Renewable Revolution

"Lies My Country Told Me"




Sun Jul 12, 2015 at 06:00 AM PDT.

Mount Rushmore, the KKK, and sanitized American history

by Denise Oliver Velez.


Sculptures of (left to right) George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln,  at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. (Lakota Sioux name for the mountain: Six Grandfathers)

"And yet where in your history books is the tale, of the genocide basic to this country's birth..."
Buffy Sainte-Marie

Monuments tell a tale of history. The question is, whose history, and who is the teller?

Two of the largest monuments in the U.S. are graven images carved into the stone of mountainsides. There are few people who have never seen the iconic presidential images on Mount Rushmore. 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia..." in his "I have a Dream" speech. His reference was deliberate, since he was speaking of the monument to white supremacy carved into the rock at the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Granite carving of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson,  Stone Mountain, GA.

No one ever taught me in school how Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain are related.

No one taught me that the original sculptor at Stone Mountain, Gutzon Borglum, who went on to carve Mt. Rushmore, was associated with the Ku Klux Klan, which used Stone Mountain and an altar designed by Borglum to stage their revival in 1915. No one taught me in school the history of violation of the Black Hills sacred spaces to carve out a monument to U.S. presidents who participated in the extermination of Native peoples and appropriation of their lands.   

While the nation is having a conversation about Confederate flags, with mixed results (according to a recent poll), and that conversation has extended to monuments, I'd like to take it one step further and talk about the racist history that still isn't taught or memorialized in many schools, and about the sanitizing and whitenizing of history books to ensure our children remain ignorant of our collective his- and her-stories.



Gutzon Borglum was, at one time in his life, a powerful member of the Ku Klux Klan, the nationalist, white supremacist organization created after the fall of the South in the American Civil War. He held a lifetime membership, was on their payroll for the Stone Mountain project, and he was also known to be a member of the Imperial Koncilium, a council of high ranking Klansmen who oversaw the transfer of power from one Imperial Wizard to another.

He also later repudiated his involvement with the Klan. Whether the repudiation was sincere or not depends upon who is being asked, as some modern critics as well as some modern Klansmen alike prefer to think that the repudiation was political rather than sincere.

When we talk of Confederate flags today, revived in order to combat the movement for civil rights, we should remember also other periods of history when the flames were fanned to heighten hate. Stone Mountain is a monument to such a revival.

The Revival of the KKK:

The popularity of The Birth of a Nation, and specifically its appearance in Atlanta in December 1915, proved the major impetus for the reemergence of the Klan. Equally significant was the Leo Frank case, which culminated in his August 1915 lynching in Marietta by a group of armed men who had organized themselves as the Knights of Mary Phagan,named for the young murder victim in the case. The anti-Semitic sentiments aroused by that case (Frank was Jewish), along with the ongoing racism fueled by Griffith's film, led William J. Simmons, a local recruiter for men's fraternal societies, to establish a new KKK.

Restricting the group's membership to white American-born Protestant men, Simmons designed the notorious hooded uniform, composed an elaborate ritual for the secret order, and secured an official charter from the state of Georgia. On Thanksgiving evening in 1915, Simmons and sixteen other members of the new order, several of whom also belonged to the Knights of Mary Phagan, ascended Stone Mountain, ignited a flaming cross, and proclaimed the rebirth of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
This is not the first time that protest has swirled around symbols of hate. The Olympic Games in Atlanta was another such occasion.


Full, hard hitting and historically accurate article at link:  

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/12/1400279/-Mount-Rushmore-the-KKK-and-sanitized-American-history