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Supporters celebrate Confederate Memorial Day at Stone Mountain Park despite opposition from activists

The event, which was canceled for several years due to COVID, saw hundreds of supporters gathered to honor fallen Confederate soldiers

STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA: The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) gathered on Saturday, April 29, at Stone Mountain in observation of Confederate Memorial Day despite opposition from a few local groups like the Stone Mountain Action Coalition. The event, which was canceled for several years due to COVID but was revived in 2022, saw hundreds of supporters gathered to recognize the 258,000 Confederate soldiers who died during the American Civil War.

However, the Southern Poverty Law Center sent a letter to the Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA) stating, as per Newswire, "Despite pleas from the Stone Mountain Action Coalition and other local activists, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA) continues to authorize the presence of purveyors of hate, extremism, and revisionist history with little regard for the safety of park visitors or staff, and zero respect for the city’s majority Black community."

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'No place for an event like this'

It further read, “The SMMA continues to provide a permit and a platform to the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a group that exists to keep the Confederacy’s lies and propaganda alive. This year’s keynote speaker, John Weaver, is a prominent preacher in the neo-confederate hate movement known for supporting succession, slavery, and segregation in the South. As the SPLC has repeatedly stated, allowing SCV to celebrate the harmful ideals of the Confederacy, namely support for white supremacy and slavery, wrongly validates the rhetoric of SCV and its keynote speaker. This sends a dangerous message that Stone Mountain Park is not a safe space for all people to gather free of discrimination or harassment. We support local activists calling for the SMMA to rescind the SCV’s permit to gather on Saturday, April 29. The SMMA should reject arrogant displays of revisionist history and the Lost Cause narrative in a public park, which should be accessible and safe for all patrons." Ahead of the event, the Stone Mountain Action Coalition said there is "no place for an event like this at a public, state-owned, taxpayer-supported park," reports DailyMail.

The group said in a release, as stated by 11Alive, "Not only is the event a threat to public safety, it is highly offensive to the vast majority of regular Park visitors, most of whom come from the Atlanta area and in particular from the majority-Black neighborhoods that surround the Park. Further, the extra police and military presence required for the event will likely wind up being billed to Georgia taxpayers. While Georgia state law mandates (for now) that the Park function as a memorial to the Confederacy it does not require that Park leadership allow specific events. Canceling the planned Confederate Memorial Day ceremony is well within the power of the SMMA board and Park management and, as noted above, has been done before."

Who are the Sons of Confederate Veterans?

FOX 5 states that the group is "a neo-Confederate nonprofit organization of male descendants of Confederate soldiers that promotes the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and white supremacy." Although Stone Mountain is not linked to a Civil War battle, it has become symbolic because of the 17,000-square-foot carving of Confederate leaders on the mountain. Martin O'Toole, an official of the Georgia chapter, said the monument is not racist. "It's history, plain and simple," he explained and added, "It's three men on horses. What's racist about that?"

However, a counter-protester, Pastor Bryan Pittman, said, "As you can see, people are really tired of dealing with things that should be naturally intolerable. We do not memorialize people who damaged people, who erased cultures, who erased families", expressing his objections to memorializing Confederate soldiers.