STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. — A small city in the Atlanta suburbs and the big, contentious Confederate monument that shares its name seemed headed for trouble on Saturday. Far-right activists and white supremacist militia groups planned to gather at Stone Mountain to symbolically “defend” the monument, and antiracist and far-left counterprotesters planned to confront them.
But the state park surrounding the monument locked its gates for the day, and the city made it clear that angry demonstrators spoiling for trouble would be far from welcome on the streets.
“Out of an abundance of caution,” municipal leaders said, the general public was asked “to avoid the City of Stone Mountain.” Public bus service was halted, and residents and business owners were “encouraged to refrain from travel and activities within the downtown area.”
And when some scuffling and pepper spraying broke out around midday between a small knot of white supremacists and more numerous counterprotesters, law enforcement officers in riot gear moved in to break it up. No arrests or serious injuries were reported.
Daniel Brown, the owner of the Gilly Brew Bar coffee shop in the city, says it sometimes feels as though he lives in one giant monument to the losing side of the Civil War, but he is proud to be here.
Mr. Brown, who is Black, runs his coffee shop in a nearly 200-year-old house that once belonged to the city’s first mayor, a slave owner named Andrew Johnson, on what was once considered the white side of the tracks that slice through town. He feels that he’s fostering community and diversity, not much farther than a mile from the immense bas-relief of Confederate leaders that the fuss is all about.
The far-right groups’ planned gathering was meant as a riposte to a rally that a Black militia group held in the state park on July 4. But the last-minute decision to close the park on Saturday switched the focus to the city, where armed and unarmed demonstrators collided to argue over whether monuments to the Confederacy were representations of Southern heritage or of racism and oppression.
The front porch of the coffee shop, shaded by a tree that is said to bear the marks of old lynchings, offered a resonant vantage point for the fracas.
When Mr. Brown began talking a few years ago about opening a restaurant in the mayor’s old house, which was also used as a hospital during the Civil War, some of the neighbors raised eyebrows, he said in an interview on Saturday.
“We didn’t let that stop us,” he said. Now, Mr. Brown, who was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., believes he’s helping to bridge the cultural divide that lingers in his adopted Southern hometown. “When I came here, I did not see community, and I’m a big fan of building community,” he said.
Bringing people together for conversations about the past and future of the community should come before deciding what to do with the Confederate monument, which some have proposed dynamiting off the side of the mountain. “Getting rid of the carving isn’t going to fix the issue,” he said. “It would be great to see it come down, but I’m trying to get to the root of this debate.”
A five-minute walk away on Main Street, a new brewpub called the Outrun Brewing Company, opened on July 3, and the owners, Josh Miller and Ryan Silva, said they were jolted when the Black militia group marched the next day, making the small city a flash point in a national debate over racism.
But Mr. Miller and Mr. Silva said they saw an opportunity to provide a safe space for potentially tough conversations. “This is what beer is all about,” Mr. Miller said, “bringing people together.”
The two men, who are white, said they are Black Lives Matter supporters. “We’re obviously not going to be on the side holding the Confederate flags,” said Mr. Silva, who stood behind their bar after watching the frenzy unfolding just outside. “That’s not what craft beer is about.”
Opening a business in the throes of a pandemic has been no small task, they said, and having chaos erupt in the street nearby wasn’t helpful. But they said they were glad to shoulder the burden if it would help show people that Stone Mountain was more than just a few old faces etched into the side of a rock.
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