Steve Gorman
Reuters
A predominantly Black group of heavily
armed protesters marched through Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta on
Saturday, calling for removal of the giant Confederate rock carving at
the site that civil rights activists consider a monument to racism.
Video
footage of the Independence Day rally posted on social media showed
scores of demonstrators dressed in black – many in paramilitary-style
clothing and all wearing face scarves – quietly parading several abreast
down a sidewalk at the park.
Many
of the protesters carried rifles, including military-type weapons, and
some wore ammunition belts slung over their shoulders. Although
African-Americans appeared to account for the vast majority of the
marchers, protesters of various races, men and women alike, were among
the group.
One video clip showed a
leader of the demonstrators, who was not identified, shouting into a
loudspeaker in a challenge to white supremacists who historically have
used Stone Mountain as a rallying spot of their own.
“I don’t see no white militia,” he declared. “We’re here. Where … you at? We’re in your house. Let’s go.”
John Bankhead, a spokesman for the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, said the protesters were peaceful and orderly.
“It’s
a public park, a state park. We have these protests on both sides of
the issue from time to time. We respect people’s First Amendment right,”
Mr. Bankhead told NBC affiliate station WXIA-TV.
“We
understand the sensitivities of the issue here at the park … so we
respect that and allow them to come in as long as it’s peaceful, which
it has been.”
Stone Mountain, which
reopened for the holiday weekend after a weeks-long closing over the
novel coronavirus, has faced renewed calls for its removal since the May
25 death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of
Minneapolis police.
Mr. Floyd’s
killing helped revive a long-simmering conflict between groups seeking
to do away with Confederate statues and sculptures, which they see as
pro-slavery symbols, and those who believe they honour the traditions
and history of the Deep South.
Nine
stories high and spanning the length of a football field, the
bas-relief Stone Mountain sculpture carved into a granite wall
overlooking the Georgia countryside about 40 kilometres east of Atlanta
remains the largest such monument to America’s Civil War Confederacy.
It
features the likenesses of Jefferson Davis, who was president of the
11-state Confederacy, and two of his legendary generals, Robert E. Lee
and Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson.
Stone
Mountain has long held symbolism for white supremacists. The Ku Klux
Klan, a hate group that was formed by Confederate Army veterans and has a
history of lynchings and terror against Black people, held its rebirth
ceremony atop mountain in 1915 with flaming crosses. Klansmen still hold
occasional gatherings in the shadows of the edifice, albeit now met
with protesters behind police tape. Many of those cross-burnings took
place on or around July 4.
