The 1921 racist pogrom, which took place at the same time the UDC was gathering funds for the Stone Mountain monument, destroyed not only a community but generations of wealth. This is where the history of the Tulsa massacre is instructive.

Stone Mountain serves as a monument to false history, built on a site where an organization devoted to terrorizing Black people regularly convened. The politics of the Lost Cause – that Confederate soldiers had fought bravely, that the war had been about states’ rights, that life had been better under slavery for both the enslaver and the enslaved – was the country’s original grievance politics, an attempt to rewrite history to make the cause just, the defeat tragic and the restoration of antebellum values urgent. Which makes the campaign stop at Stone Mountain, a shrine to the lie of the “Lost Cause,” particularly important. His politics were often described as part of a culture war, but his attacks were as much about economics and entitlement as about culture. He argued against affirmative action and “racial quotas,” arguing that Black people were being granted favors by the government at the expense of White Americans. He railed against immigration on the Mexican border, insisting that immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs and changing their culture. It was also a piece of his broader campaign, one built around emotive, racialized grievance. It was not just a political ploy: Buchanan had long praised the Confederacy, visiting the grave sites of relatives who fought for the South and railing against the Voting Rights Act, which he called “an act of regional discrimination against the South.”

Bush for the Republican nomination, Buchanan made a pilgrimage to Stone Mountain. In February 1992, as he challenged President George H.W. It doesn't have to be that wayĭecades later, the site would play an important role in Patrick Buchanan’s presidential run. The federal government got involved, too, minting a commemorative coin sold to raise funds for, as the back of the coin read, a “memorial to the valor of the soldier of the South.” The UDC failed to raise enough funds, and it was only in the 1950s that massive resistance to the growing civil rights movement galvanized further work on the Stone Mountain monument.Īmerica seems intent on following the wrong path now. Plane commissioned the sculptor responsible for Mount Rushmore, who was also involved with the Klan, to carry out the work.

Helen Plane – one of the founding members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which went on a Confederate-monument-building spree in the first half of the 20th century – began lobbying for a Confederate monument to be etched into the side of Stone Mountain. In 1915, members of the Ku Klux Klan gathered atop the mountain to burn a 16-foot cross and celebrate a new generation of the Klan, one that would gain popularity and political influence well outside the South. Nowhere is this history clearer than Stone Mountain, long a site of White supremacist activity, where that weaponized sense of loss and displacement has played out again and again for more than a century. Wrestling with the ghost of a Confederate general (Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest bust at Old Live Oak Cemetery. It lives in the 150-year history of the Lost Cause, in an ongoing century of claims that Christianity is under attack, in 50 years of fist-shaking about affirmative action as “reverse racism.” Those grievance politics not only depend on a false narrative about power and history, but also on ignoring the suffering and oppression of others.īoth entitlement and erasure are key to how grievance politics work: entitlement, because it infuses a sense of unjust loss, and erasure, because it makes that sense of loss singular and heightens the sense of injustice.

But together they help clarify the way right-wing grievance politics, which have reached a fever pitch in recent weeks with attacks on everything from critical race theory to mask mandates, function. On their face, the two may not seem related. It is fitting that Stone Mountain is in the news now, as we mark the centenary of the Tulsa massacre, an orgy of anti-Black violence followed by a deliberate erasure of the historical record. Stone Mountain and other monuments to the Confederacy should be wiped clean

The mountain politicats