(gentle music)
- [Steven] We're at Stone Mountain Park in Georgia
on the day that the monument carved
into the face of this enormous granite mountain appeared
on the front page of the "New York Times."
This carving is widely understood
as a potent symbol of white supremacy.
Carved onto the face of the mountain
are three figures, the general, Robert E. Lee,
the general, Thomas Stonewall Jackson,
and the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.
This sculpture can be seen as part of a broad effort
to sanitize the real causes of the Civil War.
- [Beth] What historians call the myth,
or sometimes even the religion of the "Lost Cause",
that the Civil War was fought not to protect the institution
of slavery, but rather to protect a Southern way of life.
- [Steven] That the moral imperative was so just
that the South had no choice but to go to war
against the better armed, better financed North.
- [Beth] But all of this involved a denial
of the horrors of slavery, that this was in fact
a good way of life that should be preserved.
- [Steven] And perhaps most importantly,
to perpetuate the racial segregation
that existed in the American South.
- [Beth] Historians ascribe the myth of the "Lost Cause"
largely to the women who wanted to memorialize
their husbands and their family members
who had fought in the Civil War.
And the woman who's at the center of this story
is named Helen Plane.
And she was a charter member
of the United Daughters of the Confederacy,
an organization that's promoting this idea
of the "Lost Cause" and revering the Klu Klux Klan, the KKK,
a terrorist organization that was formed in the 19th century
and then revived in the 20th century.
- [Steven] And worked to maintain the subservience
of freed enslaved people.
And this site is closely associated with the Klan.
- [Beth] So it was here at the top of this mountain
that the Klan was reborn.
There was a cross burning in 1915, just at the time
of the debut of DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"
a huge hit that perpetuated and ignited racist tropes
that black people were not intelligent,
that they were sexually aggressive.
And that valorized the Klan as heroes that could protect
white people from the dangers of black people.
- [Steven] They were seen as latter day knights,
which wove into the Southern idea of chivalry
as one of its defining features
and set it against what it saw as the more barbarous North.
- And in fact, when Helen Plane hired Borglum
to sculpt the face of this mountain, she wrote,
"Seeing this wonderful and beautiful picture
of reconstruction in the South.
I feel that it is due to the Ku Klux Klan
which saved us from Negro domination.
Why not represent a small group of them
in their knightly uniform approaching in a distance."
This land was owned by a man named Sam Venable,
who was himself, a Klan member,
and the sculptor, Borglum, would also join the Klan.
- [Beth] So let's start by taking us back
to before the settlers arrived here from Europe.
This was a place that was important to native American
communities beginning with the Mississippians.
- [Steven] Archeology uncovered significant evidence
of Native American occupation.
- [Beth] Those traces were disregarded, bulldozed over.
And so much of what we could have learned was lost.
- [Steven] The first treaty of Indian Springs
passed this land from the Muskogee to the US government.
- [Beth] By the 1850s, this site was becoming
an important tourist attraction, and it's easy to see why.
The natural environment is incredibly beautiful
and the face of the mountain awe inspiring.
So the idea begins in the early years of the 20th century,
Borglum was hired in 1915.
He begins work in 1923.
Borglum is nothing if not ambitious.
And he doesn't just plan this relief sculpture
on the side of the mountain with dozens of figures,
but he also plans to carve out of the mountain
below the relief a vast hall to honor the women
who were involved in the cause of the Civil War.
- [Steven] So this sculpture was meant to be part
of an ensemble in front of the entrance
was planned a memorial to the unknown Confederate soldier.
And in front of that, a large reflecting pool.
What's fascinating is that when you look
at the planned architecture,
it seems to reflect almost perfectly
the building of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC,
which was completed in 1922 at this very moment.
- [Beth] And inside this vast chamber,
they planned a sculpture about the same size as the figure
of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial,
but of a woman in mourning for those who were lost
in the Civil War called "Memory."
So in 1925, Borglum is fired
and another sculptor, Lukeman, is hired.
We might also note that in 1925, more than 50,000
members of the KKK paraded through Washington DC.
- [Steven] This was the height of Klan activity.
Now Lukeman did not like what Borglum had done
and blasts Borglum's sculpture
off the face of the rock and starts over.
But soon enough, the project grinds to halt,
funding is lost and the sculpture sits unfinished
for more than a quarter of a century.
- [Beth] And then interest in the sculpture
is revived in 1954 at the time of the landmark decision
that we know as Brown versus the Board of Education,
which made segregation in the public schools illegal.
- [Steven] Marvin Griffin, a man who was running
for governor, promised two things on his platform.
One that he would protect segregation in the South
against the ruling of the Supreme Court
and two, that he would finish Stone Mountain.
(triumphant music)
- [Announcer] For decades completion of the Stone Mountain
Confederate Memorial is a dream shared by all Georgians.
But every attempt to complete the memorial ends in failure,
no progress is made until Governor Griffin
gives the project new impetus.
- [Steven] And in fact, the reaction was so strong
against the federal efforts to desegregate the South
that Atlanta took the punitive step of changing
their state flag to include the Confederate battle emblem.
- [Beth] Work resumes on the sculpture in 1963.
And it's also in that same year that Dr. Martin Luther King
mentions Stone Mountain in his great,
"I have a Dream" speech.
- [Dr. King] So let freedom ring
from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire,
let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening
Alleghenies of Pennsylvania,
let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado,
let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California,
but not only that, let freedom ring
from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
- [Steven] By 1970, the sculpture itself is completed.
And there are plans that President Nixon
will come to the unveiling ceremony.
Nixon is called away and his vice-president
Spiro Agnew, comes in his stead.
But this history doesn't stop in the 20th century,
this history continues into our moment.
- [Beth] In 2001, a state provision
allows for the Confederate emblem to be removed
from the state flag,
something that had been lobbied for, for decades,
but the governor had written into the law
that this memorial must be preserved.
And the language states, "The memorial to the heroes
of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face
of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed,
concealed or obscured in any fashion."
And of course, once again,
obscuring the real cause of the war, of slavery.
- [Steven] Just yesterday, the board overseeing the monument
voted not to change the monument, but to take two actions,
one to remove Confederate flags that continue
to populate the park and two to do a better job
of contextualizing the history of the monument.
- [Beth] That the issue of permanence
was on the minds of those who created
and commissioned this sculpture.
Those involved said this, "This monument cannot fall.
It is part of the earth.
It will be one of the last parts of the earth to crumble."
- [Steven] And it's clear when you look at this sculpture
that the artist had been thinking about
the sculptures of ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
You might think about the riders on horseback
from the frieze of the Parthenon, held up for centuries
as the highest expression of nobility.
Although some of the original designs for the sculpture
were to incorporate dozens, sometimes hundreds,
by one report, nearly a thousand figures,
in the end, there were only three carved
and these men are holding their hats against their heart
because in an original design, they had just passed
the Confederate flag to which they were paying honor.
- [Beth] And the scale of the carving
reminds me of the tendency toward depicting the landscape
of the United States as grandiose, as almost bombastic,
as dwarfing human presence and help to promote an ideology
of manifest destiny that the white settlers
had a right to claim this land
from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
And it didn't matter who was here before.
- [Steven] And so here we stand on land
that once belonged to the Muskogee nation,
looking at a sculpture whose intention
was to heroize the Civil War, to perpetuate
the mythic narratives of the "Lost Cause",
to promote white supremacy, to maintain the social order
in the South that had existed before the Civil War.