07/14/2025
For Immediate Release from Georgia Division Sons of Confederate Veterans:
"In what may well be one of the most important lawsuits filed by the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is taking on the “woke” changes being made to the Memorial Hall at Georgia’s Stone Mountain Memorial Park in DeKalb County.
The Georgia Division, the Stone Mountain camp and concerned citizens have filed for an inunction to stop the blatant violation of Georgia’s law. (See Official Code of Georgia Annotated Sections 50-3-1 and 12-3-190 et seq.)
The Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA), acting on behalf of the State of Georgia, has contracted with Warner Museums to completely change the exhibits at Memorial Hall. It is relying on an $11 million bond issue to finance these changes. Thus the taxpayers of the entire State bear the ultimate burden of wiping their history out and disobeying the law.
As you might guess from the names, The Stone Mountain MEMORIAL Association is charged by Georgia law with memorializing the Confederacy. One way this was done was the exhibits in MEMORIAL Hall at the Park.
The exact language governing the purposes of the Park state that the SMMA shall be “maintaining, managing and operating … Stone Mountain as a Confederate memorial and public recreational area….”
Instead, the new proposals (see the attached plan) completely drop any memorial of the Confederacy and make the Memorial Hall over into an attack on the South and a civil rights museum. (It is worth noting that the greater Atlanta area already has at least (10) ten civil rights museums.)
The proposal calls for all blame for the War to be attributed to the South. Slavery comes in for frequent mention with a new twist: the presence of slavery was seen as a “threat” to “many in the free states….”
Even the Federal soldiers will come in for a hit as they failed to fully recognize the contributions of African-Americans toward winning the war. The Union military was composed of 7% African-Americans.
The exhibits will cover Reconstruction – certainly outside the law. In addition, it plans to talk about the Ku Klux Klan, the movie “Birth of a Nation,” segregation and, of course, the civil rights movement. A section will even be dedicated to a black section of the City of Stone Mountain called “Shermantown.”
Warner is so enthusiastic in remaking the Park that it has volunteered to construct a memorial garden – but only to memorialize civil rights leaders.
Back in the days of the George Floyd excitement there was much pressure to remove all Confederate memorials and monuments. When this was brought to the attention of Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, he responded with an anodyne press release saying that we had a law to protect the monuments. As the lead prosecutor of the State, he took no action to uphold the law leaving it to private organizations and citizens to take up the task at their own expense.
Now that lawsuits have been filed against the State and agencies Carr is acting to defend removal of flags and is expected to defend the Warner revisionism.
This lawsuit makes clear that only the people of Georgia themselves can keep their history intact; we can not rely on Attorney General Chris Carr.
It also makes clear that we must improve and further strengthen the law of Georgia.
The Stone Mountain cases matter to all Georgians across the state and all historically minded people in the nation.
Please take a few minutes to review the attached documents to see the outrages which have been paid for by your money and defended by Attorney General Chris Carr.
Please call, email, and write Attorney General Chris Carr’s office and ask him to start protecting Georgia’s veterans monuments per State Code 50-3-1 and stop the illegal removal of the monuments at Stone Mountain Memorial State Park and the woke illegal changes that the SMMA is making at the Park."
Christopher M. Carr:
Office of the Attorney General
40 Capitol Square, SW
Atlanta, GA 30334
(404) 458-3600
(404) 656-3300
Email: [email protected]
Communications Director - Office of Attorney General Chris Carr
Kara Richardson
[email protected]
Governor Brian P. Kemp
206 Washington Street
Suite 203, State Capitol
Atlanta, GA 30334
Call : (404) 656-1776
[email protected]
[email protected] - Chief of Staff
For further information contact:
Martin K. O'Toole
Spokesman, Georgia Division Sons of Confederate Veterans
[email protected]
Cell: 678/232-8638
Injunction Against SMMA:
https://files.constantcontact.com/c6653e36501/e69c1a1d-b224-4cac-983c-9fa5021ce079.pdf?rdr=true
Warner Museum Summary of Exhibits:
https://files.constantcontact.com/c6653e36501/e5b3e742-967a-426f-b7de-fe6abacc251d.pdf?rdr=true
Make Donations to SCV Legal Defense:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=WBJSS8UQBRVTJ&ssrt=1735715286165
