THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF MIGUEL MARCELLI
There were long periods when Forsyth’s prohibition went untested, and largely unnoticed, at least by white Georgians. For African Americans, the county’s reputation was so well established that it was rare for anyone to make the mistake of straying over the line. Once in a while, a black truck driver from Atlanta or Chattanooga would take the risk of speeding through, and simply pray he didn’t run out of gas or get a flat tire. But more often than not, black Georgians went far out of their way to avoid Forsyth, even if it meant hours of extra driving, or switching assignments with a white co-worker, or simply refusing to go into the cracker county they’d been warned about since they were children.
When my family moved to Forsyth, in 1977, my parents saw Cumming as an appealing escape from suburban Atlanta—close enough for them to commute to jobs in the city but far enough away that the county was still pastoral, with its rolling green pastures and quaint town square. Our house on Browns Bridge Road was just a few miles west of Oscarville, and while we had heard rumors that Forsyth was home to plenty of racists and Klansmen, the same could be said of almost any rural county in Georgia in the 1970s.
At age seven, I had only the vaguest sense that something “bad” once happened in Forsyth, and no idea at all that it had begun just a few miles from where we lived. My classmates at Cumming Elementary explained to me, the newcomer, why there were “no niggers in Forsyth County,” the same way their elders had once explained it to Helen Matthews Lewis in the 1930s. And when my Little League team piled into the back of a pickup truck and joined Cumming’s Fourth of July Parade in 1978, I watched a group of Sawnee Klansmen stroll along behind us, all wearing their pointy hoods and white robes, as they waved and lobbed handfuls of Super Bubble to the crowd.
But for all that, Forsyth still seemed normal to me as a kid. It was a quiet, close-knit community, as locals liked to say, where boys played football and baseball and where girls rode horses and took ballet. My friends’ fathers spent their weekends fishing and hunting, and on Friday nights you could find almost everyone in the bleachers of the Forsyth County High football stadium. I learned to sit silently when my friends told “nigger jokes” and to keep my family’s liberal views to myself. My parents had grown up in the Birmingham of George Wallace and Bull Connor, and the kind of deep-seated bigotry we found in Forsyth was nothing new to them. My father and mother had fought with their own parents over integration, and they had been taunted by racists as they’d marched in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham and Atlanta. In the same way, they told me, we were going to help change Forsyth County from within.
BUT THEN IN July of 1980, three years after we arrived, something happened that I knew wasn’t normal at all. I first heard about it when my mother, who worked as a freelance reporter for the Gainesville Times, got a call from her editor, C. B. Hackworth. Hackworth said that the night before there had been a shooting not far from our house, and he asked my mother to drive down to Athens Park Road and try to get the full story.
In those days, it wasn’t unusual to hear a shotgun blast echoing across Lake Lanier or filtering through the pines when some good ol’ boy was hunting whitetail or flushing out quail. So my mother headed toward Athens Park, expecting to learn about a hunting trip gone wrong, or a domestic violence case, or maybe just some redneck taking a potshot at a stray dog.
But after spending the afternoon stopping at one house after another, she began to sense that something very different had happened on Athens Park Road the day before. No one would talk about the shooting, and more than a few people slammed the door in her face when they realized why she’d come. Over the course of the next few weeks, she learned the truth: that whites in Forsyth had once again attacked a black man for stepping across the county line.
ON THE MORNING of July 26th, 1980, Miguel Marcelli and his girlfriend, Shirley Webb, were invited to a company picnic thrown by Sophisticated Data Research, the Atlanta-based computer firm where Webb worked. The organizers had chosen to hold the gathering on Lake Lanier, which was a popular weekend playground for young professionals, particularly after an extension of Highway 400 made the lake an easy drive from northside Atlanta.
Marcelli, a twenty-eight-year-old Atlanta firefighter, had been born and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and his girlfriend, Shirley Webb, thirty-seven, had moved from her hometown of Chicago to take a job at Sophisticated Data. So as they drove over the two-lane country roads to meet Shirley’s co-workers for the company party, Marcelli and Webb knew nothing about Forsyth. When they pulled into the public park where employees and guests were laying out their picnics and setting up a volleyball net, the scene looked idyllic: a shady pavilion set between tall pines and the red-clay banks of the lake.
But soon after they arrived, word started to spread up and down Athens Park Road: there were “a couple of niggers” down at the lake, laughing and frolicking, having a party with a bunch of white friends. As locals at the park watched Marcelli and Webb hit the volleyball back and forth, they were shocked—not just by the appearance of two black faces in Forsyth but by the fact that this man and woman didn’t seem to realize where they were, or just how much danger they were in.
