NY Mag: Georgia Struggles With Its Giant Neo-Confederate Embarrassment

Ed Kilgore has a new article which is a reminder of why Brian Kemp is governor of Georgia.

New York Magazine:

“All around the country, memorials to the racist Lost Cause of the Confederacy are coming down or, in the case of military facilities named after Confederate leaders, being redesignated. Many monuments, typically erected during the Jim Crow era to symbolize resistance to racial equality, occupy key public locations in southern cities.

But there’s nothing quite like Georgia’s Stone Mountain, a giant outcropping of granite in the suburbs of Atlanta that bears a three-acre carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson on horseback. The question of what to do with this very deliberately constructed tribute to those who tried to overthrow the U.S. government in defense of slavery is unavoidable. …

The board is not expected to endorse the simple idea embraced by many civil-rights activists, including 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams: to sandblast the carving right off the mountainside. Governor Brian Kemp, who narrowly defeated Abrams in 2018 and will likely face a rematch with her next year, has opposed such measures. In a tweet two years ago, Kemp said, “I will protect Stone Mountain and historical monuments in Georgia from the radical left. We should learn from the past – not attempt to re-write it.”  …

As it happens, I spent a good chunk of my life near Stone Mountain, or passing it on the way to Athens, and always regarded the carving as an ugly monument not to the Confederacy but to the determination of white conservative Georgians to ensure its hateful legacy lived on and on. Perhaps the state should take a page from the demolition of the Berlin Wall and give Georgians the opportunity to wield a sledgehammer or a laser and do some damage to the carving as a sort of spiritual reparation. Anything would be better than pretending this mammoth exhibit represented an innocent effort to honor the dead.”

If the choice is Brian Kemp who signed the election integrity law or Stacey Abrams who drove the MLB All-Star Game out of Atlanta and who said on Meet the Press that Republicans are her domestic enemies and progressive activists who want to wield a “sledgehammer” against Stone Mountain