Christmas at Stone Mountain

Stone Mountain’s annual Christmas is an incredible event for the whole family not to be missed. There are more than two million lights, live entertainment and the arrival of Santa Claus at the nightly parade, and a snow angel that flies high in the sky that brings a snowfall and fireworks celebration.
Festivities include:

The classic film “Polar Express” in a 4-D experience.

Two Fabulous Live Shows - A Hometown Holiday and Kickin’ Up Christmas.

Christmas Lasershow.

Crossroads Christmas Parade.

Over 2million lights on the Crossroads Buildings.

Christmas Event Dates: November 8 – December 30

Click HERE for more information

Stone Mountain Park Pumpkin Festival- Last Weekend!

6th Annual Pumpkin Festival

Dates: October 3 - 26 (Fridays - Sundays)

Times:
10:00 AM - 6:00 PM on Fridays & Sundays
10:00 AM - 7:00 PM with Lasershow at 8:00 PM on Saturdays

Come out and enjoy some cooler weather at Atlanta’s favorite place to celebrate the fall season. Now in it’s 6th year, Stone Mountain Park’s annual Pumpkin Festival has become a family favorite with kids and parents alike.

Throughout weekends in October enjoy attractions, entertainment, activities and fall decorations that are fun for all ages.

Event Highlights Include:

NEW! Sci Guys Science Show
NEW! Sky Hike
NEW! Pumpkin Puppet Parade (Starts at 3:00pm - Meet at 2:50pm at the Dogwood)
NEW! Children’s Costume Contest (Saturdays Only)
NEW! Trick or Treating in the shops
Jack Squash’s A-MAZE-ing Adventure
Pie Eating Contests
Kroger Pumpkin Patch
Story Time & Tunes For Tots
Backyard Circus

Birthplace of Klan Chooses a Black Mayor

By KEVIN SACK/NY Times
Published: November 22, 1997

The 20th-century Ku Klux Klan was born here in 1915, and for half a century afterward this quaint town on the outskirts of Atlanta played host to an annual rally of cross-burning Klansmen.

Until his death in 1993, the town was home to James R. Venable, the hate-spewing imperial wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Even today, the granite monolith that gives the city its name is revered as a Confederate Rushmore because of its giant relief sculpture of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson.

Now Stone Mountain has elected a black mayor. What is more, it has elected a black mayor who happens to live in the same house where Mr. Venable, himself the mayor in the 1940’s, lived for most of his life.

”Tell me,” said Chuck E. Burris, the Mayor-elect, ”that God doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

In a low-turnout election on Nov. 4, Mr. Burris defeated the incumbent, Pat Wheeler, by 278 votes to 260; a third candidate won 30.

Neither the small turnout — 16 percent of the town’s registered voters — nor the narrow margin of victory has stopped Mr. Burris and his wife, Marcia Baird Burris, from proclaiming the election a landmark in the racial evolution of the New South.

”There’s a new Klan in Stone Mountain,” Mr. Burris said in an interview, ”only it’s spelled with a C: c-l-a-n, citizens living as neighbors. And I guess I’m the black dragon.”

Mr. Burris’s election to the part-time, $300-a-month position is a tribute to his years of public involvement, both in Stone Mountain, where he has served two terms on the City Council, and in nearby Atlanta, where he worked as a budget analyst for that city’s first black Mayor, Maynard H. Jackson. It is also a testament to the gradual easing of racial politics in some Southern communities.

But perhaps above all, it reflects a remarkable demographic shift in the suburbs of cities like Atlanta, where certain middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, once exclusively white, have seemed to integrate almost overnight.

In 1980, white voters were 94 percent of the electorate in the city of Stone Mountain. By 1990, the figure had slipped to 85 percent. Only seven years later, half the registered voters in this town of 35,000 people are black.

It is not just the result of the mayoral election that suggests racial progress here. It is the nature of the campaign as well. Mr. Burris said that his opponents, both white, had not stooped to either overt or coded racial appeals and that he had not felt any racial animosity.

He also recalled with a chuckle the phone call he received from a 92-year-old white woman who had lived in Stone Mountain all her life.