MELVIN CROWE’S BRANCH of the family added an e at some point, but in Oscarville everybody knew that he was blood kin to Bud, Azzie, and Mae Crow. Melvin’s father, Burton, was nine years old in 1912 and had grown up with Obie and Ovie, twin brothers who were among the siblings Mae had been sent to fetch on the day she was attacked. As a son of old Oscarville, born in 1929, Melvin Crowe had learned the story of Mae’s death not as a legend but as something his father, uncles, grandparents, and cousins had all witnessed firsthand, and told him about many times.
So when Crowe heard the rumors and drove down to see for himself, he could hardly believe his eyes. There, less than a mile from the spot where Mae had been found with her skull bashed in—where she had sickened and died, and where Ernest Knox had first “confessed his crime”—stood two black people, holding hands and wading knee-deep in the waters of Lake Lanier.
Crowe watched them through somewhat bleary eyes, since, according to his neighbors, he “customarily spent much of Saturday drinking, then driving around the area, sometimes stopping by to see friends.” Crowe had been doing exactly that all morning, and after catching sight of Marcelli and Webb, he drove to the house of his friend Bob Davis, and together with a friend of Davis’s named Bryine Williams, they started plotting to “do something” about what they’d seen. Before they drove back down Athens Park Road, Davis grabbed a pistol. The idea, Crowe said later, was to scare the black couple away: “We talked about shooting out their tires.” For anyone who’d missed his point, he added, “I don’t like colored people.”
Marcelli got his first inkling of trouble when he heard the crunch of gravel under the tires of a pickup truck, rolling slowly past the grassy picnic area. The vehicle cruised by several times that afternoon, always disappearing up the dirt road leading out of the park only to return a few minutes later. When at one point Marcelli ran over near the truck to get a volleyball, he said he found the driver “looking at me with a mean face.” As a black man living in Georgia, Marcelli had seen scowling white men many times before. “I didn’t pay much attention,” he said. “I just thought maybe he looked like that all the time.”
But around six-fifteen p.m., as Marcelli and Webb were shaking the sand out of their towels and packing the trunk of their car, the same truck appeared again, and this time the driver pulled sideways across the road, blocking their exit from the park. A middle-aged white man sat behind the wheel, glaring at them. Without a word, he gunned the engine and drove off.
With the light fading, Marcelli and Webb said good-bye to the rest of Webb’s friends and got in their car, eager to put the whole episode behind them and relieved at the thought of getting back to Atlanta. But as they drove up the hill toward the main highway, Webb noticed a huge dust cloud filling the road ahead. At that same moment, inside Melvin Crowe’s truck, Bob Davis raised his hand, nodded at Crowe, and said, “Stop and let me out right here.”
As Marcelli and Webb drove up the dusty road, struggling to see, Webb suddenly heard a blunt pop, then another, and watched in horror as Marcelli went limp, his body slumping over the steering wheel. “I felt a great weakness come over me,” Marcelli recalled later. “Then, I felt a ‘wiggling’ sensation in my head and neck. I heard Shirley scream and the car seemed to be moving on its own.”
When she looked over at Marcelli, Webb said, she “thought he was dead . . . the whole left side of his face was covered in blood.” She struggled to grab the steering wheel as the car veered, climbed a bank beside the road, then flipped, the engine revving and smoking as the wheels spun. With Marcelli drenched in blood and unconscious in the front seat, Webb dragged herself out through the shattered rear window. As she staggered away from the overturned car and called out for help, she saw “a group of men . . . standing on a hill above the road,” and she headed toward them. But when she got closer, Webb was shocked to find that “they were pointing and laughing.” Convinced that these were the same men who had just shot Marcelli, a terrified Webb turned and ran back down the road, screaming for someone to help her.
A local man named Keaton was working in his yard when he heard the sound of gunshots, the squeal of car tires, then shattering glass. He ran to look and found what he described as “an extremely distraught black woman” coming up the road toward him.
“Would you help me? Would you protect me?” Shirley Webb pleaded. “And, please, help him,” she said, pointing back toward the wrecked car. Keaton told the woman that he would “instruct his wife to call the police.” When she begged him to drive her back to the pavilion so she could find her friends, he repeated that his wife was going to call the police. Leaving Shirley Webb standing in the road—still, for all she knew, in the sights of armed white men—Keaton turned back toward his house, shaking his head and saying, “There’s nothing more I can do here.”
As Melvin Crowe stood in his driveway, staring in the direction from which the shots had come, Bob Davis came crashing through the woods behind his house. Melvin could see that Davis had taken off his shirt and was wrapping a pistol inside it as he ran deeper into the pines. A few minutes later, Davis walked back empty-handed. Still wild-eyed and gasping for breath, he looked at Crowe and said, “I think I killed the black son of a bitch.”
