The Day I Escaped A Klan Rally At Stone Mountain

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

My aunt was the first Black person to move onto her street, so there were white neighbors who would never talk to us. But my uncle used to force them to talk. He would just keep the conversation going as if they were regular neighbors and pretend he didn’t know they were ignoring us. I would be standing there thinking, That is so weird.

I remember saying hello to one of the little boys on the street. He picked up dog poop and threw it at me and said, “Niggers.” I remember that.

Later that summer, I realized I didn’t even know what that word meant.

My aunt used to take us to Stone Mountain all the time. That was our routine. Every evening we would climb the mountain and play around. We might not make it all the way to the top, but that was our family time.

She was a Trekkie, so you knew you had to get home in time for Star Trek. We didn’t have streaming or anything like that. You watched your show when it came on. TV even went off at midnight back then.

So we were used to rushing down the mountain because she didn’t want to miss Star Trek. I thought that was why we were hurrying. But when we got to the bottom, there were a bunch of people in pickup trucks with flags.

I could tell my aunt was rushing, but I was trying to figure out what was going on. People were driving past us, yelling from the backs of their trucks. I was a little kid, wondering if they were talking to me.

They were yelling, “Nigger.”

I had turned to look at them while my aunt was rushing toward the car. All I know is she grabbed me, swatted me and shoved me inside.

I still didn’t understand why she was so upset. In my child’s mind, I was thinking, Damn, it’s just Star Trek.

When we got home, the news was showing that there had been a Klan rally at Stone Mountain.

I asked my aunt what the Klan was. She told me they were white people who liked to catch Black people and kill them by hanging them from trees.

Then I asked her why they were calling us niggers. What was a nigger?

I want to say she told me it meant a low-down, dirty person, but she never actually connected it to being Black. Looking back now, I think what she was trying to do was protect me. She created this category of “other,” where those people were talking about someone else, not us. She never related the word to our skin color.

It’s amazing to think about what’s changed in the last 50 years. I’m 58 now, so I must have been about 8 then.

Stone Mountain has become much more integrated. You rarely hear about the Klan anymore. Grady High School has been renamed Midtown High because students pushed for a more honest telling of history.

And yet here we are, fighting Reconstruction all over again. That’s the response to having the first Black president, not once, but twice in a row.