Stone Mountain

STONE MOUNTAIN — We have a complicated connection to the town and the “mountain,” don’t we? Some folks living there now are our kinfolks who started out in Newton and Rockdale counties. One of my cousins, the late Ralph Shipp Jr., was the first black elected to the city council in Stone Mountain. This article from the Washington Post focuses on the history of the monument to the Confederacy and debate about its future.

I know some folks love to visit the Stone Mountain park, but I’ve always remembered hearing older folks talk about Ku Klux Klan activity there when I was a kid. That was where the KKK reorganized in 1915 and held gatherings even into the 1960s. Black folks have been a significant presence in the municipality since at least the Civil War when Sherman’s troops came through. The Shermantown community is named for him. From a CNN story in 2001: “According to oral tradition, the neighborhood was created after Union General William Tecumseh Sherman made his fiery path through Georgia and freed slaves, some of whom congregated in the small area between Main Street and the mountain. Elderly blacks remember the injustice of separatism and Shermantown as one of the last areas in DeKalb County to get sewers and paved roads.” What are your thoughts?

Stone Mountain: The ugly past — and fraught future — of the biggest Confederate monument

Submitted by E. R. Shipp, September 21, 2017 to the Black Heritage of Rockdale County Facebook page