In a detailed survey of land transactions, journalist Elliot Jaspin has shown that while a small minority of Forsyth’s black property owners got out early and received something close to fair market value for their land, the vast majority either sold at artificially low prices or simply walked away—knowing that their white neighbors would eventually take over their property. Each transaction is “carefully recorded in oversized books . . . in the basement of the Forsyth County Courthouse,” Jaspin writes,
and each sale tells a tale of black people who struggled to build a life [in Forsyth] and were crushed by the terror. . . . In all, twenty-four African-American landowners and seven churches . . . sold their property [and] the timing of these sales gives a sense of the panic people felt. The worst case was Alex Hunter, who, just three months before the expulsions, bought a farm for $1,500. Faced with death or leaving, he sold it in December 1912 for $550.
Jaspin found that even after selling for a third of his land’s value, Alex Hunter was still luckier than many others, who simply walked away and lost everything. “For thirty-four of the black landowners,” Jaspin writes,
there is no record that they ever sold their land. It made no difference. Whites, money in hand, would pay the tax on land they did not own and the clerk would note the transaction . . . simply ignor[ing] the gap in ownership. . . . In the three years after the expulsion, nearly two-thirds of the black-owned farmland that had not been sold was appropriated in this way.
With the racial ban still violently enforced, whites could feel confident that black owners would never appear and try to reclaim the land they had left behind. Even if someone was reckless enough to try, word spread that whites could defend land seizures not just with shotguns and pistols but under a common-law principle known as “adverse possession.” If a man went down to the county courthouse, signed an affidavit swearing he had occupied the land “continuously, openly, and notoriously” and had been paying taxes on the lots, then according to state law, the original “adverse possession” would “ripen into title” after seven years, since the owner had taken no steps to repossess his property. In Georgia, this legal right—meant to encourage productive use of abandoned land—included the stipulation that any new claim “must not have originated in fraud [and] must be public, continuous, exclusive, uninterrupted, and peaceable.”
Black owners abandoned land in Forsyth for many reasons—from armed invasion, to arson, to dynamite—but everyone in Georgia knew that none of them were remotely “peaceable.” Nonetheless, when white residents walked down to the courthouse to register deeds on land they had long ago fenced in as their own, the county clerk rarely even raised an eyebrow. In 1912, the expulsion of Forsyth’s black population had made news all over the country, but the thefts that followed were given a legal stamp of approval by the state, and they went unnoticed by anyone but the expelled black property owners themselves. “There was land for the taking,” as Jaspin put it, “and in this free-for-all, the [county] tax clerk kept score.”
BY THE EARLY 1920S, the elementary schools of Cumming were filled with a generation of white children who had no memory of the black people who once occupied those stolen lots. Most had never seen a black resident of Forsyth, and never would. As the Macon Telegraph put it in 1921, “in Forsyth more or less pride is taken that they have run out all the negroes.” With the violent raids of 1912 receding into the past, it became possible for civic leaders to boast that while other north Georgia communities continued to suffer episodes of “race trouble,” there were no such embarrassments in Forsyth.
The signs that African Americans once lived there had already begun to fade, and the remnants of that old world were visible only to those who knew where to look. A reporter driving north from Atlanta in January of 1921 wrote that “soon after the Chattahoochee has been crossed . . . a lone brick chimney stands amid blackened ruins . . . [and] a mile further on an old stove rises above a pile of stones which once formed the foundations of a little church and school.” Many readers must have recalled the year when mobs drove more than a thousand black residents out of Forsyth County, yet the article made no mention of how that abandoned house first turned into “blackened ruins” or who had once occupied that “little church and school” now turning into a pile of mossy stones.
Night riders continued to make headlines in other Georgia counties in the early 1920s, but having once been synonymous with lawlessness, Forsyth found that its “race troubles” were quickly forgotten by many whites, and its reputation was already being rehabilitated. When, in 1923, the Atlanta Constitution asked a north Georgia man named Arnold B. Hall to write a profile of the county, he made no mention of the expulsions and called Forsyth “a far-famed county of grand old Georgia where rich lands, rotation of crops and marked advancement in animal industry and horticultural activity are awakening the people with a new purpose, a dynamic zest, and a vigorous vision!”
