At around midnight that Sunday, shortly after National Guardsmen left the scene, the Athens city police used teargas to disperse the crowd, then fired rubber bullets at protesters who were standing near the canisters, allegedly to prevent them from throwing them back. Graffiti later scratched on the monument–including ACAB, short for All Cops Are Bastards–suggest that the monument was part of the problem.
What is this monument? Finished and dedicated in June of 1872, the Athens monument was one of the first monuments to the Confederate dead, but it was much more than that. Knowa Johnson of the Athens Anti Discrimination movement had asked me to attend a radio show in 2017 to discuss the monument. Doing my due diligence I read some background material about the monument. Then I read some more. Because the Athens Monument was not just a monument to the Confederate dead, it was also a monument to the Klan. It was commissioned during Congressional Reconstruction, when the South was divided into military districts. The US Congress required that African-Americans be allowed to vote in state elections, a move that former Confederates Benjamin Hill and Howell Cobb attacked.
In a series of public speeches in July of 1868 called the Bush arbor speeches, Benjamin Hill and Howell Cobb forcefully criticized the newly-written Georgia constitution which required that black people be allowed to vote. These fiery speeches used the language of blood and soil, much like those we heard in Charlottesville in 2017. Hill and Cobb argued that Georgia’s Assembly was a “band of foreigners” and that men should take up arms against black voters. More to the point, these Bush arbor speeches marked the first public appearance of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan. In Athens, Atlanta, and throughout the upcountry it led to secret orders being formed that harassed and intimidated black voters. Klansmen declared that they were the ghosts of the Confederate dead, who still wore the burial shrouds of fallen soldiers – that’s the reason for the white robes. The Klan said they were, quoting Hebrews 12:23, “the spirits of just men made perfect.” They killed Black politicians and scared away white ones. Klansmen argued that Black men and women would be so frightened to see these ghosts of the Confederacy that they would not push to either vote in elections or try to attend classes at the University of Georgia in Athens, which, according to contemporary newspaper reports, Black men and women apparently tried to do in the same year.[1]