An East Cobb resident who asked Cobb commissioners Tuesday to include the name of a Confederate general in the name of a new county park along the Chattahoochee River upset the commissioner who took the action item off the meeting agenda.
During a public comment period, Mary Stevens, who said she lives in East Cobb, wants the name of Gen. Joseph Johnston to be part of a proposed park in the Mableton area that includes Civil War earthworks.
Stevens said the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery and that “had it been so bad for the freed slaves they would have left the South.”
She said blacks served the Confederate Army as cooks, chaplains and other laborers and that “naming the park anything that does not include the name of Joseph Johnston is historically inaccurate.”
Johnston was the general in charge of Southern forces that fought Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and the Battle of Atlanta in 1864.
Cobb commissioner Lisa Cupid, who represents Mableton and South Cobb and is the board’s only African-American, tabled a proposal to designate the 103-acre tract as the Mableton Chattahoochee River Line Park.
A master plan for what some South Cobb residents preferred to be called the Mableton Discovery Park was approved by commissioners in March. Cobb has owned the land that’s also been known as Johnston’s River Line since 1990, but finalizing the name has been a thorny matter that has been delayed before.
Cupid said she understood there would be those with different perspectives, which is why she favored the Mableton Chattahoochee River Line Park name as a compromise.
“It’s very clear that this is a very sensitive issue that I don’t think was dealt with very sensitively” by Stevens, said Cupid, saying she was “deeply offended” by her remarks.
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