Just five miles away from Clarkston, GA, the most diverse square mile in America (see my last post), is Stone Mountain, “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world” according to Richard Rose, President of the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Stone Mountain is the Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy, only bigger. Robert E. Lee is as tall as a nine-story building. Jefferson Davis’ nose is the size of a sofa.

Here is the ugly history of Stone Mountain according to the Southern Poverty Law Center:

“The nearly 60-year effort it took to create this monument, from its first fundraising campaign in 1915 to finishing touches in 1972, makes quite the compelling story. Historical photos show stonecutters dangling from cables and perched on swings halfway down the mountain’s 825-foot face. Carving these figures into the mountainside took courage, strength and skill. But there’s an odious side to the story.

In 1915, the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan occurred atop Stone Mountain. Klan money helped fund the monument. And the first of its three head sculptors was a Klansman, as was the owner of the mountain, Samuel Venable, whose family bought it in 1887 to run a quarry. Venable granted the Klan rights to hold meetings there in perpetuity. And for decades it did.

Two events sparked the revival of the Klan, which swept the South during Reconstruction before fizzling in the 1870s.

Fueled by anti-Semitism, the first was the lynching of Leo Frank, a Cornell graduate and Jewish superintendent of an Atlanta factory, who was convicted in a shoddy trial of the murder of a 13-year-old Christian girl. After Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life, an armed mob snatched him from prison while guards did nothing to stop it. The men drove Frank to the girl’s hometown and hung him from an oak tree. (Decades later a witness came forward and, in 1986, the Georgia Board of Parole granted Frank a posthumous pardon.)

The other provocation was the Atlanta debut of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a silent film portraying African Americans as savages and sex fiends who defiled white women, while glorifying the KKK as saviors galloping to the rescue.

On Thanksgiving night, William J. Simmons led a group of 15, including some members of the Frank lynching mob, to the summit of Stone Mountain, where they set up a flag-draped altar, opened a Bible and burned a 16-foot cross in an initiation ceremony described in Atlanta’s Stone Mountain: A Multicultural History, by Paul Stephen Hudson and Lora Pond Mirza.

The resurrected KKK targeted primarily blacks, but also Jews, Catholics and foreigners among others.

Although the idea of carving a monument into Stone Mountain had floated about for years, Civil War widow Helen Plane made it her mission. As a charter member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, champions of the “Lost Cause” version of the Civil War, she had both the passion and the sway. Once Gutzon Borglum was chosen as the sculptor in 1915, she wrote him with a design suggestion.

“I feel it is due to the Klan which saved us from Negro dominations and carpetbag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?”

Due to funding challenges and World War I, the jackhammers, drills and explosives didn’t descend upon the mountain until 1923. Borglum had grandiose visions of carving an army of Confederates in addition to the three leaders, as many as 1,000 figures sweeping across the mountain. But after a year’s work, all he’d completed was Lee’s head.

Project managers fired him and later pressed charges when he destroyed his models. Borglum fled the state and went on to carve Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota on sacred Lakota land.

Augustus Lukeman took over, but slammed into the deadline before finishing. In 1916, Venable had granted a 12-year lease to complete the carving, and time was up. The project sat mothballed for the next 36 years.

The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education integration decision and rise of the Civil Rights Movement jump-started interest in completing the carving. In 1958, under Georgia’s segregationist governor, Marvin Griffin, the state created the Stone Mountain Memorial Association and purchased the dome and surrounding land to create a memorial park.

Carving resumed July 1964 with its third head sculptor, Walter Kirtland Hancock. Eight years later it was finished.

The state’s purchase of Stone Mountain voided Venable’s agreement with the Klan, but that hasn’t stopped sympathizers and other white supremacists from making pilgrimages to their sacred ground of hate. And, it’s hard to ignore the timing of the park’s official grand opening on April 14, 1965 — 100 years to the day that President Abraham Lincoln was shot.”

Today we stopped in Clarston, GA for lunch on our way to Americus, Ga. We had some very good Ethiopian food.

Known as the “Ellis Island of the South”, Clarkston, GA is a small town east of Atlanta that has been a refugee resettlement area for almost 50 years. For immigrants from countries like Ethiopia, Bhutan, Somalia, and Vietnam, Clarkston, Georgia, has been their first American home. The town has become the most ethnically diverse square mile in America, doubling in size in ten years with a 2020 population of 14,756 (2020 Census).

