Racial violence was making headlines all over the country in December of 1986 after four black men were beaten by a mob of whites in the Howard Beach section of Queens, in New York City. A twenty-three-year-old African American man named Michael Griffith died after the gang of baseball-bat-wielding white teenagers attacked him for trespassing across an unwritten racial border. Already badly injured and running for his life, Griffith had sprinted across a busy highway, where he was struck by a passing car. In response to the killing, Reverend Al Sharpton led twelve hundred demonstrators through the streets of Howard Beach on December 27th, 1986, as furious local whites screamed racial slurs and demanded that black protesters get out of their neighborhood.
Less than a month after the Howard Beach protests, a man named Chuck Blackburn came up with what he thought was a modest proposal for the people of Forsyth: that all those opposed to “fear and intimidation” gather for a short march along Highway 9, ending at the Blackburn Learning Center, where he taught karate classes and meditation. “Overcoming fear of aggression is a basic theme of martial arts,” Blackburn told reporters, and with the march he wanted to prove that “racism is on the wane in Forsyth.”
Cumming, Georgia, January 17th, 1987
Blackburn had moved to Cumming from San Francisco in the early 1980s, and he had been shocked to learn that none of his black friends from Atlanta would set foot across the Forsyth County line. And so in January of 1987, Blackburn announced his plan to protest the situation publicly. He called on like-minded residents to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of 1912 with what he called a “brotherhood walk,” which was timed to coincide with the second annual—and still highly controversial—Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.
Once local newspapers and radio stations picked up the story, there was widespread opposition to Blackburn’s plan. He sent letters to area clergy, in hopes that some of their parishioners might join the walk. But, Blackburn told reporters, “only one minister responded . . . and then he backed down.” That minister was Reverend Jim Martin of Shiloh United Methodist, who withdrew his support after his own congregants objected vehemently. “Chuck was talking about there being a silent majority who favor brotherly love and who think race doesn’t really matter,” Reverend Martin said in the days leading up to the brotherhood walk. “But I don’t think he’s right. I think he’s realized that’s not right. It would take changing the hearts of a lot of people.”
Blackburn learned just how naive he’d been when the phones at his office started ringing day and night, with men and women, young and old, calling to warn of the consequences if he went ahead with the demonstration. The mildest was a caller who said, “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to try to get the niggers to come up here. . . . That’s why we live in Forsyth County—to get away from them.” An old woman’s voice echoed the sentiment, and added an overt threat: “You can’t change it, no matter how bad or how hard you try,” she said. “You’re going to have to end up leaving this county. Or leave in a box.”
Then there were the men, whose voices were laced with such menace that Blackburn and his students armed themselves and posted round-the-clock guards at his storefront school. “I know [someone] whose house was burned,” one caller said. “So you’d better watch out.” As Blackburn peered out through the blinds and double-checked the door locks, his office phone rang again, and the answering machine clicked to life. Through its little speaker a man whispered, “I got a thirty-aught-six bullet with your name on it.”
Fearing for his life, Blackburn canceled the protest on January 9th, telling the Forsyth County News that “the threats . . . were much more violent than I thought they would be, and the good folks [in this community] just aren’t ready to stand up for it. . . . Forsyth County is just not ready for it yet.”
When he announced his decision, the brotherhood walk was taken up by a friend of Blackburn’s named Dean Carter. Carter was a white construction worker and fellow martial arts enthusiast who lived in Gainesville, where so many of Forsyth’s expelled families had resettled. Carter and his wife, Tammy, also received threats, like one from a caller who told them, “After Saturday . . . you’re dead.” But they were determined to go ahead, and in the week leading up to the protest, Carter joined forces with the veteran Atlanta activist Hosea Williams, who had been a key member of Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle during the civil rights battles of the 1950s and ’60s. When Williams agreed to lend his name and experience to the cause, the Brotherhood March—and the shocking story of the Forsyth expulsions—started to gain national media attention.
