Back on April 17, 2012, these words were published at SBPDL:
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Georgia's Racist Past Demolished at Stone Mountain ParkJuly 14, 2016
Byline: Racially ambiguous graduate of an Ivy League college/university
It will be completed soon. Freedom will ring from sea-to-shining-sea finally, just as Martin Luther King prophesied in his angelic "I Have a Dream" speech from 1963. Stone Mountain Park's divisive Confederate Memorial carving of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson will be demolished today.
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie Land...
One of the last vestiges of public, prominent racism left in America (after the White House in Washington D.C. was renamed "The People's House"), Stone Mountain Park - located in predominately Black Stone Mountain, Georgia - will see a new mural erected in place of the three most prominent leaders of the white supremacist Confederate States of America.
The new mural, selected by the presidents of America's leading Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will depict Martin Luther King giving his fabled address in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial.
"This is a powerful day in our nation's history, with true racial reconciliation coming to a state whose history is replete with the stain of white bigotry," said President Barack Obama.
"It is only by removing every white stain of bigotry that we can move forward with creating a more powerful union," he said.
The Army Corps of Engineers will supervise the demolition. Pieces of the memorial will be distributed across the nation as part of the Department of Education's Teaching Tolerance program.
It was only a joke, though I knew one day the United States of America would do to the engraving of Lee, Davis, and Jackson on Stone Mountain what the Taliban did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March of 2001.
And here it comes. [NAACP wants removal of Confederate generals from Stone Mountain, WSB-TV, July 13, 2015]:
The Atlanta chapter of the NAACP officially called for the elimination of all symbols of the Confederacy from Stone Mountain. This comes on the heels of the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House. NAACP's Richard Rose says the time to move is now, but admits it may be a steep slope to climb. Channel 2’s Berndt Petersen talked with Yolanda Shackelford, who was chaperoning a group of children from Cobb County on a trip to Stone Mountain. "When I'm out here, and I have to be honest, when I'm out here enjoying Stone Mountain, I'm thinking about what it has to offer for what I'm coming for," Shackelford said. But the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP has a much more serious point of view. The organization issued a statement calling for the removal of all symbols of the Confederacy from t
he park. "My tax dollars should not be used to commemorate slavery,"
Rose said. Rose said his group wants Confederate symbols removed from all state-owned buildings, parks and lands. Rose told Petersen he would start with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee
and Stonewall Jackson. "Those guys need to go. They can be sand-blasted off, or somebody could carefully remove a slab of that and auction it off to the highest bidder," R
ose said. Shackelford said she is all for a discussion as long as it's not based on emotion. "We have to look at history. We have to look at how it's affecting all people. That's my view. We are an organization of many faces. So, we always want to consider our total community,"
Shackelford said. A spokesman for Stone Mountain Park said any removal of the
Confederate flags or monuments is up to the Georgia Legislature.
I'll never forget when I found out Brittany Watts was murdered in Atlanta in 2011; more than that, I'll never forget where I was when I found she had been murdered by a black male whose primary motivation was shooting white people because of the 'white privilege' he had been taught in college. [Midtown murder suspect confesses, CBS Atlanta, January 30, 2013]:
All of Thandiwe's victims are white. He said during his last few years in college, his history studies changed his thoughts about how some white people treated black people.
"In terms of slavery and race, it was something that needed to be answered for. I saw it as something that the black community hasn't recovered from so my initial way to handle that was to spread information to help combat some of the ignorance that was in the black community about our history," said Thandiwe.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you were trying to spread the message of making white people the enemy," asked Assistant District Attorney Linda Dunikoski."Yes," replied Thandiwe.
Thandiwe told jurors the night before the killed Watts some white people attended a meeting he felt was only for black people. He said part of that anger was with him the day of the shootings.
White people were the enemy to Nkosi Thandiwe, so he opened on three white women (killing one and paralyzing another); now, the history of white people is an open target for a people whose every intent is to ultimately finish off what Thandiwe started.
It's funny: a civilization whites created long ago in Selma, Alabama was completely destroyed by the black population after it was unleashed via freedom and a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Jesse Jackson himself said the only way to stop majority black cities from collapsing once white people left was to make white flight illegal. [Selma, 50 years after march, remains a city divided, Los Angeles Time, 3-6-15]:
"Some people have a need to not be satisfied," said Jamie Wallace, who in 1965 was an editor at the Selma Times-Journal. He stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with civil right marchers when they were attacked on Bloody Sunday. He and other newspaper staffers resisted enormous pressure from advertisers, subscribers and the Selma elite to ignore the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the marchers.
This weekend, he will be presented a Living Legend Award by Selma's mayor, a black man. Things were bad in 1965, Wallace said. They are still bad.
"But I dispute anyone who claims we didn't change anything," he said. "We went from an all-white power structure to all black. That means something."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson sat nearby on a wicker sofa, watching Sanders and her volunteers work. "People coming to Selma in a celebration mood should be in a protest mood," he said. Sanders agreed.
"Sixty percent of Selma's children live in poverty," she told him. Jackson nodded.
"People assume there is a correlation between political power and economic power," he said. But a black power structure — mayor, city council, police force — is not enough.
"You change the political power, and the white business owners just move outside the city. So you have power over a doughnut hole. We need help to climb out of the doughnut hole," he said.
He went on to describe a plan in which the government would intervene to stop people from relocating their businesses. "It's the only way," Jackson said.
They want to destroy your history and then make you a slave to ensure they don't become history.