the Ku Klux Klan According to sociologist James W. Loewen, Stone Mountain was "the sacred site to members of the second and third national klans." Loewen alleges that the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan—the second Klan—was inspired by D. W. Griffith's 1915 Klan-glorifying film, The Birth of a Nation. It was followed in August by the highly publicized lynching of Leo Frank, who had been wrongly convicted of murder, in nearby Marietta, Georgia. Loewen further alleges that on November 25 of the same year, Thanksgiving Day, a small group, including fifteen robed and hooded "charter members" of the new organization, met at the summit of Stone Mountain to create a new iteration of the Klan. Led by William J. Simmons, it included two elderly members of the original Klan. As part of their ceremony, they set up on the summit an altar covered with a flag, opened a Bible, and burned a cross. James R. Venable attended the 1915 revival of the KKK on top of Stone Mountain and later became an Imperial Wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which was one of the later KKK factions. He owned land at the base of the mountain that he had inherited from his ancestors, and in October of 1923 he granted the Klan an easement with perpetual right to hold celebrations as they desired. However, the property was condemned in 1960 at the behest of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association. The Klan also held cross-burnings at the summit of the mountain on different occasions from 1915 onward. This practice came to an end in 1962, when the Klan attempted to hold a mountaintop cross-burning in response to the NAACP holding its national convention in Atlanta. The Stone Mountain Memorial Association did not want either group using state property for demonstrations, and convinced Governor Ernest Vandiver to order state troopers to stop the event. Seventy troopers attempted to stop several hundred Klansmen gathered at the base of the mountain from climbing to the summit, but the Klansmen were armed with billy clubs, flashlights, and stones, and greatly outnumbered the officers. The police negotiated a truce with the local Klan Grand Dragon, under which the Klansmen would refrain from further violence, but 20 of their number would be allowed climb the mountain for a “religious ceremony”, and the cross-burning was substituted with the lighting of a flare. In