# Stone Mountain **Stone Mountain** is the largest Confederate monument in the world — a bas-relief of [[Jefferson Davis]], [[Robert E. Lee]] and [[Stonewall Jackson]] on horseback, three acres of carving on the north face of a granite dome sixteen miles east of Atlanta — and the one that has not come down. The [[Second Ku Klux Klan]] was refounded on its summit on Thanksgiving night 1915; the [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]] commissioned the carving from Gutzon Borglum in 1916 and work began in 1923; Borglum quit and Mount Rushmore got him; the state of Georgia bought the mountain in 1958, the year after *Brown* began to bite, and finished the carving in 1972. It is now a state park run by the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which Georgia law (O.C.G.A. § 12-3-192) requires to maintain "an appropriate and suitable memorial for the Confederacy." ## The fight over it After 2015 and again after 2020 the Association did what the statute allows: relocated the Confederate flags from the walk-up trail, dropped the Confederate street names, and built an $11 million "Truth Telling" exhibition, opened in 2025, that puts the Klan's 1915 ceremony and the 1950s massive-resistance politics of the park's creation beside the carving. The Stone Mountain Action Coalition wants the memorial language repealed and the park re-chartered around the mountain's natural history; the Georgia legislature, which in 2019 strengthened the state's monument-protection law, has not moved. The carving is protected by statute in a way no other Confederate monument is, which is why the argument in Georgia is about the law rather than the stone. ## Why it matters here Stone Mountain is the [[Contested Symbols Hub]]'s anchor case because its chronology is the [[The Lost Cause]] in miniature: conceived in the Klan's second founding, financed by the UDC's memory work, *completed* by a segregationist state as an answer to the civil-rights movement, and defended now as heritage by people who do not know the 1958 date. The response the state has chosen — contextualize, do not remove — is the model the right offers for every monument fight, and the one the [[Confederate Monuments]] page tests against the record. See [[Confederate Battle Flag]] for the same argument over cloth. ## See Also - [[Contested Symbols Hub]] · [[Confederate Monuments]] · [[Confederate Battle Flag]] · [[The Lost Cause]] - [[Second Ku Klux Klan]] · [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]] · [[Jefferson Davis]] · [[Robert E. Lee]] · [[Stonewall Jackson]]