Abstract
Commemorative art dilutes social complexities and conveys a fairly universal message: that whatever is being memorialized is worth remembering. This chapter questions how we might reconcile contemporary discourses and lived practices at public artworks with the inherited legacy of racial violence that inspired their creation. This chapter locates one Southern sculpture within a broader sociohistorical context, and draws parallels between racialized meanings of memorial carvings and other remnants of American Civil War and Jim Crow memory in order to demonstrate how memorials reflect key developments in Southern identity politics. Ultimately, the chapter engages ongoing debates about the future of Confederate monuments as an effort to answer the following question: what are we to do with public art relics of our racist past?
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Notes
- 1.
This study blends archival and ethnographic research that focuses on the reflection of Southern racial politics in public art in the United States, and was submitted to this anthology before Trump’s election, the August 2017 Charlottesville riots, and many other relevant events. The fieldwork that informs this chapter spans six years of interviews, focus groups, and observations that relate to Stone Mountain and is inclusive of the August 2015 rally. Debates about Civil War sculptures were not on the minds or tongues of ethnomusicologists when I began this project, but that is changing, and a decision had to be made about expanding this chapter to reflect current events and the continuation of my fieldwork at Stone Mountain and other Lost Cause installations. My final decision was to leave the chapter intact as an introduction to one site of an ongoing power struggle that reverberates across our communities and throughout this book.
- 2.
Readers will find my stylistic usage of the uppercase Black and lowercase white forms, in keeping with Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s (2011) denotation of Black as a proper noun that encapsulates peoples of African descent within the United States, and a cultural identity that was historically denied. Given that white and whiteness does not equally capture any one ethnic, national, or cultural identity within the United States, my lowercased white and whiteness recognizes the fluidity of this category.
- 3.
The rally occurred shortly after a racially motivated mass shooting at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Bree Newsome’s removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse, and the anonymous placement of Confederate flags outside Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Atlanta church.
- 4.
In this chapter, I use the terms “monument” and “memorial” interchangeably, in keeping with the meanings and employment of these terms in the contemporary United States. Given that Stone Mountain stands as a tribute to an ideological movement, and those who died for its cause, both terms capture the purpose of American public memory markers. For an overview of how these terms have been used in Western history and art scholarship, see Doss (2012, pp. 37–40).
- 5.
Private funding for these projects necessitated that their design appeal to the most affluent collectives. Many of these objects were later donated to government entities, but they continue to represent the ideals of individuals who felt entitled to speak to and for a larger collective.
- 6.
Lost Cause mythology glorifies a fanciful confederate history as an origin story, civil religion, cultural movement, and litmus test for white southern authenticity and regional difference. Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson emerged as the great trinity of Lost Cause heroes. The conceptual linking of these three figures fused military and political might with overtones of Christian theology and created a confederate mythology that absolved white southerners of any responsibility for slavery or its aftermath. See Blight (2001), Coski (1998), Gallagher and Nolan (2000), Wilson (1980).
- 7.
Frank was a northern-born Jewish factory manager who was convicted of raping and murdering a white teenage girl named Mary Phagan. Proceedings from his trial reflected Southern white anxieties about policing Northerners, non-Christians, and people of color in Southern spaces. Two years after his sentence, in 1915, the self-proclaimed Knights of Mary Phagan abducted Frank from prison and hanged him outside Atlanta. They celebrated his murder at Stone Mountain.
- 8.
The second Klan expanded the anti-reconstructionist principles of the nineteenth-century organization to include Jews, Catholics, and new immigrants.
- 9.
It is important to note that although the Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA) remains a state entity, the association itself does not receive any tax funds (Freeman, 1997). The Prison Work Camp on the west side of the Park was demolished in 2002 (Stone Mountain Park Master Plan, 2005).
- 10.
By the time the state assumed control of the mountain, changes in the distribution of electoral power in Georgia effectively excluded Black districts from discussions of state funding priorities.
- 11.
Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his seminal “I Have a Dream” speech in at the Washington D.C. Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
- 12.
Butterfly McQueen portrayed “Prissy” in the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind.
- 13.
- 14.
Peter Herschend is Co-founder, Executive Vice President, and Vice-Chairman of Herschend Family Entertainment.
- 15.
Indeed, park visitor demographics have rapidly changed over the past 20 years as many of the counties surrounding the city of Atlanta have achieved minority-majority status. According to the most recent census, African Americans now account for approximately 75% of the population of the city of Stone Mountain, a far cry from the 14% Black population when the laser show was first introduced.
- 16.
Many vivid images of the laser show may be viewed on the Stone Mountain Park website.
- 17.
The SMMA describes their educational mission as follows: “The Stone Mountain Memorial Association Education Department offers both school and public programs free of charge [free to the public with the price of admission] and are able to provide these programs because SMMA is financially self-sufficient. All park operations, maintenance, and capital improvements are funded through lease and miscellaneous revenues. Public school buses are admitted into Stone Mountain Park for free” (SMMA, 2015a, 2015b).
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Ozment, E.W. (2018). This Rock Will Not Be Forgotten: Whiteness and the Politics of Memorial Art. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_16
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