Stone Mountain, Georgia: The Idyllic Place of Pride and Hate

Blake Williams

11/14/05

Multicultural Georgia HIST 4110

The Ku Klux Klan is a group that is all too familiar with the state of Georgia. Historians have seen three different waves of this group of white supremacists and countless other sub sects. The history of the State of Georgia is filled with repetitions of bigotry, race supremacy, and group membership to support those ideologies. The Ku Klux Klan is an example of one of these groups who found its second rise on top of the great Stone Mountain, the ideal spot for such rebirth of great proportion. The history of bigotry in the South has been a characteristic that has seen many reformations, but has never disappeared. Following groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, offers insight into the racist mind of the white southerner.

The original founding of the Ku Klux Klan began as fraternizing social club in Pulaski Tennessee. In December 1865, this club was formed by six ex-Confederate veterans of the Civil War. The six middle-class men initially began the club as a source for practical jokes and hazing rituals, but as membership and popularity grew, the tactics of the Klan in the following years strayed. White Klansmen began breaking up black prayer meetings, and confiscating firearms from African Americans during night raids. This group appealed to the white middle-class Americans was so much that in 1867, the Ku Klux Klan became a nationally recognized organization under the leadership of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave trader and Brigadier General of the Confederate Army.[1]

The objects and purposes of the original Ku Klux Klan were set forth at the Nashville Convention, were the Klan was originally formed in 1867. Their three main purposes were:

1. “To protect the weak, the innocent and the defenseless, from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and the oppressed, to succor the suffering and especially the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers.”

2. “To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto, and to protect the states and people from all invasion from any source whatever.”

3. “To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure and from trial, except by their peers in conformity to the laws of the land.”[2]

In addition to taking a vow of the Ku Klux Klan’s constitution, applicants for membership were also questioned about their stand on key issues of the time. Future Klansmen were asked of their political standpoint, whether or not they were members of the Loyal League(most original Klansmen were solely Democrat), their views of African American social and political powers, and “the inalienable right of self-preservation of the people against the exercise of arbitrary and unlicensed power.” The implications of these questions offer insight to the ideology of the typical Klansmen. The Ku Klux Klan wanted to maintain a dominant white society, pure and free of mulatto children, purely Democratic, and free of any reform that would stray from their intention.[3]

The original Ku Klux Klan used violence and intimidation to achieve their goals in their short run of terror. In 1868, there were 1,300 murders reported of Republican voters. Klan midnight raids had become infamous quickly, promoting terror to both blacks and any type of sympathizer for the black cause. It is impossible, however, to account every murder to the Klan because of their secrecy. Klansmen hid behind the white mask and it is possible to assume that proactive non-Klansmen used the Klan as a scapegoat to achieve their own form of terror. Regardless, the number of murders in 1868 is astounding, and national opinion helped spread the dissolution of the original Ku Klux Klan. After a series of state enforced anti-Klan movements, the Federal Government under President Ulysses S. Grant, created he Ku Klux Klan Act, which was made into law on April 20, 1871. The new legislation allowed the president to intervene in troubled states where racial disturbances had occurred. The new federally backed law as well as the swaying tide of emotion towards the KKK, dwindled the Klan down drastically for about a decade thereafter.[4]

The Ku Klux Klan found its resurgence on Thanksgiving Night in 1915. Aiding this temporarily lost, but not forgotten cause, was the film by D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation. The film debuted early in the year and included numerous quotations from President Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People. Under allegation of Klan allegiance, Wilson could not deny that he felt the movie was historically accurate. The use of the film’s popularity was a tool that helped bring terror back into the South. The fact that the Ku Klux Klan act had been deemed unconstitutional, paved the way for the second rise of once diminished organization.[5]

The formation of the second Ku Klux Klan is an indication of the reaction by whites to the changing South. The industrializing South brought many new jobs to white Americans, but at the expense of less autonomy and security in holding that job. The KKK was concerned that all walks of life would be interfered with by the African American and other people not of European descent.

The typical member of the Klan was a middle-aged, white male of the middle class, though there were many exceptions. These Klansmen was predominantly Protestant, becoming a staple in their ideals of a solid individual. The idea of membership in the KKK was appealing to middle-aged white males because their age, gender, and race shaped their class. These men felt they were at the top of the ladder, so to speak. If women worked, men had ultimate authority over their salary. These men established themselves as leaders of the household and quite frankly, they had the most to loose.

