16A Friday-Sunday, July 3-5, 2020 Denton Record-Chronicle

Ratonia Runnels

Jeff Woo/DRC file photo

Crews at work atop the Denton landfill in 2018. The city plans to expand the landfill by 100 acres to the north.

Fiona Scoggin/For the DRC

Denton County Public Health provides a free drive-thru COVID-19 testing center on Tuesdays at the University of North Texas’ Union Circle Parking Garage.

By Kate Brumback and Russ BynumAssociated Press

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. — Some statues of figures from America’s slave-owning past have been yanked down by pro-testers, others dismantled by order of governors or city lead-ers. But the largest Confederate monument ever crafted — co-lossal figures carved into the sol-id rock of a Georgia mountain-side — may outlast them all.

Stone Mountain’s supersized sculpture depicting Gen. Rob-ert E. Lee, Confederate Presi-dent Jefferson Davis and Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson mounted on horseback has special protection enshrined in Georgia law.

Even if its demolition were sanctioned, the monument’s sheer size poses serious chal-lenges. The carving measures 190 feet across and 90 feet tall. An old photo shows a worker on scaffolding just below Lee’s chin barely reaching his nose.

Numerous Confederate stat-ues and monuments to Amer-ican slave owners have come down across the South amid recent protests against racial in-justice. Stone Mountain hasn’t escaped notice.

After organizing a protest where thousands marched in neighboring Atlanta, 19-year-old Zoe Bambara held a demon-stration June 4 with a much smaller group — her permit allowed no more than 25 — in-side the state park where the sculpture has drawn millions of tourists for decades.

“The Confederacy doesn’t celebrate the South; it celebrates white supremacy,” said Bamba-ra, who is Black. “The people on that mountain, they hated me. They didn’t know me, but they hated me and my ancestors. It hurts to see those people cele-brated and a memorial dedicat-ed to them.”

Still, Bambara admits she’s at a loss for what should be done with the massive monument, conceived some 50 years after the Civil War ended but not fin-ished until 1972.

The sculpture’s creators used dynamite to blast huge chunks of granite away from the moun-tain, then spent years carving the detailed figures with hand-held cutting torches.

Erasing the carving would be dangerous, time-consuming and expensive.

The stone is likely too durable

for sandblasting, said Ben Bent-kowski, president of the Atlanta Geological Society. Controlled ex-plosions using TNT packed into holes drilled in the mountainside would work, he said.

“With the logistics, the safety aspect of it, you’d have a budget certainly north of $1 million, I suspect,” Bentkowski said. “You’ll need insurance for the project, you’ll need hazard pay for people working on the sur-face of it. It could easily take a year or more.”

There’s also a sizable legal obstacle.

When Georgia lawmakers voted in 2001 to change the state flag that had been dominated by the Confederate battle emblem since 1956, language to guaran-tee the preservation of the Stone Mountain sculpture was includ-ed as a bargaining chip.

The law states that “the memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be al-tered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion.”

Ryan Gravel, an Atlan-ta-based urban designer, noted the law doesn’t mandate main-tenance. He suggested allowing nature to take its course, letting vegetation grow over the sculp-ture from its nooks and cran-nies.

“I think we’re in a moment where pushing the limits of that

law is possible,” Gravel said. “And certainly the scale of the challenge at Stone Mountain warrants that.”

Other ideas — such as add-ing a bell tower atop the moun-tain in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — have failed to take hold. And Democratic proposals to strip the protective language from Georgia law have fallen flat with the Republi-can-controlled Legislature.

Asked whether Stone Moun-tain still deserves special pro-tection, GOP Gov. Brian Kemp didn’t give a direct answer when speaking to reporters June 26.

“As I’ve said many times, we can’t hide from our history,” Kemp said, while citing the new hate crimes law he signed the same day as a significant step in fighting racial injustice.

Stone Mountain wasn’t a bat-tle site and had little historical significance to the Civil War. But 50 years after the war ended, the exposed surface of the moun-tain’s northern face sparked an idea among the United Daugh-ters of the Confederacy.

“It looked like a giant bill-board,” said Stan Deaton, senior historian for the Georgia Histor-ical Society.

The group hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum — who later would carve Mount Rushmore — to design a massive Confed-erate monument in 1915.

That same year, the movie

“The Birth of a Nation” glorified the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan and Stone Mountain played a key role in its resurgence, mark-ing its comeback with a cross burning atop the mountain on Thanksgiving night.

Budget problems plagued the Stone Mountain project and work on the sculpture lan-guished until the state bought the mountain and surround-ing land in 1958 for a public park. Finishing the monument gained renewed urgency as the civil rights movement brought unwanted change to defiant Southern states.

“It became the centerpiece of the park,” Deaton said. “There was never any doubt that the state’s intention of finishing this was of a piece with massive re-sistance.”

An estimated 10,000 people attended the monument’s ded-ication in 1970. Another two years passed before its official completion.

Five decades later, the park at Stone Mountain markets itself as a family theme park rather than a shrine to the “Lost Cause” mythology that romanti-cizes the Confederacy as chival-rous defenders of states’ rights. Its website highlights miniature golf and a dinosaur-themed at-traction while downplaying the Confederate carving, Confeder-ate flags and brick terraces ded-icated to each Confederate state.

