Stone Mountain and the Second Founding of the Klan

On the night of November twenty-fifth, nineteen fifteen, Thanksgiving night, fifteen men climbed to the top of Stone Mountain east of Atlanta and burned a cross in the dark. William Joseph Simmons stood among them and proclaimed the second Ku Klux Klan.

The first Klan had been a Reconstruction-era organization, formed in Tennessee in eighteen sixty-five and suppressed by federal enforcement in the eighteen seventies. Simmons's organization was something different. It was national by design, organized along fraternal lines, with dues and ranks and recruiting machinery that reached into Northern states as readily as Southern ones. By nineteen twenty-four, the second Klan claimed four million members, including substantial chapters in Indiana, Ohio, and Oregon. It was not a regional holdover. It was a national organization with a national membership at the height of its power.

The timing of the Stone Mountain gathering was deliberate. D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation had premiered earlier in nineteen fifteen. The film presented the original Reconstruction Klan as heroic defenders of white Southern civilization against corrupt Black political power. Woodrow Wilson screened it at the White House. Its release created a cultural moment Simmons calculated he could use, and he was right.

The Confederate carving on Stone Mountain's granite face was conceived as a monument to the same Lost Cause ideology the Klan gathering was meant to celebrate. Gutzon Borglum, who would later carve Mount Rushmore, was engaged to begin the relief sculpture in the early nineteen twenties. The carving was not completed until nineteen seventy-two, long after Borglum's involvement ended in a dispute. The state of Georgia operates Stone Mountain Park today as a recreation area. The carving is still there. So is the history of what the mountain meant before anyone picked up a chisel.