Black Voters Understood What the Stakes Were
For those who remember the history of disenfranchisement, what happened in Georgia was especially poignant.
Chiseled into the side of Stone Mountain, a quartz monzonite dome in Georgia that arches nearly 1,700 feet toward the sky, are the likenesses of three Confederate leaders—President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Each is shown holding his hat over his heart, and each rides on the back of a horse whose body melts into the stone. This is the largest Confederate memorial in the country, an homage to treasonous white supremacists who fought a war to maintain the institution of slavery. Its construction began in 1916. It was completed in 1972—more than a
