Ghosts Of The South

  • (4 of 5)

    Burris is optimistic despite divisive issues like the cemetery flag. In 1991, when he ran for city council, Stone Mountain's population was 15% black. Now, with blacks accounting for more than 60%, it is increasingly multicultural. Recently the city council helped some 400 Kosovo refugees settle here. "I'm as proud of that as probably anyone would be of their ancestors fighting," he says. "I'm not saying racism is gone. But we're beyond having the challenge of racism to deal with. We have to learn how to live in a multicultural society."

    Paradox has long been a part of life here, says Georgianne Christian Allen, who is writing a history of Shermantown, an African-American neighborhood in Stone Mountain. According to oral tradition, the neighborhood was created after Union General William Tecumseh Sherman made his fiery path through Georgia and freed slaves, some of whom congregated in the small area between Main Street and the mountain. Elderly blacks remember the injustice of separatism and Shermantown as one of the last areas in DeKalb County to get sewers and paved roads. But even when separatism was perpetuated by law, "Stone Mountain blacks and whites got along harmoniously," says Ralph Shipp, 68, a lifelong resident. Other African Americans also recall warm relationships between the races. And yet the Klan had a strong presence in Stone Mountain, its leader occupying the two-story white house the black mayor now lives in. James R. Venable, Imperial Wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was also a lawyer. According to local historian Walter McCurdy, Venable once successfully defended two Black Panthers accused of killing a white policeman in Louisiana. Venable took pay from the Black Panthers, McCurdy says, and gave it to the K.K.K. But that's a long time ago now. Too long for some black residents here to worry about. Let the rebel flag fly over those graves, says Ralph Shipp. "That's all right. They are dead, and it's a thing of the past. Let's move on."

    South Carolina The man behind a controversial neo-Confederate magazine

    The storm came out of nowhere. A magazine most people had never heard of was in the spotlight. On TV, John Ashcroft was getting fire-tested at his nomination hearings for a interview he'd given in 1998 to Southern Partisan. On Meet the Press, Delaware Senator Joe Biden called it "a white supremacist magazine, so I'm told." How could Ashcroft be a fit Attorney General if he agreed with it? "We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect," Ashcroft told the magazine, "or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

    Like slavery, for instance? The same issue of the magazine that ran the Ashcroft interview had an ad for the Southern Heritage Association, asking, "Is the war over? Perhaps, but the cause lives on." Another ad, for a book about Lincoln, began, "If you think Bill Clinton has a character problem, take a look at...Lincoln." But rather than judge it from afar, I decide to drop by Southern Partisan, based in downtown Columbia, to find out who these people are.

    Chris Sullivan, the current editor, had faxed me a 10-point response to national press accounts calling Southern Partisan racist, segregationist and secessionist. So I expected to find a considerable operation, one equal to the wrath against it. But at an unremarkable strip mall, I entered an office that contained the entire paid staff: Sullivan and one assistant. The quarterly magazine has 8,000 subscribers and generally runs between 50 and 60 pages. Sullivan uses free-lance writers--columnists and essayists, mostly--who are paid between $200 and $500 per article. "We're not in the news because of our influence or vast number of subscribers. We're an issue because we're a stick liberals can use to beat their enemies," says Sullivan, 38, who seems not entirely opposed to such exploitation. "I guess no publicity is bad publicity," he says.

    A soft-spoken single guy who drives a pickup truck with a gun rack, Sullivan comes from a family of Greenville jewelers. A nonvet and nonjournalist, he got his start at Southern Partisan by writing about the Sons of Confederate Veterans as a member and officer. Sullivan is Christian, antiabortion and a supporter of small, decentralized government. His magazine is all those things and also a passionate defender of the Confederate flag. Sullivan says it's fair to call the publication right-wing with a Southern twist. But not racist.

    1. 1
    2. 2
    3. 3
    4. 4
    5. 5