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Georgia park wants to ‘tell the truth’ about world’s largest Confederate monument. Others want it gone.

Culture,Monuments,History,Georgia

From the Left

A record number of Confederate memorials fell last year amid a push to reject racism after the killing of George Floyd — but the biggest Confederate monument in the world still stands in Georgia, just a short drive from Atlanta. Carved into a mountain, Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Jefferson Davis tower over visitors to a state park.

Then there are the Confederate flags by the walking trail. The street names. The “Venable Lake” referencing a family once active in the Ku Klux Klan.

Change is coming: Board members of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association voted unanimously this week to move the flags elsewhere in the park, cut the rock carving from a logo and “tell the truth” about the park’s racist history. A new museum exhibit, they vowed, would present the full story of what one scholar called a “ground zero” for “Lost Cause” mythology, built long after the Civil War and propelled by those who resisted the expansion of civil rights.

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