According to Wikipedia, Georgia is among states that has received the highest number of refugees for resettlement, and has resettled more than 37,000 refugees since 1993.  Clarkston receives a large portion of these refugees, but arrivals have gradually declined yearly since 2016.  In 2016, then Georgia Governor Nathan Deal issued and then reneged on an executive order attempting to cease influx of Syrian refugees into the state.  Additionally, as of 2019 federal funding for refugee programs has decreased and executive orders have been issued that allow states increased authority to limit resettlement, which has resulted in the downsizing of several Georgia resettlement organizations

Trump’s immigration crackdown began taking shape immediately when he took office. For immigrants already in Georgia, the orders will result in significantly increased risk of deportation.

The Trump administration has also halted new refugee admissions. But some refugee-agency leaders say Trump’s “stop work” order goes a step further, and is affecting refugees in the U.S., who rely on federal funds for housing, food and support during their first three months in the country. This foreign assistance was stopped before the Trump administration tried to pause all federal grants and loans.

We are in Richmond, Virginia near Fort Gregg-Adams, formerly known as Fort Lee. On 27 April 2023 the name of Fort Lee was changed to Fort Gregg-Adams after two African American officers Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg and Lt. Col. Charity Adams.The name change was part of an effort to rename military assets associated with the Confederacy. Fort Gregg-Adams is the first base named for African Americans. Charity Adams is a very inspirational person. I recommend watching the 2024 movie, “The Six Triple Eight” on Netflix about Lt. Col Charity Adam’s acomplishments.

Charity Adams was born on December 5, 1918, in Kittrell, North Carolina, and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School as valedictorian and from Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1938, majoring in math and physics. After graduation, she returned to Columbia, where she taught mathematics at the local high school while studying part-time for a M.A. degree in psychology at the Ohio State University, receiving her master’s degree in 1946.

Adams enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in July 1942. She was the first African-American woman to be an officer in the WAAC and was the commanding officer of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was made up of African-American women serving overseas during World War II.. The 6888 was stationed first in Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham, England. Three months later they were moved to Rouen, France and then to Paris.  They were responsible for the delivery of millions of pieces of mail to soldiers during World War II. Wikipedia

Mail written to the troops would be sent overseas to Europe and processed by a postal battalion, but by 1945 multiple warehouses in Birmingham, England contained mail for soldiers that had not been distributed. The backlog would take six months to process. At the time, there were about 7 million American soldiers and government workers in Europe. Service members were frustrated about not receiving their letters.

In the waning months of World War II, the 855 women of color who comprised the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — 824 enlisted Soldiers and 31 officers — completed a time-sensitive mission in the European Theater of Operations. Army leadership believed their success would be key to boosting morale amongst the 7 million war-weary American service members, U.S. Government personnel, and Red Cross workers stationed throughout Europe in 1945. The mission? To label, sort, and clear millions of pieces of mail — including letters, photographs, and gifts — that had been stockpiled and left languishing in warehouses for months, even years. One general predicted it would take six months to process the massive backlog of undelivered mail, yet the battalion, nicknamed “Six Triple Eight,” managed to do it in just three. (National Museum of the U.S. Army)

Iron making evolved over a few thousand years. Using the ancient “bloomery” method, iron ore was converted directly into wrought iron by heating the ore while at the same time melting the ore’s impurities and squeezing them out with hand hammers. The bloomery furnace differs from a modern blast furnace because it does not actually melt iron. The bloomery operates at lower temperatures but still achieves the same result of separating metallic iron from undesirable elements.

We passed this iron bloomer ruin by the side of the road near PawPaw, West Virginia.

It was built in 1838, and produced up to 8500 tons of iron annually that was carried on rafts and flatboats down the Cacapon River, a tributary of the Potomac River.

Well, it is that time of year where we all get little cabin fever, wishing for warmth and sunshine. We will take four or five weeks to venture South to Florida and back. We plan to visit friends and places we have never been. This year, we will focus on finding out the truth about immigration in Southern cities and rural communities by visiting first hand. Are there success stories where immigrants have helped uplift a community? What are the obstacles to resettling immigrants successfully? And what are the impact of Trump 2.0 policies really? I’ll let you know what we find out. Stay tuned.