STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) – The huge raised-relief images show a Confederate trinity sitting astride their horses, high above the ground. Hats held across their chests, President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson ride across the face of Stone Mountain into faded glory.
Part theme park and part shrine to Dixie’s Lost Cause, this granite outcrop east of Atlanta – sculpted like a Mt. Rushmore of the Confederacy – is once again an ideological battlefield as a new fight rages over rebel symbolism across the South.
In the aftermath of the Aug. 12 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a Democratic candidate for Georgia governor said the carving should be removed. But removal would probably mean destroying a work of public art that took decades to complete and is the centerpiece of one of Georgia’s biggest tourist destinations.
The images carved into the mountain, “like Confederate monuments across this state, stand as constant reminders of racism, intolerance and division,” Stacey Abrams wrote in an email to supporters following the violence in Charlottesville. Abrams is vying to become the nation’s first black female governor.
Gazing up at the carving Thursday with out-of-town guests, Leila Finn and Sandra Neuse, white women from nearby Avondale Estates, said they visit Stone Mountain for the hiking trails and other park amenities. They see the carving as a curiosity.