Forsyth County’s white defenders are quick to point out that the racial purge of 1912 was not, as is often believed, absolute. And records confirm that while nearly all of the 1,098 people listed as black or “mulatto” in 1910 were gone from Forsyth by 1920, when a census taker named Vester Buice made his rounds in February of that year, he did eventually come upon a small group of black families living in the Big Creek section, along Forsyth’s southern border with Milton County.
The families of Ed and Bertha Moon, Will and Corrie Strickland, and Marvin and Rubie Rocks were all clustered together at the bottom edge of the county, as far as one could get from Oscarville and still be in Forsyth. The most prosperous of the group was Will Strickland, whose father James had been born a slave on the Strickland plantation in 1850. The Strickland farms were so notorious for their harsh treatment of slaves that Hardy, the family patriarch, had become known far and wide as “Devil Hard” Strickland. But James Strickland stayed in Forsyth even after emancipation, and he was among the young, newly freed black men of the county when in 1867 he signed his oath of allegiance at the Cumming courthouse. Just like Joseph Kellogg, he seems to have been both industrious and patient, for by 1900, after decades of sharecropping and saving, he and his wife Rosanna owned the property they worked in Big Creek. By 1910, James’s son Will was farming their land and doing well enough, at least, to support a family with ten children.
Apologists for Forsyth have often pointed to the 1920 census roll, and those twenty-three black residents living around Will Strickland’s farm, in an attempt to deny that African Americans were forced out. But it seems clear that twenty-three people returning to the county after more than a thousand have been banished does not mean the purge was any less violent or widespread than was reported in the papers. Instead, it suggests that a kind of exemption, or at least protection, was granted to these employees of the white Strickland family, whose power in the county was unmatched.
There is no way to know exactly where the black Strickland, Moon, and Rocks families went during the first waves of violence, but there is strong evidence that they fled along with the rest of the African American community. When Ed Moon filled out a WWI draft card in 1918, he was living forty miles east of Cumming, in Maysville, a town the white Stricklands had helped found in Jackson County in the nineteenth century. Jackson happened to be the birthplace of Forsyth’s largest slave owners—Hardy, Tolbert, and Oliver Strickland—and was still home to many of their kin. One likely scenario is that when the mobs of Forsyth threatened black employees like Ed Moon, the white Stricklands simply relocated them to other family farms in Jackson County. And then, at some point after the violence had died down, and prior to the 1920 census, the Stricklands quietly brought some of their black laborers back into Forsyth, where they were isolated but protected as long as they stayed on Strickland property.
Whether it was the lure of wages, the threat of punishment, or a lack of any better option, at some point after 1918, at great risk, those twenty-three people stepped back across the invisible line and were counted as Forsyth residents in 1920. No mention was made in the papers, no mobs assembled at the edge of the Strickland place, and there is no record of their presence other than those few entries that Vester Buice scrawled in his census ledger. As enraged as locals had been at the sight of the “Seeing Georgia” chauffeurs, they likely knew better than to test the rich and powerful white Strickland clan. That small cluster of black people at the southern edge of the county still numbered sixteen in the census of 1930. Then, at some point after 1930, they were gone. The Moons to Gainesville. Will and Corrie Strickland just nine miles south, to Milton County, near Alpharetta, and Marvin and Rubie Rocks to some new life of which no traces survived.
ACROSS THE CHATTAHOOCHEE, in Hall County, Jane Daniel was just starting to imagine a more ambitious escape—not just from the lynchers and night riders of Forsyth but out of the South altogether. In the census of 1920, we can still find her, age twenty-nine, pinning white people’s damp clothes to the line in her backyard, as somewhere in Gainesville Will Butler gripped the wooden handle of a pair of steel pincers and lugged a fifty-pound block of ice through the back door of a white man’s mansion. But when the census taker came back to Atlanta Street in 1930, neighbors said that Will and Jane were gone—having boarded a northbound train at the depot in Gainesville and joined so many other young black people of their generation in the Great Migration.
