This Town is Home to the Nation’s Largest Confederate Monument

I was wandering around the small town of Stone Mountain, Georgia with my camera in July, when I stopped to chat with a woman helping distribute free school supplies outside a church.

“This might be a strange question,” I said, “but do you know where I’d find some Confederate flags around here?”

“Oh no,” she said, taken aback. “Not around here.”

When I posed the question to other residents later on, they said the same thing: Not in this community.

Forgive me if I had the wrong impression of Stone Mountain. After all, the town abuts the park that contains the nation’s largest Confederate monument: the titular Stone Mountain, which is carved with the likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. And white supremacists often rally at the mountain, which was the birthplace of the modern KKK.

So I assumed there was bound to be a few Confederate flags floating around town somewhere, maybe off a highway or on a flagpole on somebody’s porch or stamped to the back of a pickup truck, as I’ve seen elsewhere in the South. But the only one I discovered was in Stone Mountain Park, which houses the mountain and other tributes to the Confederacy.

In fact, I was surprised to find Stone Mountain to be one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places I’ve ever been – a model of a new, changing South.