Opinion: Confederate flag, Confederate faces -- some ideas for the NAACP

The biggest stone carving in the world is not Mt. Rushmore, the South Dakota granite monument bearing the faces of four extraordinary American presidents, including the one who won the Civil War.

The biggest of them all is Stone Mountain, in a state park in Georgia, where three figures, nine stories tall -- Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, and Dixie President Jefferson Davis – gaze out upon the terrain of the Old South.

And the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP wants Georgia to sandblast them off the side of the mountain.

Now that South Carolina has hauled down from its Capitol grounds the battle flag of the states in rebellion, as the Emancipation Proclamation called them, Georgia too is grappling with symbols from its past, especially those on display in public places.

The Stone Mountain monument has kind of a creepy history for a number of reasons. On Thanksgiving 1915, a year after an Atlanta newspaper called for a Robert E. Lee memorial there, some of the men who had lynched Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank barely three months earlier set a cross ablaze atop Stone Mountain to announce the return of the KKK. The sculptor later chosen to create the monument was Gutzon Borglum; he soon left and went on to create Mt. Rushmore.

Creepy footnote: For a time, Borglum belonged to the KKK. Extra-creepy footnote: Part of the money for the monument came from the U.S. government, which minted commemorative half-dollars and let fundraisers resell them for a buck each. Creepy capper: Stone Mountain wasn’t finished until 1970, and President Nixon was scheduled to speak at the dedication. The shootings at Kent State University in Ohio kept him in Washington, D.C., so Vice President Spiro Agnew did it instead.

In spite of all of that, in spite of states and places striking the “Stars and Bars” flag, sandblasting the monument or smashing it to smithereens is not a wise idea. It’s too close to what the Taliban and ISIS have been doing in the Mideast and Afghanistan, destroying antiquities whose creators and whose meaning they don’t know.

The South’s institutionalized slavery was repugnant. The insistence on treating Confederate leaders as heroes is, again, extra creepy. But so is trying to erase history. We make memorials of concentration camps, though the human impulse for decency and mercy is to bury their horrors out of sight.

And where might all of this take us?

Should Native Americans angle for changing the name of the capital of Ohio because Christopher Columbus ushered in centuries of disease, enslavement and conquest?

Some Californians are already in protest mode, anticipating that Pope Francis, on his upcoming U.S. visit, is to canonize Junipero Serra, the founder of the California missions, and a man accused of forced conversions and obliterating native culture. Should his name disappear from the public schools that bear it?

As to the matter at hand, Georgia should stow the dynamite. Here’s a compromise: Let the NAACP operate the state park instead, and let its docents tell the history.

Or better yet, keep the massive sculpture in place, and just bring in the stonecutter to alter Lee, Jackson and Davis into Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln.

Follow Patt Morrison on Twitter @pattmlatimes