By the early 1930s, Jane Daniel and Will Butler were renting a house at 467 Theodore Street, in the Paradise Valley neighborhood of Detroit. Having grown up in rural Forsyth and then lived in the small railroad city of Gainesville, Jane suddenly found herself at the center of a booming industrial metropolis. Census records show that Jane and Will’s neighborhood was filled with others who had been born to sharecroppers and field hands in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, and Mississippi—but who now worked as cooks, maids, bricklayers, and night watchmen.
And more than anywhere else, the black residents of Detroit worked in the bustling factories of Motor City: Fisher Body, at the corner of Piquette and St. Antoine; Cadillac’s Detroit Assembly, on Clark Street; and the Hudson Motors plant, off Jefferson Avenue. Whereas the backdrop of her youth had been pine forests, cotton fields, and the lazy, deep green waters of the Chattahoochee, the second half of Jane’s life would play out amidst smokestacks and glowing steel ingots, in a city whose pulse in its heyday one visitor described as “the sound of a hammer against a steel plate.”
Sign protesting the arrival of black tenants, Sojourner Truth housing project, Detroit, February 1942
One migrant of Jane’s generation described the life she left behind in the Jim Crow South as “like sleeping on a volcano which may erupt at any moment,” and Jane must have felt a similar kind of relief once she and Will were settled in Detroit—to be out of Georgia, and beyond the reach of the white people who had killed her first husband, Rob, and celebrated the hanging of her brother Oscar and her cousin Ernest. Will and Jane never had children, but the nieces and nephews who knew them in Detroit all understood that Aunt Janie and Uncle Will had begun their lives far away, among the crackers and Klansmen down in Georgia. “Georgia,” they said years later, “was not a place Aunt Janie ever talked too much about.”
BUT IF THE Butlers thought they had escaped white terrorism, they and the rest of Detroit got a rude awakening in the summer of 1943, when the white people of the city decided that they, too, would declare a racially cleansed zone and draw an invisible line that blacks could cross only at risk of their lives.
Racial tensions had been building since the first trainloads of migrants began arriving from the South after World War I. The African American population of the city was just 6,000 in 1910, but by 1929 some 120,000 new black residents had settled in Detroit, and a decade later, in 1940, that number had nearly doubled, to 200,000. During that same span of years, European immigrants were also arriving in unprecedented numbers, and for many of the same reasons: the magnetic draw of high wages and low unemployment, and a chance to escape the violence and deprivation they’d suffered in their homelands.
By the early 1940s, there were simmering tensions between whites and blacks in the city, and they boiled over in the winter of 1942. That was the year the federal government opened the new Sojourner Truth housing project, which was built especially for poor black families but located in a predominantly white area north of Paradise Valley. When the first tenants arrived, on February 28th, neighborhood whites burned a cross in a field near the housing complex, and the next morning a mob of twelve hundred armed white men rallied to keep out black residents—many of whom had already signed leases and paid their first month’s rent. Whites formed a picket line in front of the building, and when two cars driven by black men tried to force their way through the line, a melee broke out. The violence ended only when mounted police arrived with shotguns and tear gas.
White mob dragging an African American man from a Detroit streetcar, June 21, 1943
In April of 1942, 168 black families finally moved into the housing complex, under the protection of the Detroit Police Department and sixteen hundred troops of the Michigan National Guard. Like Jane and Will Butler, the great majority of those families had migrated to Detroit from the South. As they went to bed on their first night in Sojourner Truth—with the racist taunts of whites rising up past the windows of the new high-rise—many must have wondered if they had simply traded one band of night riders for another.
The chaos at Sojourner Truth was only a prelude to what Jane and Will experienced the following summer, when twenty-five thousand workers at Packard walked off the assembly line because black employees had been promoted to jobs that placed them shoulder to shoulder with whites. As one enraged man said outside the plant, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work beside a nigger.”
The shoving and shouting outside Packard turned to more serious violence on the night of June 20th, 1943, when two young black men were expelled from Belle Isle Park, in the middle of the Detroit River. On the bridge linking the park to the city, a skirmish broke out between groups of blacks and whites. In the wake of the clash, a rumor quickly spread across the city: that “blacks had raped and murdered a white woman on the Belle Isle Bridge.”
