I had the wrong impression of Stone Mountain. The town, a half-hour from Atlanta, abuts the nation’s largest Confederate monument: the titular Stone Mountain, etched with the likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.

The carving is the central attraction of Stone Mountain Park, a fenced-in recreation area and amusement park that boasts streets named “Robert E. Lee Boulevard” and “Stonewall Jackson Drive.” Not infrequently, white supremacists make calls to gather at the mountain, which was the birthplace of the modern KKK.

Last weekend, Confederate-flag-wielding groups descended on the town in response to armed Black protesters marching into the park on July 4.

But Stone Mountain, I’ve found, is not what I imagined. In the few weeks I’ve spent wandering around the town, the park and the surrounding area, I’ve met Black people, Brown people, White people, Muslims, Christians, Mormons and a White lesbian couple with an adopted Black son. Near a Walmart, I saw a store selling burqas next to a Caribbean bakery. In a neighboring town, one restaurant sign offered “Italian Indian Mexican Jamaican American Thai Cuisine.”

I went to Stone Mountain out of curiosity, after seeing video of the July 4 protesters. I’m new to the South; I moved to Atlanta a year ago from San Francisco, and I’ve lived most of my adulthood in major coastal cities. Despite spending a few years of elementary school in an Atlanta suburb, I had preconceptions of the South as a regressive place. It didn’t help that when I was looking to establish health care, a White doctor said — unprompted — that I was right to leave California on account of all the “illegals.” When my Latina girlfriend, who has never lived in the South, tells her friends that she’s moved to Georgia, they all have the same question: Why?

So I guess I was expecting Stone Mountain to be a little more, well, “Southern.” As a Black acquaintance recently told me, “If you make one wrong turn outside Atlanta, you’re back down South.” Thinking back, I’m not quite sure what he meant by that. As a brown-skinned person, though, I interpreted it like this: I should watch out.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised by what I discovered in Stone Mountain. After all, the town’s neighbor Clarkston is known as “the most diverse square mile in America” for its immigrant and refugee population. In DeKalb County, where Stone Mountain Park is located, White people became a minority in 1991. Black people make up more than 78 percent of Stone Mountain’s 6,300 residents.

Stone Mountain’s Main Street features a gazebo where families picnic. Young people drive around singing songs out their car windows. There’s a brewery and a farm-to-table restaurant and a theater (the kind that puts on plays). The historic downtown reminds me of Stars Hollow, the fictional Connecticut town featured on the television show “Gilmore Girls” — except more humid, with more Black people, and set under the shadow of what one friend calls “Racist Rock.”

It wasn’t too long ago that the town had a more sinister vibe. Some longtime Stone Mountain residents remember when the Klan used to march and gather there. Actor and musician Donald Glover, who grew up in the town in the 1980s, told Esquire magazine that he remembers “Confederate flags everywhere.”

One day, looking for remnants of this Stone Mountain, I asked a woman if I could find any Confederate flags hanging in town. “Oh no,” she said, taken aback. “Not around here.” (It’s a different story in Stone Mountain Park, where I saw a Confederate flag at half-mast the day after civil rights hero John Lewis died.)

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“The story of change in [Stone Mountain] is common to suburbs all around the South,” says Grace Elizabeth Hale, a history professor at the University of Virginia. Job opportunities and a low cost of living attracted a variety of people looking to become upwardly mobile.

It’s largely the reason I left California for Georgia. Even some rural areas have attracted newcomers, says Hale.

“There has been a way, historically, in which white Southerners have used ‘Southern’ to mean a particular vision of segregation, of the ‘Lost Cause,’ and of what they call the Southern way of life,” says Hale. But Stone Mountain suggests that definition is changing, too.

People think of the South as “just something you watch in black and white movies and … not a place where progress comes unless you’re in Atlanta, in Charlotte, in Charleston,” Stacey Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor in 2018, recently said. “But the reality is the South is growing and changing.”

Of course, the new is bound to clash with the old, and that’s exactly what happened on Saturday when right-wing groups rallied at Stone Mountain to defend their Southern heritage. Protesters, including far-right militias and white supremacists, had initially planned to make their stand at Stone Mountain Park, in sight of their Confederate heroes. Many came from out of town or out of state. But the park’s last-minute decision to close left them to gather in town on Main Street, amid storefronts that have for weeks proclaimed with hand-painted signs that Black Lives Matter.

For an event so tied to a symbol, this change in venue seemed symbolic in itself: from a Confederate relic to a contemporary community, a forced reckoning with the times.

It was also striking that the few dozen gun-toting pro-Confederates were vastly outnumbered by a diverse group of counterprotesters — some of whom also toted guns. (The South may be changing, but it’s still the South.)

The rally consisted mostly of people yelling at each other — “every argument you’ve ever seen on Facebook,” I heard one person say into his cellphone camera — but there were moments of violence, with fistfights, pepper spray unleashed, and rocks hurled into the crowd. Nobody was arrested.

Residents I spoke to had mixed opinions on the monument next door but said that the park is a great place to visit and that the town is a great place to live.

Karen Patton, a Black restaurant owner who moved to Stone Mountain from Washington D.C., says that while she’s sure there are folks around who “wish they could go back 20 or 30 years,” she has always felt welcome in the town. Others agree.

“We are a village … the majority of us are a tightknit community,” says Jasmine Little, a member of Stone Mountain’s City Council.

As for me, the South is growing on me.

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