Confederate carving has size on its side in debate

John Bazemore/AP file photo

A carving depicting Confederate Civil War figures Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jef-ferson Davis is seen June 23, 2015, in Stone Mountain, Ga. The sculpture is America’s largest Confederate memorial.

the landfill back in 2004, in-cluding buying the land needed to expand and ordering the en-gineering and planning permits to ensure compliance with all federal and state environmental laws.

Boerner told the hearing participants that the additional land includes about 66 acres to buffer operations from the sur-rounding community.

The city has invested about $11 million and 15 years pre-paring for the expansion, which should extend the landfill’s life nearly 75 years at current dis-posal levels, Boerner said.

The city continues to work on its programs to boost recy-cling and other programs that divert trash from the heap, he added. Denton’s 28% recycling rate is about 6 percentage points higher than the state average and also higher than recycling rates in Dallas and Fort Worth.

Resident and participant Brad Pollock said he was con-cerned the expansion would affect the Ryan High School campus more with more dust and odors. The campus is about 2 miles north of the landfill.

Crews at the landfill work to minimize dust and odors, par-ticularly from getting off the site, Boerner said.

However, the weather some-times affects those conditions for many nearby residents and businesses on Denton’s east side.

Longtime resident Sharon Speiss, who lives just north of the landfill, has noticed more truck traffic on Mayhill Road.

“The odor and blown trash that already exists are greater than they should be,” Speiss said.

In addition to the online public hearing, residents and activists provided dozens of written comments, most oppos-ing the landfill’s expansion.

The comments become part of the public record that goes to the TCEQ commissioners.

The TCEQ staff will make a recommendation, but it’s the commissioners who grant, modify or deny Denton’s permit application.

Generally, the commission-ers meet twice a month. Den-ton’s permit application has not yet been scheduled for a com-mission agenda.

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881 and via Twitter at @phwolfeD-RC.

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Landfill

Dallas

County reports 1,103 new coronavirus cases

Dallas County reported 1,103 cases of COVID-19 on Saturday, setting a record for daily new cases for the fourth time this week.

The county also reported two deaths. The county had 44 deaths this week, marking the deadliest week of the pandemic the county has experienced thus far.

The county has now had

24,778 cases of the disease — about 9.4 cases for every 1,000 residents — and 395 deaths, about a third of which had been associated with long-term care facilities. The county does not report recoveries.

County health officials have said the spike in cases is a re-sult of people letting their guard down and venturing outside their homes more, a trend they say started during Memorial Day weekend.

— The Dallas Morning News

BRIEFLYACROSS THE STATE

Ami Moore

County residents make up a larger percentage of positive cases compared with their share

of the county population.

Ami Moore, a professor at the University of North Texas who has re-searched health disparities, said this stems from socioeconomic

status. People who are consid-ered the majority — which is not always the numerical majority — are the people who have the most valued resources such as wealth, prestige and power. Moore said socioeconomic status tends to fall along racial lines.

“We know that health doesn’t begin when you’re an adult or a certain age — it begins at conception,” Moore said. “The environment you live in, the experiences you have during pregnancy … affects the out-come of your health. … People with fewer valued resources tend to have poor health. It’s not because they don’t know about healthy behaviors necessarily, but social factors push them to have poor health.”

Denton County Public Health first started reporting racial and ethnic demograph-ics with COVID-19 numbers in mid-June. Non-Hispanic white Denton County residents made up 58.2% of the county population in 2018 but account for 33.82% of coronavirus cas-es and 54.05% of deaths, as of Thursday.

“In terms of COVID more specifically, it’s really just a melt-ing pot of contributing factors when we look at who has to work outside of the home, who lives in multigenerational or multifamily

homes, who has the best access to care. … It’s pretty clear the level of suscep-tibility,” said Texas Woman’s University pro-fessor Ratonia Runnels, who

has also researched health dis-parities.

Latinos in Denton County make up 34.33% of cases and 21.62% of deaths but account for 19.5% of the population. Black Denton County residents account for 10.2% of the popula-

tion but make up 11.79% of cas-es and 5.41% of deaths. About 11.56% of patients’ races are re-ported as unknown.

“Our local demographic data is showing Hispanic communi-ty members in Denton County are disproportionately affected by COVID-19,” Matt Richard-son, director of Denton County Public Health, said during a Commissioners Court meeting in June.

While Black Americans make up about 11% of the country’s pop-ulation, they account for 20.7% of COVID-19 cases and 22.8% of deaths where race is reported, ac-

cording to data from the Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC says non-Hispan-ic Black people in America are hospitalized at a rate five times higher than non-Hispanic white people.

Some of the reasons they list for why people of color are disproportionately affected in-clude living in densely populat-ed areas; Latinos being three times as likely to be uninsured as their white counterparts, and non-Hispanic Black Americans twice as likely; language barri-ers; and Black Americans expe-

riencing higher rates of chronic conditions at earlier ages and higher death rates than their white counterparts.

“For African Americans, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment is at the forefront when we talk about distrust,” Runnels said. “Another issue for Latinos here in Texas and California is im-migration status, a fear of being reported and also possibly the language barrier. Cultural and linguistic competence can be improved ... to ensure people are being prosperity treated.”

The Tuskegee Institute and Public Health Service in 1932

began the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” according to the CDC. Of the 600 men, 399 had syphilis and 201 didn’t.

“Researchers told the men they were being treated for ‘bad blood,’ a local term used to de-scribe several ailments, includ-ing syphilis, anemia and fatigue. In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness,” the CDC states.

Essential services are also a factor in people of color facing higher rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths. The New York Times reported in late June that

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Virus