Many people surely recognized this as the “old threadbare lie” that had fueled half a century of lynch law in the South. But once infuriated whites believed that a gang of black men had “violated” and killed a white woman and thrown her body into the river, it hardly mattered that the story was untrue. If Jane dared to venture out into the city during the three days that followed, she would have witnessed a familiar scene: black bodies being dragged through the streets by gangs of white men.
Witnesses told of mobs ambushing and beating black passengers as they stepped down off trolley cars; a fifty-eight-year-old black man named Moses Kiska being shot and killed for waiting at a bus stop in the wrong part of town; and an unnamed black man being bludgeoned on Woodward Avenue as four white police officers looked on. Jane and Will’s house was just two blocks from Woodward, in the middle of what quickly became a war zone. By the time military troops arrived to stop the rampage, there were thirty-four confirmed killings. Most of the victims had been beaten to death with wooden clubs.
Langston Hughes wrote that at least in the North he had his own “window to shoot from,” and in June of 1943, in Detroit, that’s exactly what black residents like Jane and Will Butler did: keep watch with loaded rifles, stiff-jawed as they waited for the roving mobs. Many of the attackers had European instead of southern accents, but their faces were contorted with the same hatred Jane had seen so many times in Forsyth. All she could do, as so often in her life, was hope that the future might be different. As it said on the flags flying over Detroit’s city hall, Speramus meliora: “We hope for better things.”
DURING THE SAME decades that Jane and Will struggled to build a new life in the North, Forsyth was deep in its sleep of forgetfulness, as all around it the state of Georgia veered even further in the direction of white supremacy. The 1933 governor’s race was won by Eugene Talmadge, a south Georgia farmer who proudly grazed a cow on the lawn of the governor’s mansion and courted the votes of poor rural whites by casting himself as the last line of defense against a “Nigra takeover.” Talmadge held the governorship for three terms between 1933 and 1943 and was, according to writer Gilbert King, “a racial demagogue who presided over a Klan-ridden regime.” In a typical campaign speech in 1942, Talmadge answered a question about school integration by reassuring his segregationist base: “Before God, friend, the niggers will never go to a school which is white while I am Governor.”
One of the few glimpses from inside Forsyth during this period comes from a white woman named Helen Matthews Lewis, who moved into the county as a ten-year-old in 1934, when her father was hired as a county mail carrier. Lewis remembered a white community still very much in the grips of its original paranoia and still openly proud of having “run the niggers out” in 1912. “I was told stories [as a child],” Lewis said,
about how they hung blacks around the courthouse. I knew they lynched the guy that they were accusing of [the rape of Mae Crow]. Stories were told. I could just see bodies hanging all around the courthouse in my mind.
Lewis sometimes caught sight of frightened black deliverymen passing through the county in 1930s: “[Back] then blacks coming in through town on trucks to deliver stuff to the stores were afraid to get out. . . . They would hide in the back.” Lewis also remembered that many Forsyth residents were quick to react to even the slightest trespass across the racial border—from the appearance of a black worker on the back of a truck to an old man who strayed into Forsyth while riding a bicycle north toward Hall County. “My father came home from his mail route one day,” Lewis said,
and he said he saw this old black man bicycling through town on his way to Gainesville. My father said “I’m worried he’s got to go through Chestatee” . . . [past] the rowdy boys of Chestatee. [My father] said “He’ll never make it,” so he gets in his car and he said “I’m going to go find him,” then he goes and picks him up and takes him to Gainesville.
Lewis remembered how another outsider violated the unwritten code in the late 1930s—a woman who moved to the county with her long-serving black maid. “When I was in school” at Forsyth County High, Lewis said,
this teacher comes to town . . . who had this black woman who was a companion, maid, a person who’d always been in their family. And she taught music and the woman lived with her [until] these boys . . . came with torches and surrounded her house and made her get up in the middle of the night and take the black woman back to Alabama.