Not even fear of prosecution was enough to quiet Melvin Crowe on the subject, or to dampen his pride when police investigators arrived at his house the day after the shooting. Detective Randy Sims started the investigation at Crowe’s front door only because it was the closest house to the spot where glass from a shattered windshield still littered the street. When he and another officer introduced themselves, Crowe blurted out, “I’m not telling [you] anything. . . . Somebody has got to keep the niggers out of Forsyth County. I’m glad it happened.”
The exchange convinced investigators that Crowe was not just a run-of-the-mill Georgia racist but saw himself as a defender of the “whites only” rule that had been in effect for nearly seventy years. Having instigated the plot to frighten Marcelli and Webb, and having driven Bob Davis to the scene, Crowe was clearly involved in the crime, and as the officers stood on the lawn listening to what was fast veering toward a confession, they had reason to think that Crowe himself might have been the shooter. But even when Crowe realized that he was a suspect, he didn’t tell them about Davis or about how he’d seen his friend hiding a pistol in the woods. Melvin fell silent when asked if he knew who’d pulled the trigger. Having lived in Forsyth all his life, he seemed to fear the consequences of identifying a “person unknown.” “I’m not gonna tell who did it,” Crowe said to Officer Sims. “I’m not gonna tell . . . because [if I do] I’ll get burned out.”
The full story of the shooting came to light during the court testimony of Ethel Crowe, an elderly aunt with whom Melvin lived. Born in 1911, Ethel, too, was a child of old Oscarville, and from earliest girlhood she had heard the tale of Mae Crow’s rape and murder, with its lesson about the monstrous lust of black men. As a member of the wary, insular community of farmers in Oscarville, she had seen unimaginable changes come to the county since the 1920s. What she hadn’t ever seen, even in 1980, was a black person coming toward her on Athens Park Road and stopping right outside her front door.
But that’s what happened in the minutes after Bob Davis raced into the woods to hide the gun with which he’d shot Miguel Marcelli. Called to testify about that day, Ethel Crowe described “seeing and hearing a black woman crying in the road.” According to news reports, Crowe’s “lips began to quiver and she spoke in between quiet sobs” as a courtroom filled with local whites sat in silence. The lawyer for the prosecution asked her what she’d done to help Shirley Webb.
“Nothing,” Ethel Crowe told the jury. “Nothing like that ever happened at our house before.”
There, in her own driveway, stood a trembling, blood-spattered woman, presenting Melvin Crowe’s aunt with a frightening choice: she could either go out and help the woman and her injured boyfriend or she could turn away and pretend that she had never heard the gunshot, the car crash, or the woman’s cry for help. Asked what she did when she found Shirley Webb sobbing outside her kitchen window, Ethel Crowe stared into her lap and shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing . . . I was scared.”
DR. MICHAEL FARNELL, chief surgeon at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, testified that Miguel Marcelli had been shot “behind the left ear with a .38 caliber bullet” and that the entrance wound was close enough to his brain that “Marcelli may suffer neurological problems in addition to injuries already sustained.” After emergency surgery, Marcelli recovered, and he was well enough to testify at the trials of Melvin Crowe and Bob Davis and to tell the story of his trip to Forsyth. All-white juries found both men guilty of two counts of aggravated assault.
After almost a century during which black Georgians had been lynched, shot at, beaten, and “burned out” of Forsyth, and during which untold acres of black-owned land had been quietly plundered, two whites had finally been arrested and convicted for stalking and shooting a black man. Rather than acknowledging that Crowe and Davis were the first and only men to face such consequences in the county’s long history of white terrorism, the Gainesville Times congratulated the juries on dispelling the “myth” of Forsyth’s bigotry and intolerance. “Twelve men and women . . . exploded that myth” by convicting Davis and Crowe, the paper said, reiterating the old claim that “the county’s unusually white complexion is [not] a preoccupation—it is simply a happenstance.”
LOCALS WERE RELIEVED when the convictions brought an end to all the media attention and sent news trucks back down Highway 400 to Atlanta. But the peace and quiet didn’t last long. Seven years later, a much larger group of African Americans made the trip north, this time crossing the county line not by chance but by choice. They came to publicly protest seventy-five years of segregation in the county and to demand a new era of “peace and brotherhood in Forsyth.”
The whole nation soon learned that there were whites in the county who considered themselves exempt from Brown v. Board of Education, from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and from a host of federal laws against racial discrimination in housing and employment. When a double-file line of black and white civil rights marchers appeared on Bethelview Road on January 17th, 1987, and began walking toward the Cumming courthouse, a raucous army of Forsyth residents was waiting to meet them. Just like their grandparents and great-grandparents, they were convinced that they had a right to live in an “all-white” community. As photographers and news crews set up their cameras, the crowd erupted into a chorus of rebel yells and unfurled a long white banner. “RACIAL PURITY,” it said, “IS FORSYTH’S SECURITY.”