They certainly ought to mention it.
If they had carved the stalagmites so that they resembled pointy-hooded Klan members, though, it might be a different matter.
Otherwise, there’s really no point in comparing the Caverns to Stone Mountain, with its carvings as the focal point.
I still think the Outkast addition is the best possible solution.
Although now that I see kudzu mentioned, that’s kind of appealing too. Don’t blast the whole thing, but let the kudzu do its work to show how history continues to grow past these relics.
Well, if we’re going to do that, we might as well supersize a replica of the one in D.C.. Now *that’s *glowering.
I’ve been to quite a few plantation tours, and I have yet to visit one that attempts to portray the slave owners as being some type of heroes.
Which is exactly why Stone Mountain exists, to portray men who led the efforts to fight a war to preserve slavery as being heroes. That’s one reason why the monument is very different than plantations.
Who lived 150 years ago that deserves a present-day memorial?
And what was that person’s position on LGBT rights?
Marie Curie? Though probably not at Stone Mountain.
It doesn’t have to be a movement to erase history, just a movement to erase one artifact of history. There is a slippery slope argument to be made, there are people who want to cleanse history of all unpleasant events, but certainly there is also justification in this case to be argued as well.
Heh. My father helped detoxify/deNazify that monument. From the article:
My father was a mortarman with the US 69th division. One of his more vivid accounts of the war was trying to drop mortar shells into the doorway of the monument (the monument itself was impervious to 81mm mortar fire).
Too late, now that the Klansmen left.
Yeah, my issue with sandblasting it would be that this is a really huge bas relief that took decades to finish. I don’t like the idea of destroying something that everyone must concede is art, for the simple fact that it’s politically objectionable. I wouldn’t want Hitler’s personal paintings destroyed either, for example.
My feelings on issues like this are fairly closely linked to the artistic historical value of what’s being discussed and the feasibility of things other than destroying it. For example a lot of objectionable monuments, the artwork itself can be simply relocated. Some of them aren’t necessarily very artistically valuable, either. For example a statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson on horseback isn’t something we have a shortage of, and also can be moved anyway. But a giant bas relief on a mountainside cannot be easily moved, and to be frank there aren’t a lot of large bas reliefs like this in the world. In fact I think it’s the largest.
Not trying to “erase history” just stop racists from glorifying the bad parts.
You do that through education, not bowdlerization.
It’s not bowdlerization. It’s stopping over-glorification. Stone Mtn are the ones who are trying to change how we view history.
Stone Mountain is historical, primary-source documentation of how southern Americans of the early 20th century felt about the Civil War. That war doesn’t exist in a vacuum that stops dead at 1865.
Getting rid of the monument is bowdlerization because it contributes to a dishonest narrative about the effects that the Civil War had beyond its own time.
No, it’s how a handful of ignorant racists thought about the Civil war.
I don’t see how monuments, or the one in question anyway, is trying to do anything. Our agreed upon accounts of history are recorded for all and sundry to learn about. Those that would revise it or otherwise interpret it for their own purposes will do so regardless of whether there is a giant bas relief depicting three major figures from an important era in American history. Not trying to pick on you, DrD but I think you’re giving it too much power. Everybody knows the Civil War happened, what it was about(though opinions do differ) and what the outcome was; that last point serving as quite the neutralizer for any negative feelings the depiction stirs up. Plus, we use it as a backdrop for a laser show for Pete’s sake. That’s not exactly showing reverence for “those great heroes” 
What it was about? Hell, there are textbooks in Southern states that still print the Big Lie it was about States Rights. Other Big Lies- that the Emancipation Proclamation didnt free any slaves. That there were volunteer black slave units fighting for the CSA. That most slaves were happy and better off.
Among other things, “The Truths of History” asserts that Abraham Lincoln was a mediocre intellect, that the South’s interest in expanding slavery to Western states was its benevolent desire to acquire territory for the slaves it planned to free, and that the Ku Klux Klan was a peaceful group whose only goal was maintaining public order. One of Rutherford’s “authorities” on slavery was British writer William Makepeace Thackeray, who visited Richmond on a tour of the Southern states during the 1850s and sent home a buoyant description of the slaves who attended him: “So free, so happy! I saw them dressed on Sunday in their Sunday best—far better dressed than English tenants of the working class are in their holiday attire.”
So Stone Mtn perpetuates these lies. It needs to come down. It’s NOT “history” it’s lies.
A hundred years from now, somebody may dig up one of those textbooks, and it would be right to say “we need to keep these books because they are an accurate account of the mistaken way some early 21st children were educated in southern states.”
It would not be right to say, “we need to burn these books because they are full of lies.”
Likewise, it is not right to destroy a hundred-year-old monument because it’s an inaccurate portrayal of the Civil War. It is still an accurate depiction of its own time, and as such it has its own historical value.
The difference, of course, is that those textbooks really do represent a fringe element whereas the Stone Mountain monument represents the prevailing attitudes of its day.
If your viewpoint is that no piece of art should be allowed to remain unless it presents an accurate and unbiased view of history, I suggest you lay in an awful lot of pens and envelopes. You have a hell of a lot of angry letters to write.
Unless this is a whoosh, you’ve got it all wrong. we demonstrably DON’T have an “agreed upon history”. People use monuments and markers to influence how we see the past. Why do you think there was a movement to try to put Reagan’s head on Mount Rushmore?
Have a look at James Loewen’s Lies Across America. Even if you disagree with him, there’s plenty of evidence in there about how people fight over monuments and how they want to change them, usually in line with their own agendas:
So are you saying that no account of the past is accurate? That nothing that is taught in school is fact based? I admitted that not everyone agrees on all aspects of our history but as it stands the widely accepted story is that the Union won, slavery was abolished, and mssrs Jackson, Lee and Davis are not regarded as heroes by* the majority*. It seems that those things that we haveagreed upon are recorded and widely available and I suspect people aren’t getting most of their education from a tourist attraction.
