Stone Mountain

“In order to believe that the Confederacy and these Confederates were noble, you have to have this myth of victimization of white Southerners that they are the real victims during the Civil War... And any effort to redeem them ought to be considered heroic.”
– History Professor Hasan Jeffries explaining how attempts to reframe the causes of the Civil War gained traction in The South.

Gloria Brown tells David Rubenstein about the hope and disappointment she experienced in the immediate aftermath of desegregation.

"It's a very scary thing to live in a space that is whispering to you, 'You don't belong. You're not authorized.' There are forces that will roughly remind you of what you can and can't do."

U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith discusses the possible psychological toll on Black people living in the shadow of a Confederate monument like Stone Mountain.

“I don’t see the carving being removed… I don’t see pleasing everybody because you’re not going to please everybody. I’d rather be agitating on the inside than be on the outside looking in."

- Rev. Abraham Mosely, Chairman of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, discusses plans for the future that he hopes will alleviate some of the controversy surrounding the Confederate monument.

Should Confederate leaders remain on places like Stone Mountain, or should they be erased? As Confederate statues are torn down across the country and the nation wrestles with its past, David Rubenstein looks at the origin, the impact and the future of Stone Mountain Georgia's problematic monument to the Civil War.

This clip takes a look at The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the pivotal role that they played in memorializing Confederate soldiers. This organization, originally comprising female relatives of Civil War soldiers who fought for The South, was instrumental in propagandizing the war and reframing its origins by coining phrases such as “The War of Northern aggression.”