The Klan also appealed to white males of the lower class, or as Nancy MacLean states in Behind the Mask of Chivalry, the petite-bourgeois. Scared of losing a place in class position, these men would join in hopes to fulfill a higher ranking by social standards. An emphasis of the Klan was to banish the class system from the white man’s consciousness and re-divide the world along the imaginary “natural” lines of race, sex, and age. However, this could have been used as a tactic to draw in more members to the Klan and create a larger following. There were clearly class systems within the KKK itself.[6]

Among one of the members of the elite class of the KKK was Samuel Hoyt Venable. A lover of the Confederacy and all that it stood for, Venable owned the area of Stone Mountain which was envisioned to be the largest, and greatest scale carving on Earth. In 1916 Venable presented a deed to Mrs. Helen Plane for the steepest side of Stone Mountain which was to be reserved for a Confederate Memorial. The gift was worth over $1,000,000 dollars. Along with this enormous deed, Venable allowed the Ku Klux Klan to use the mountain for celebrations.[7]

The idea of the massive carving and monument was that of Mrs. Helen Plane, the honorary lifetime President of the Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association. A pamphlet of the unfinished mountain describes her idea as an, “impulse of a bygone day, as she pictured on the mountain in relief the rebel hosts marching from the Appomattox of defeat, facing the rising sun of the East in the glorious light of eternal day.” Mrs. Plane had lost her husband to the Civil War and felt obliged to commemorate the loss she and countless others had partaken. In addition to the great carving, originally a great monument hall was to be built into the face of the mountain. Both intensions were extremely expensive and seemingly impossible at the time.[8]

In 1915 the United Daughters of the Confederacy invited the renown sculptor and fellow Klansmen, Mr. Gutzon Borglum, to see the mountain and take measurements. The United Daughters of the Confederacy originally wanted Borglum to carve a single figure of Robert E. Lee into the side of the mountain, but after taking measurements, Borglum instigated that the single carving would make Lee’s head look like a “stamp on a barnyard door.” Borglum then sent the U.D.C. a plan to incorporate Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson as a central focus, with numerous other soldiers in the back drop. In all, the original number of figures to be carved was 800 to 1200. The size of General Lee was to be eight times larger than any other sculpted figure in America.[9]

Not only was the size of the project enormous, but the cost to fund the project took help from a number of different sources. The U.D.C. and the Ku Klux Klan helped initially fund the estimated $5,000,000 dollar project, but support also came from other sources. First the Founders Roll Plan required a subscription of no less than $1,000 payable in equal installments over 5 years. Second, the Children’s Founders Roll plan allowed any person between 1 and 18 to submit their names in the Book of Memory in the name of a Confederate soldier or woman of the Confederacy for $1.00. Finally, the U.S. mint issued a Memorial Half Dollar which was sold at a profit to help fund the process. The Act minted 5,000,000 coins, designed by Gutzon Borglum. The profit from the coins produced were in hopes to account for half of the expenses the work of Stone Mountain would demand.[10]

The initiation of “the world’s greatest spectacle” offers some insight to the white person’s mind frame of the time. So much effort and so many dollars were produced to create a memorial to honor the fallen heroes of the Confederacy, as well as to embrace easier times of the white man. The extensive effort to achieve this monument reflects the status and the longing for the past with the U.D.C. and the Stone Mountain Monumental Organization. The fact that Stone Mountain hosted the Ku Klux Klan for their celebrations adds to the fact that the people who conjured up the idea for this mountain, did so in honor of the white man and their struggle to keep slavery and white supremacy in tact for the good of their people. Many of the people associated with the monument, acted because they felt that the South’s reason for entering the Civil War was just. This makes a statement on their vantage of the social and economic standing of African Americans at the time.

The struggle between the races in the 1920s has been labeled as a “reactionary populism,” by Nancy MacLean. Basically, whites feeling as if they were the superior race, where intimidated by the changing status of the second generation of freedmen. White men were afraid of losing their jobs, social standing, and control of their wives and family to anyone who was not of European descent. It is easy to imagine why. The nationalistic ideals of the Southern White Man did not apply to that of anyone who was not like him. The rising of the second KKK supports this ideology.

