As Confederate symbols come tumbling down across the nation, some are proving trickier to remove than others. Stone Mountain, Georgia, is one such obstacle — its portrayal of Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson stands 90-by-190 feet tall and is carved into the side of a mountain. The monument's website boasts that the rendering is so big that when it was being carved, workers could hide in the horse's ears or mouths to take shelter from the rain. All told, Stone Mountain's relief is bigger even than Mount Rushmore.
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In comparison, figuring out what to do with the potentially offensive mountainside makes passing legislation look easy.
"What are you going to do, dynamite Stone Mountain?" asked Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesman and Dukes of Hazard actor Ben Jones.
“Should we blast those images off Stone Mountain? How far do we go?" asked U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson. "Stone Mountain is a Confederate area, [a] heritage area... but it is a public park that all of us go to, and I guess we have to all keep it in perspective."
However, dynamite doesn't sound so bad to the NAACP, who called today for the images to be sand-blasted off... or something.
“Those guys need to go," the NAACP's Atlanta branch President Richard Rose told WSB. "They can be sand-blasted off, or somebody could carefully remove a slab of that and auction it off to the highest bidder."
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