Background and creation John Brown Gordon was a noted
Confederate general during the
American Civil War who served multiple terms as a
Senator from Georgia and as
Governor of Georgia in the post-
Reconstruction era. He was also generally recognized as the leader of the
Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and supported both the institution of
slavery as well as the
Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Following his death on January 9, 1904, multiple civic leaders in
Atlanta began to plan a monument in his honor. On January 19, 1904 (
Robert E. Lee Day), a meeting at the
Georgia State Capitol of groups including the
United Daughters of the Confederacy and the
United Confederate Veterans was held where
Clement A. Evans proposed creating a statue to honor Gordon. The John B. Gordon Monument Association was formed for this purpose, led by
William Lowndes Calhoun as its president. While the association was successful in fundraising, a total of $25,000 had to be secured from the
state government in order to complete the project.
Solon Borglum (whose brother
Gutzon Borglum was the first sculptor to work on the
Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial) was commissioned to design an
equestrian statue of Gordon, was dedicated on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol on May 25, 1907. Evans served as the main orator for the unveiling, During the dedication, Governor
Joseph M. Terrell and another speaker called for the erection of additional monuments on the Capitol grounds for
Robert E. Lee,
James Longstreet, and the "common soldier", but budgetary issues prevented these plans from coming to fruition.
Calls for removal near the statue on May 31, 2020|left Recently, the statue has come under criticism due to Gordon's stance on race. Following the
Charleston church shooting in 2015, a
state senator proposed a law forbidding the official recognition of Confederate symbols, including icons such as the Gordon statue. Around the same time, American historian
Kenneth W. Noe, speaking with
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, spoke directly about the Gordon statue and others on the Capitol grounds as symbols of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. In 2020, during the
George Floyd protests in Atlanta, many protesters called for the removal of the statue, prompting a trending
hashtag on
Twitter, #TEARDOWNGORDON. On June 8,
Bob Trammell, the
minority leader in the
Georgia House of Representatives, sent a letter to
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp asking him to remove the statue of Gordon, saying, "the statue's nexus to hate in our state is overwhelming" and "its presence is both divisive and offensive." Protests regarding the statue and others prompted a barricade to be erected around the Capitol grounds. On June 11, a protester was arrested for
vandalizing the statue, writing "tear down" with chalk on the monument. Following these events, 44 descendants of Gordon sent an
open letter to Governor Kemp calling for the removal of the statue from the Capitol grounds, stating that "the primary purpose of the statue was to celebrate and mythologize the
white supremacists of the Confederacy". == Design ==