The Day I Escaped A Klan Rally At Stone Mountain

Colette R. Haywood is an Atlanta-based educator, artist and community advocate whose work explores history, race and collective memory. As a child growing up in metro Atlanta, she experienced racism long before she understood what it meant, including an encounter with a Ku Klux Klan rally at Stone Mountain.

My aunt was the first Black person to move onto her street.

There were some white neighbors, and they 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 like he didn’t know they were ignoring us.

I would be standing there thinking, That is so weird.

One day, I think my uncle said hello to a little boy, and the little boy picked up dog poop and threw it at me. He called us the N-word.

I remember that.

Later on, it must have been that same summer, because I still didn’t know what the N-word meant, my aunt and I climbed Stone Mountain.

That was our routine. Every evening, we went to Stone Mountain to climb and play around. We might not make it all the way to the top, but that was our exercise or family time.

My aunt was a Trekkie, so we always had to get home for “Star Trek” and “227.” This was before DVRs or streaming. TV went off at midnight, so you had to watch your show when it was on.

So rushing down the mountain was nothing new. I thought we were rushing because she was going to miss “Star Trek.”

But when we got to the bottom, there were people in pickup trucks with flags. I was trying to look around and figure out what was going on. Some people driving past us were screaming off the back of their truck.

I was a little kid, so I was wondering, Are they talking to me? What are they saying?

They were screaming the N-word.

My aunt was rushing to the car. All I know is she snatched me, swatted me, and shoved me into the car.

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

We got home, and on the news, there was a Klan rally at Stone Mountain.

I asked my aunt, “What’s the Klan?”

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 were they calling us the N-word? What does that mean?”

I want to say she told me it meant something like a low-down, dirty person. But what she didn’t say was that they were talking about Black people.

As I think about it now, she had created another category. She made it seem like those people could use that word, but somehow it was not about our skin color.

In these 50 years, Stone Mountain has changed. I’m 58 now, and if I was about 8 then, that was half a century ago. Stone Mountain has become much more integrated. You rarely hear about the Klan there now.

Grady High School has been renamed Midtown High School because students advocated for a more accurate telling of history.

And here we are, still fighting Reconstruction again. I believe that is a response to having the first Black president, not once, but twice in a row.