More ‘Black Lives Matter’ Signs than Confederate Flags in the New Stone Mountain, GA

I had the wrong impression of Stone Mountain. The town, a half-hour from Atlanta, abuts the nation’s largest Confederate monument: the titular Stone Mountain, etched with the likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.

The carving is the central attraction of Stone Mountain Park, a fenced-in recreation area and amusement park that boasts streets named “Robert E. Lee Boulevard” and “Stonewall Jackson Drive.” Not infrequently, white supremacists make calls to gather at the mountain, which was the birthplace of the modern KKK.

Last weekend, Confederate-flag-wielding groups descended on the town in response to armed Black protesters marching into the park on July 4.

But Stone Mountain, I’ve found, is not what I imagined. In the few weeks I’ve spent wandering around the town, the park and the surrounding area, I’ve met Black people, Brown people, White people, Muslims, Christians, Mormons and a White lesbian couple with an adopted Black son. Near a Walmart, I saw a store selling burqas next to a Caribbean bakery. In a neighboring town, one restaurant sign offered “Italian Indian Mexican Jamaican American Thai Cuisine.”

I went to Stone Mountain out of curiosity, after seeing video of the July 4 protesters. I’m new to the South; I moved to Atlanta a year ago from San Francisco, and I’ve lived most of my adulthood in major coastal cities. Despite spending a few years of elementary school in an Atlanta suburb, I had preconceptions of the South as a regressive place. It didn’t help that when I was looking to establish health care, a White doctor said — unprompted — that I was right to leave California on account of all the “illegals.” When my Latina girlfriend, who has never lived in the South, tells her friends that she’s moved to Georgia, they all have the same question: Why?

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“The story of change in [Stone Mountain] is common to suburbs all around the South,” says Grace Elizabeth Hale, a history professor at the University of Virginia. Job opportunities and a low cost of living attracted a variety of people looking to become upwardly mobile.

It’s largely the reason I left California for Georgia. Even some rural areas have attracted newcomers, says Hale.

“There has been a way, historically, in which white Southerners have used ‘Southern’ to mean a particular vision of segregation, of the ‘Lost Cause,’ and of what they call the Southern way of life,” says Hale. But Stone Mountain suggests that definition is changing, too.