Much like the original Klan, the second Ku Klux Klan did not only place the blame for their problems towards African Americans, they also took focus on Jews and foreigners. The Klan took an oath as a member to “correct evils in their communities, particularly vices tending to the destruction of home, family, childhood and womanhood.” The second Klan wave blamed Jews for pushing out “American” business and stifling the pure white man’s economic status. Like the first Klan, the second rise showed the same uses of terrorism and intimidation to alleviate their problems. Lynchings and cross-burnings were characteristic and became an infamous trademark of the KKK. To the Klansmen, these were ways of protecting their homes and country from the evils that they feared would bring apocalypse to their race.[11]

The second Ku Klux Klan, deeply Protestant, pushed for a moral and social cleanup in the 1920s. The rationale for these moral cleanups was a reflection of their Protestant beliefs and social status. Individualism was viewed as an immorality. This problem, Klansmen feared, would destroy families, demoralize citizens, and undermine the South. The morale problem was viewed more upon women than any other defining trait. Women’s roles were changed through industrialization and as they gained more autonomy from their families, Klansmen especially feared for their sexuality. The fear of these men came from new fashions, “petting parties,” influence from films and jazz music, and from filthy fictional stories. These influences were said to be “polluting” society. The greatest fear that Klansmen had was that races would mix and dehumanize the white person.

The fear of this changing Southern society was a catalyst for bigoted crimes of the time. The lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager, was an event that helped push the rise of the second clan. In 1915, the manager was accused of the rape and murder of a young girl employed in his factory, Mary Phagan. The verdict of the trial held in Georgia was announced to a violent mob outside of the courthouse. As he was condemned to life imprisonment, this did not seem just to the mob, who kidnapped Frank, tortured and then hung him. The place of blame was a common usage of the Klan, who did not often turn to self scrutiny. The effect of this trial by peers and it’s resemblance to the film Birth of a Nation initially spawned the second Ku Klux Klan. Countless other cases, much like the Leo Frank case were trademarks of the Klan’s terror.[12]

In the postwar years of World War I, a new confidence by African Americans spurred a great challenge to the Klan’s dominant reign over the Southern States. While there was a massive black flight, others chose to stay and fight the bigotry. W.E.B. Du Bois stated, “The real arraignment of the Negro is that White America with its present machinery is not going to be able to keep black folk down…It is a new Negro who inhabits the South today...above all a new Negro youth that will not be cowed by silly superstition or fear.” Du Bois points out that the road had been paved, and that African Americans were not going to give up the fight for equality. The fact that there was a need for a Ku Klux Klan, shows the resilience of the heroic African Americans of the 1920s.[13]

Along with the resistance from society, the Ku Klux Klan’s image was damaged in the later half of the 1920s. The Grand Dragon of Indiana and fourteen other states was convicted of the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer. Grand Dragon David Stephenson was accused of biting the victim so many times, it appeared she had been eaten by a cannibal. With this drastic trial, the Klan lost a great amount of public favor. Although never falling out completely, the Ku Klux Klan as a national organization was sold in 1939, and in 1944, the Klan reportedly owed $685,000 in back taxes to the IRS. Following these events, as well as a number of internal conflicts, the Klan dissolved.[14]

In the mid-to-late sixties the Klan did have a rebirth in response to the Civil Rights Movements. The Jim Crow laws of separate, but equal, was an example of a racist compromise. Darien J. Davis explains in his comparison between the Civil Rights movement of Cuba and the United States; “Despite the ‘separate but equal’ rhetoric, segregation meant that African Americans were second class citizens.” An unnerving argument states that the desegregation of the 1960s only received widespread attention due to the embarrassing image of war within the country following World War II. White bigotry did not excuse desegregation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however. The allowance of African Americans into our everyday life and policies was a way of undermining the nation’s values. This type of ideology shows that even though the Klan had been dissolved, the foundations for which it stood where still intrinsic in the heart of racist peoples throughout the South.[15]

The struggle for equality has loomed over the heads of generations and generations dating back to the defeat of Appomattox. The Constitution of the United States does begin with, “We the People.” This does not apply only to certain races, but to anyone who chooses to live in America. The race wars of the past still linger in previous generations. Racism, as well as sects of hate group still encompass areas of the United States today. In Georgia alone, there are eight noted active hate groups within the state. Of those, there are countless others who are not nationally recognized. We have seen the terror that groups such as the KKK have imposed upon society, and we know the great lengths people have gone to promote their pride and longing for the past. Hopefully, our future will be free from dangerous groups such as these, but as history has shown, society will not be so lucky.