When an interviewer in 2010 interjected, “Oh, goodness,” Lewis said, “These were my experiences in Forsyth” in the 1930s and ’40s. “There was a sense of . . . horror.”
Lewis was clearly frightened by tales of lynched men hanging from telephone poles, and by the sight of black workers hiding under tarps when they passed through Cumming. But to her schoolmates, “white Forsyth” seemed like the natural and eternal order of things. By 1941, when Lewis graduated from Forsyth County High, most traces of the black community had long since been burned, dismantled, or silently absorbed into the property of whites.
Of that former time, all that was left were fleeting glimpses, visible only to someone who paid very close attention. Not long before she moved out of the county, Lewis remembered, she was walking up to a friend’s front door and noticed faint inscriptions in the stepping-stones that led up to the house. It was only when she knelt down for a closer look that Lewis realized the path she’d been walking on was paved with remnants of black Forsyth. “They [were] gravestones,” she said, “from a black cemetery. Someone had dug them up, and took them home, and used them for flagstones.”
THE CIVIL RIGHTS clashes of the 1950s and ’60s came and went without changing much in the lives of Forsyth’s quiet country people, who in the decades after World War II had been busy erecting chicken houses in their old corn and cotton fields, as America’s expanding poultry industry brought new prosperity to north Georgia. The county seat may have been just a short drive from Ebenezer Baptist—the home church of Martin Luther King Jr. and one of the epicenters of the American civil rights movement—but with no black residents to segregate from whites, there were no “colored” drinking fountains in the Cumming courthouse, and no “whites only” signs in the windows of Cumming’s diners and roadside motels. Instead, as segregationists all over the South faced off against freedom riders, civil rights marches, and lunch-counter sit-ins, Forsyth was a bastion of white supremacy that went almost totally unnoticed.
Even as the nation changed around it, Forsyth’s old, unspoken rules remained, and each new generation of enforcers clung to the code their parents and grandparents had handed down. In May of 1968, just a month after King was assassinated, a group of ten black schoolchildren came north from an Atlanta housing project, as part of a church camping trip led by two white Mennonite counselors—who were unaware of Forsyth’s racial prohibition. At dusk, as the children pitched their tents in a scenic campground beside Lake Lanier, a gang of white men appeared out of the darkness and forced the group to leave, warning them that “we don’t allow niggers in this county after dark.” When Atlanta activists returned a week later to protest the intimidation, they had to be protected by the Georgia State Patrol, as whites gathered around the campsite, chanting, “Wait until the night comes!”
Asked about the clash, Roy P. Otwell, president of the Bank of Cumming, assured a reporter that while he was “sorry to read of it . . . this sort of thing does not represent Forsyth. . . . When we have an incident of this kind it is overplayed and much exaggerated [and] the people of Forsyth County [are] greatly misunderstood.”
BY THE EARLY 1970S, many of the lynchers and night riders had begun to die off, taking with them the last living memories of the expulsions. The identities of these men will probably remain a mystery forever now. But the account of Marcus Mashburn, a local doctor, leaves little doubt that many of them were well-known residents who—after waging a months-long campaign of terror against their own neighbors—went back to quiet lives as farmers, storekeepers, tradesmen, and God-fearing, churchgoing Christians.
Mashburn was a country doctor who practiced for decades in Forsyth, and late in his life he told an interviewer that “in traveling over the county to wait on the sick . . . [I] attended many of the men who took part in the riots and lynching on their deathbeds.” Mashburn described old men racked with guilt over the events of 1912 and said he watched a number of them “die horrible deaths because of their part in the negro lynching.” Even sixty years later, the doctor was careful not to name any names, or to spell out too clearly the obvious conclusion: that Rob Edwards had been murdered not by “parties unknown,” and not by Klansmen flooding down out of the hills, but, just as Ruth Jordan remembered, by regular “people of the county.”
After a few generations of silence, what began as an open secret had become a carefully guarded one, revealed only at the very end, and only to a select few. “As they grew older, their minds [were] burdened by having had a part in the killing,” Dr. Mashburn said, and in their last moments “this thing, they knew, was wrong.”