Stone Mountain Graves Eclipsed By Confederate Monuments

So many defenders of Confederate monuments insist we should place great honor on the Confederate soldiers who fought to protect the institution of slavery and spilled blood in an effort to secede from the United States of America. Some of them even call the carving of three Confederate generals on Stone Mountain art, claiming it's their heritage, yet they continue to ignore and neglect so many others' heritage, others whose blood was also shed into the ground right beneath their feet: the graves of enslaved people and their descendant — or worse, the absence of any markers that they ever existed. This country's own president even constantly baits his followers and champions of Confederate monuments: "They're trying to take away our culture. They are trying to take away our history." They will likely be able to tell you where all of the Confederate monuments and markers in Georgia are located, but very few can say where those who were enslaved are buried, the very people that worked the sprawling corn, cotton, and tobacco plantations and dairy farms in communities like Stone Mountain. While many of the graves of the sons and daughters of the enslaved did manage to find their rightful way into local city cemeteries, the condition of those graves and scarcity of records, depending upon the cemetery, still often reflect an inequality in death as those black Americans interred so frequently suffered in life. Such is what I found to be the case in the Stone Mountain City Cemetery when I went looking for the grave of Charlie C. Gholston in the African-American section of the historic cemetery. Unequal in death as in life cried out many broken headstones, as did the ones nearly swallowed up by the dirt or, in one case, overtaken by a nearby oak.

Charlie Gholston has led me on quite a journey over the summer. Not long after discovering his 90 year-old carving at the base of the Confederate flag terrace at Stone Mountain, I began looking into his life, and likely because this particular carving looked so much like a grave marker, I wanted to locate this former African-American air driller's grave (even if to rule out that the one at the mountain was not in fact a tomb). I first called the historic Haugabrooks Funeral Home listed in the 1938 “colored” obits section of the Atlanta Constitution. They could not provide any information, but since I mentioned Gholston and his family had been listed in census reports for Shermantown, the historic black community at the base of the mountain which supplied so much labor to the quarries and the railroads, the gracious and helpful employee there connected me via a three-way call to Gloria Brown, an older Shermantown native and community leader who might remember the Gholstons. Brown was inducted in recent years as one of the city’s “Granite Sentinels” (also the title of town resident George Coletti’s fiction book), and she proudly told me that her daughter was the first black cheerleader at the Victoria Maddox Simmons equalization school erected in 1956 in Shermantown (the property was razed in recent decades and is now the Mountain View senior living community). I quickly told her what basics I knew of Charlie Gholston and his parents, Augustus and Lucinda, but they didn't jog any memories for her, and she suggested that Charlie likely was not buried in one of the cemeteries associated with the historic churches in Shermantown, like Bethsadia Baptist Church, as she intimated those burial grounds came about later than Charlie’s death in 1938. So she suggested I look in the African-American section of the Stone Mountain City Cemetery.

I first visited the Stone Mountain City Cemetery in early June to look for Charlie’s grave and was instantly disheartened by the rundown condition of the historic African-American section of the cemetery on the eastern side of the grounds, especially in contrast to the well-kept plots of the town’s prominent citizens and the celebrated Confederate soldiers there, even a secessionist signer from Dekalb County, G.K. Smith. The city extols particular reverence upon the bulging plot of George Pressley Trout, a Civil War soldier supposedly buried with his horse. Even the rows of white Confederate markers at the cemetery's E. Ponce de Leon & Main St. entrance commemorating the unknown dead Confederate soldiers (beneath which are no actual bodies) are better cared for than the graves of black citizens (beneath which are actual bodies).

I called Gloria Brown again and expressed surprise and disappointment at how untended, even broken in half and illegible, so many of the headstones in the African-American section of the cemetery were and mentioned that I’d still not found Charlie’s grave. She said she had to go to a doctor’s appointment, and that's the last we spoke. When I again returned to the the African-American section of the city cemetery in early July, I was taken aback to suddenly spot a marker resting above the ground that seemed to read “Gholston." And yet, it didn't appear in the least overtaken by earth and time like the surrounding headstones. Sure, maybe I missed it the first time, I thought, but I had been pretty thorough that day in June and have felt unsettled about it since and am not convinced it's a marker for Gholston.

A few months ago, with the help of a grant, the City of Stone Mountain completed exterior renovations of the historic train depot in the center of the village for future use as its visitors center (interior renovations are still underway), which is currently housed in a red train caboose near the entrance to THE PATH. The Stone Mountain Downtown Development Authority, which is overseeing the train depot renovations, also regularly draws revenue from movies filming in Stone Mountain Village (parking spaces are often blocked along Main St. to accommodate studios and film crews when a movie's in town). Another recent ribbon-cutting ceremony took place in the Village of Stone Mountain this month for the renovation of another historic building on Main Street  by C.D. Moody Construction out of Lithonia, GA. Yet, it seems that a city so synonymous with the contentious Confederate carving on Stone Mountain, and which has based its identity on a Confederate "brand" for so long, should not only focus on development but also upon restoring some dignity to the graves of its buried black citizens in the Stone Mountain City Cemetery. Also, is that an old slave cabin on Second Street in the back yard of Stone Mountain Manor? I often pass it on my way to the park, and I wrote the new owner of the bed-and-breakfast to ask for more information on it but have not heard back.

Yes, while it is the city's responsibility to maintain its cemetery, care for neglected historic graves does often fall to family or concerned volunteers to keep the stones clean and repaired and to keep the deceased from being forgotten. For example, a group of volunteers came together in Lithonia a little over ten years ago to preserve the Flat Rock Cemetery, which had become overgrown and neglected. So many of those interred there had lived along Bruce Street (in a community similar to Shermantown) and worked in the quarries near Arabia Mountain during the time Arabia Mountain was still owned by the Venable brothers, which also simultaneously owned and quarried Stone Mountain and Pine Mountain. For many decades now, Arabia Mountain has been part of the Arabia Mountain National Heritage area, overseen by the Arabia Mountain Heritage Alliance . Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta also has an ongoing African-American Grounds Restoration Project, as do many communities that work together to preserve African-American heritage alongside other parts of their history. It's often long overdue work, and sadly, it sometimes comes too late. A distant descendant of Andrew Johnson's, who is widely regarded as Stone Mountain's founder, tried to restore some care and dignity to the Johnson-Maddox-Goldsmith Cemetery many decades ago, but it longs for more attention and preservation.