One of the rules Saturday was simple: “No racial slurs.” But that apparently didn’t last long at the Georgia rally to support the Confederate flag at the base of a mountain that’s the birthplace of the modern iteration of the Ku Klux Klan.
Conservative writer Jim Goad described the gathering as a “cultural porno” on Monday as part of a narrative about his experience at the Stone Mountain, Georgia rally for the website Taki’s Magazine.
Goad described a moment in which an argument broke out over racial slurs:
And then, finally, came what the party-crashers were looking for. A genetically challenged-looking ginger male in a pink baseball cap called a black girl a “greasy monkey nigger bitch.” The black girl in question, who was wearing a shirt celebrating her “blackness,” began howling and screaming and clawing and swinging like a Jerry Springer guest before cops were able to restore order. Her friend, a portly black woman with a giant black leather earring in the shape of Mother Africa, shouted at someone in the crowd, “What if I called you a greasy inbred stringy-haired cracker?”
“I’d be offended,” they replied.
“But ‘cracker’ isn’t offensive!” she insisted.
“Shouldn’t that be for the crackers to decide?” I asked her. She either didn’t hear me or she didn’t want to answer the question. Maybe she simply assumed it was for her to decide what was offensive and what wasn’t.
The rally organizers posted rules beforehand and their first was: “NO racial slurs or offensive remarks.”
Stone Mountain has come under fire this summer for its overt Confederate memorials. The state park, about 30 minutes from Atlanta, features a 90- by 190-foot carving of three Confederate leaders, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported an estimate from 600 to 800 attendees armed with Confederate flags.
Allan Croft, of Dalton, Georgia, told a group of young black men that segregation was wanted by all, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Yeah, we didn’t want our daughters to marry you and we didn’t want our children to go to school with you,” he said, according to the newspaper. Croft said the civil rights movement was the fault of the “communist Jews.”
Then, there was the white man carrying a Confederate flag on a pole who was wearing FUBU tennis shoes, a hiphop brand created by Daymond John, a black man.
“But does that make you stop wearing them shoes because the white man designed them? I don’t care if a black man designed my shoes,” he said before adding, “I don’t like what your people are doing to this country.”
Another flag supporter, who refused to give his last name to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, said the South was under attack.
“This is about erasing us,” said Jimmy, a representative of the League of the South who refused to give his last name. “This is about our First Amendment rights, our Second Amendment rights — every amendment you’ve got.”
One woman went to the rally in protest after racial slurs were yelled at her while she was at the park, according to the Journal Constitution.
“It is, in fact, hate not heritage, the same as the KKK or the Nazis,” she said.
Back in July, Richard Rose, president of the Atlanta branch of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the relief should be “sand-blasted off” the mountain. An Atlanta City Council member received death threats for a much milder suggestion: Add other prominent Georgians, such as former President Jimmy Carter, to the relief.