”She wanted to know what kind of mayor I was going to be, was I going to be one way or the other,” Mr. Burris said. ”I said, ‘I’m not sure I understand.’ ”

The woman clarified: ”Are you going to be for the white people or the black people, or are you going to be for everybody?”

Mr. Burris assured the woman that he would try to represent everyone.

”She said, ‘Well, I don’t mind turning the city over to you blacks if y’all are going to act right.’ ”

Mr. Burris, a 46-year-old computer consultant, is the kind of man who savors life’s ironies like a smooth brandy. He is amused that Mr. Venable was born on Jan. 15, the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and had to spend his own final birthdays watching the nation celebrate the life of the civil rights martyr. The first thing Mr. Burris did upon moving into the Venable home, he said, was hang on a bedroom wall a framed picture of Dr. King, whose ”I have a dream” speech included a call to ”let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.”

The Burrises did not at first want to buy Mr. Venable’s house, which was owned at the time by Mr. Venable’s daughter, Ginger V. Birts. But they eventually fell for the place, and now Mr. Burris views his earlier resistance in itself as a reflection of a certain kind of prejudice.

”It wasn’t until we got to know it,” he said, ”until we gave it a chance, until we opened the door and looked in, that we realized we liked the house and didn’t care who had owned it before.”

Mr. Burris has maintained a firm friendship with Ms. Birts, who says of the Burrises, ”They’re just great people.”

Both Ms. Birts and Mr. Burris recall that in 1991, Mr. Venable, by then elderly and ailing, allowed Mr. Burris to plant a campaign sign on the Venable lawn for his first run for the City Council.

After that election, Mr. Burris received a call from Ms. Birts, who said she wanted to insure that when her father died, the city would not redesignate a street that carried the Venable name. Sensing an opportunity, Mr. Burris told Ms. Birts that he would be pleased if the family would no longer allow Klansmen to hold rallies on its property at the base of the mountain, where three 60-foot crosses were burned each Labor Day weekend.

The deal was struck. And that, Marcia Burris jokes, left the Klan ”all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

Mr. Burris grew up in Louisiana, the son of a school principal and a high school English teacher. He used to pray for the end of summer, because ”at least there was a limit to homework during school.”

When he was 3 years old, he said, a cross was burned in his family’s yard. He said he remembered being awakened in the middle of the night by his mother, who told him to collect some toys, that they were leaving. Several years later, he said, a cross was burned at his school.

As a scholarship student at Morehouse College in 1967, he sat in on several Saturday seminars led by Dr. King, and once told Dr. King that he did not think he could respond to violence with nonviolence. Dr. King replied, ”You will always be a slave if you let other people control your behavior.”

To Mr. Burris’s thinking, as to many here, Stone Mountain’s image has been distorted by the activities of a few locals, an annual pilgrimage by outsiders and some distant history (the Klan had been largely inactive for decades before its rebirth at a 1915 rally on the mountain).

Of course, the Confederate carving on the mountain, which rises from a state park abutting the city, remains. The huge sculpture, depicting Lee, Davis and Jackson on horseback, was commissioned in 1916 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a memorial to their Civil War dead, but, with work proceeding in fits and starts for decades, it was 1970 before it was dedicated.

Mr. Burris says the sculpture does not bother him as much as the need to pour new sidewalks, reduce property tax appraisals on the elderly and cleanse the city of crack houses.

”Maybe things are getting a little better,” he said. ”If nothing else, hopefully my election will make people know that the city of Stone Mountain is a good town, that everybody is welcome here, that there are no bars to anyone moving here and finding friends and neighbors.”

Stone Mountain Park Annual Pumpkin Festival

Dates:  October 3 - 26 , 2008 (Fridays - Sundays)

Times:
10:00 AM - 6:00 PM on Fridays & Sundays
10:00 AM - 7:00 PM with Lasershow at 8:00 PM on Saturdays

Come out and enjoy some cooler weather at Atlanta’s favorite place to celebrate the
fall season. Now in it’s 6th year, Stone Mountain Park’s annual Pumpkin Festival
has become a family favorite with kids and parents alike.

Throughout weekends in October enjoy attractions, entertainment, activities and fall
decorations that are fun for all ages.