Home of Largest Confederate Monument Is Making Changes

The Stone Mountain Memorial Association board has voted to make some changes at Stone Mountain Park—though none of them involve getting rid of the country's largest Confederate monument. The resolutions approved Monday include a new "warts and all" museum exhibit that will look at the carving's history and the Georgia site's connections to the Ku Klux Klan, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. The park 15 miles northeast of Atlanta will also remove Confederate flags from a busy walking trail, though Georgia law bans the park from removing them entirely. The flags will be moved to an area of the 3,400-acre site that already has numerous other Confederate symbols.

The Rev. Abraham Mosley, the board's first Black chairman, described the changes as a good "first step" at the park, where revenues have plunged in recent years. The site, which officially opened in 1965, includes a 190- by 90-foot carving of Gen. Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures, the Smithsonian reports. CEO Bill Stephens has acknowledged that changes need to be made, but he says the park shouldn't "cancel history." At Monday's meeting, former DeKalb County NAACP President John Evans said the park needed to do more, including renaming streets named after Confederate generals. "We need to take down the flags. We need to change all the street names and do what we said we were going to do: eliminate the Confederacy from Stone Mountain Park," Evans said, per the AP. (More Confederacy stories.)