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Local civil rights leaders on Wednesday asked Gov. Nathan Deal to kill a plan to put a monument to Martin Luther King Jr. on top of Stone Mountain.
Meeting behind closed doors for more than an hour, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP said the governor listened to their case but didn’t change his mind about the project.
“The governor received our concerns and was receptive,” said SCLC President Charles Steele. “And he understands that no aspect of Dr. King being integrated with the Confederacy would have ever happened through the civil rights community.”
Those who attended the meeting said Deal acknowledged that he had signed off on the plan. But the governor said the monument is now a matter for the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, not the governor’s office, to decide, meeting participants said. Calls to Deal’s office regarding the meeting were not returned.
In what looked on the surface like a win for peace and civil rights, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association announced plans on Sunday to place a monument honoring King on top of Stone Mountain. The plan would erect a tower on the summit and place a replica of the Liberty Bell there, with the famous inscription from King’s I Have a Dream speech: “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain, Ga.”
But several civil rights organizations – particularly the national SCLC and the Atlanta and DeKalb branches of the NAACP – came out against the idea.
They argued that because Stone Mountain is designated by state law as a memorial to the Confederacy, King’s image and words should not be associated with it. They also expressed concern that no civil rights groups were consulted before Sunday’s announcement that a monument was being planned.
“We made it clear that we didn’t want any part of anything going up on Stone Mountain about Dr. King, period,” said John Evans, president of the DeKalb County NAACP.
What isn’t clear is how the full civil rights community feels about the plan. Steele, who runs the organization founded in 1957 by King, said the groups have not reached out to any other organizations or major figures in the civil rights movement to get their thoughts or opinions.
And while the King Estate, which controls King’s intellectual property, has been silent on the matter so far, Steele said they have not reached out to the King siblings privately either.
“We have all been very busy, but we knew as civil rights organizations focusing on direct action that we had to move swiftly,” Steele said. “There is no way that we are on the wrong side of this issue. This is what we live for — to protect the imagery of Dr. King and the civil rights movement. We are freedom fighters and this is what we do.”
Civil rights leaders said that while Deal was willing to meet again, no meeting has been scheduled.
“But we are going to try to set up a meeting with the Stone Mountain Memorial Association,” Evans said. “We gotta get to the folks that make decisions.”
A spokesman for the SMMA said they would not comment on a meeting called by the governor.
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