Grand Wizard - former Confederate general Nathan B. Forrest, the supposed namesake of Forrest Gump. They formed to use force and intimidation to restore white supremacy after the Civil War and their targets were mostly freedmen and white, progressive Republicans. After Reconstruction was weakened and eventually surpassed by 1877, organizations like the Klan and the White League and the Red Shirts (all white supremacy groups) became less important.

By 1915 though, the second iteration of the Klan came to the forefront, led by William C. Simmons, a so-called doctor and Methodist minister who had the habit of joining or creating fraternal organizations. While recuperating from a car crash, he became obsessed with the rebuilding of the Klan, which he'd seen depicted in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. The opportunity came with the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager that was convicted (now universally considered unfairly) for the rape and murder of a 13 year-old worker named Mary Phagan. After his death sentence was commuted to life in prison, the self-named 'Knights of Mary Phagan' kidnapped Frank and drove him to Marietta to hang him. The plotters planned extensively and even made sure that they used the route the most closely resembled Union General William T. Sherman's March To The Sea. Tom Watson, publisher and main provoker had this to say:

"Hereafter, let no man reproach the South with lynch law: let him remember the unendurable provocation; and let him say whether lynch law is not better than no law at all.... "[W]hen mobs are no longer possible liberty will be dead."

Two months after the lynching, the 'Knights' burned a cross on top of Stone Mountan and did so again on Thanksgiving night, 1915, under the leadership of Simmons and with a couple of old, original Klan members, when they rechristened the KKK. This group spread its hate wider, encompassing anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, nativism, as well as anti-black and freedmen. The oath was administered by Nathan Bedford Forrest II, the grandson of the original Imperial Grand Wizard, Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, and was witnessed by the owner of Stone Mountain, Samuel Venable. Fundraising for the monument resumed in 1923, and in October of that year, Venable granted the Klan the perpetual right to hold celebrations as they desired.

On a related note, Leo Frank was B'nai B'rith president for Atlanta, Georgia and the antisemitism surrounding his case, trial and lynching was the catalyst forming the impetus and inspiration for creating the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in 1913, an organization dedicated to stopping the defamation of Jewish people, bigotry, racism and discrimination.

This is probably not the last I have to say in this blog about Stone Mountain.