Three hundred million years ago, the Earth heaved and what we now know as the Blue Ridge Mountains started climbing toward the sky. Magma oozing up between tectonic plates cooled into an aberrant mound of granite nesting in the subtle roll of the interior Mid Atlantic. And age after geologic age, that’s all this solid granite blip was—a rock with the same matter-of-fact existence as every other rock.
Humans applied the meaning. In pre-Colonial times, it was a sacred site for the Creek and Cherokee tribes, among others. Then, 116 years ago, it became something else entirely.
On Thanksgiving, 1915, a group of white men ascended Stone Mountain’s 1,686-foot summit, opened a Bible, and burned a 30-foot-tall cross. The blaze would have been visible for miles in every direction. This was the coming out party for the new Ku Klux Klan.