Carvings in the stone of mountains are what a civilization does for it's more revered leaders and heroes.  This is because stone monuments, in particular carvings in rock faces can last for tens of thousands of years. Along with Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Stone Mountain in Georgia is just such a carving.  Sign  this petition if you don't want to be defined forever by the face of traitors arguably worse than Benedict Arnold, who fought for a version of slavery which was more dehumanizing than even that practiced by George Washington.  




Caption:  This massive image would not erode for tens of thousands of years and so would serve along with Mount Rushmore to define us for the bulk of that time.  Do we really want this kind of image to define us for 10,000 years or more?  

The historical context of the confederacy.

Those men were traitors at best. The They are in the same league as Benedict Arnold.  Like General Arnold they were fine soldiers, and leaders and the acted against US.  Unlike him those particular men acted to defend a morally bankrupt economic system gradually created by planters to keep indentured servants from being able to run away, and divide white indentured servants from imported African indentured servants by making black people property not for 7 or 11 or 20 years but for life, and the lives of their children's children from the 1650's until 1860's.  

From the decision of the case brought by Anthony Johnson a free black person in early colonial Virginia who had black and white indentured servants, one of whom a court ruled a "servant for life", to the Dredd Scott decision which a black man sued his masters when they reneged on the promise to give him freedom if he paid for it.  

By the time Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E Lee the system of slavery practiced in the United States held that African Americans were little better than cattle who happened to be shaped kind of like people.   In times before even a slave could sue their master in court, see Dredd Scott, by the civil war a black person could not even count on the most minimal rights or protections of a being a natural born son or daughter of this land.   They rebelled not simply for the right to own human beings...but for the right  to live in a state where they can treat human beings as we do animals. 

So yes Washington, Jefferson, and other founding fathers, and even a number of my ancestors black and white owned slaves.  That was awful.  What the Confederate States of America fought to maintain was the right to completely dehumanize a whole category of people.   If there was any doubt of what the war was about, after the emancipation proclamation it became about slavery.   The fact that they did not disband after that point shows that those men unequivocally fought from that moment forward to preserve one of the two greatest evils done by the United States of America.  

Sign this petition.  Do something to make sure that in 10,000 years or more those men won't stand for all of us as part of some enigmatic carving.  Let us erase their image from any place of honor and dignity.  Save for their graves, and appropriate places in cemeteries, their image should not appear. 

In the long run we can pull down every metal statue in every park and public place.  If Stone Mountain survives then it is all for nothing.  Such a carving can last longer than the pyramids. 

Do you really want this to be one of two things people will know about the United States of America in ten or twenty thousand years?