July 7, 2025
The confederacy group claims that the exhibit will undermine the mountain’s initial purpose and history.
A Confederate group has sued Georgia officials over plans to debut an exhibit focusing on white supremacy, slavery, and segregation at Stone Mountain Park.
The Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans filed the lawsuit July 1, claiming that the state park’s association broke state law with its plans to install the exhibit. Prompted by the racial justice protests of 2020, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association voted in 2021 to develop an exhibit that tells the history behind the infamous mountain. According to the Associated Press, they also removed the Confederate flags once located on the park’s walking grounds, which the Sons also sued about in May.
Stone Mountain has a dark history in Georgia. The state park features the largest Confederate monument in the United States, an enlarged engraving of Confederate generals on its side. The park, a popular hiking destination, also has ties to the Ku Klux Klan’s re-emergence. The same year the carving was created in 1915, commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan held a comeback celebration on top of the mountain.
The exhibit aimed to inform visitors of the mountain’s connection to this racist past, while also exposing how the monument contributed to the “Lost Cause” ideology that attempts to romanticize the Confederacy and its white supremacist values. Georgia’s General Assembly approved an $11 million budget to curate the exhibit, which would also highlight a Black community that resided in the area following the Civil War, as well as renovations to the park’s Memorial Hall.
“The interpretive themes developed for Stone Mountain will explore how the collective memory created by Southerners in response to the real and imagined threats to the very foundation of Southern society, the institution of slavery, by westward expansion, a destructive war, and eventual military defeat, was fertile ground for the development of the Lost Cause movement amidst the social and economic disruptions that followed,” the exhibit proposal stated.
The exhibit has yet to open, however, as the new legal challenge hopes to prevent its unveiling. In the filing, the Sons of the Confederate Veterans believe the exhibit will “completely repurpose” Stone Mountain and its purpose in maintaining a specific part of Georgia’s history.
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