Faced with so much negative coverage, civic leaders in Cumming did what they had always done: rather than acknowledge and confront the county’s history, they pointed to racially motivated attacks elsewhere in the state and the country and asked why Forsyth, of all places, was suddenly being singled out. “We haven’t had any incidents up here as far as race is concerned that I can remember, and I’ve been here since 1956,” said County Commissioner James Harrington—a surprising claim, given that only six years earlier, Atlanta firefighter Miguel Marcelli had been gunned down by Melvin Crowe and Bob Davis. Harrington must have also read newspaper reports about an attack in November of 1986, when “five Mexican construction workers, in the county [to work for] a Cumming man . . . were beaten by four men and a woman who broke into their house.” The Mexican men said the whites “threatened to kill them unless they left the county.”
In the days leading up to the march, the dominant tone of the Forsyth County News was annoyance, along with an unabashed desire to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. In a column titled “Let’s Get on to Better Things,” editor Laura McCullough argued that it was Forsyth residents, not black citizens of Georgia, who were being victimized by the negative attention: “By the time this newspaper is printed, the march for freedom, or brotherhood, or martial arts, or whatever, will be thankfully over. Maybe then we can become Forsyth County again. You remember, the sleepy town north of Atlanta that has its own problems with land rezoning and bulging schools?”
A similar note of irritation came from Cumming–Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce head Roger Crow—another distant relative to Mae Crow. On the Thursday before the march, as tensions rose all over the county, Crow stood on the steps of the courthouse and made a public statement on behalf of the business owners of Forsyth, decrying the violent threats of “outsiders,” as well as the march organizers themselves. “We do not condone needless efforts to create havoc,” Crow said, “made by those with questionable motives, particularly those from outside the confines of the county.” There are those “who would portray Forsyth County as a lawless, racist anachronism,” he said, but “this simply is not so. . . . Forsyth County shall not be maligned by inaccurate aspersions cast by a reckless few.”
While politicians and businessmen fretted over the damage being done to Forsyth’s reputation, others were busy recruiting members for a group they called the Forsyth County Defense League. They responded to the Brotherhood March not with editorials and news conferences but by loading pistols, tying lengths of rope into nooses, and planning a “White Power Rally” for the day of the march. Signs were posted and flyers tucked under windshield wipers all over Cumming, calling on whites to “PROTEST AGAINST THE RACE MIXERS MARCH ON FORSYTH COUNTY!” While Sheriff Wesley Walraven told reporters that the Defense League represented “a small radical element,” the wording of the announcement tapped into much broader currents of fear and anxiety in the white community, which had origins in the steady northward growth of Atlanta.
BY THE 1970S, Georgia’s interstate highway system had extended the margins of the state capital farther and farther from its old downtown, and put the Atlanta suburbs right on the doorstep of Forsyth. Just as Charlie Harris’s ill-fated railroad had promised to bring new ideas, new people, and new commerce into the foothills at the turn of the twentieth century, by the time Chuck Blackburn proposed his brotherhood walk in 1987, droves of Atlanta professionals—like my parents—were moving to “lake houses” inside the county. Along with all that new energy and new capital, the freeway brought with it the possibility that Forsyth might soon see the arrival of large numbers of black residents.
Organizers of the White Power Rally played on whites’ fears of the city and presented the gathering not only as a celebration of “white power,” but as a defense of the “racial purity” that had defined Forsyth for as long as anyone could remember:
We are protesting against racemixers . . . like Chuck Blackburn, the Carters, The Forsyth County News, The Gainesville Times, and other OUTSIDE AGITATORS AND COMMUNIST RACEMIXERS [who] want to defile our community.
If such a call to arms was meant to mobilize white residents of the county, it worked. Two days before the Brotherhood March, the editors of the Gainesville Times predicted that “about 100 members of each group are expected to demonstrate,” but just like local law enforcement, they seriously underestimated the crowd. Appalled by the thought of “racemixers” invading Forsyth, on the morning of January 17th, 1987, more than twenty-five hundred whites gathered at the intersection where the Brotherhood March was to begin.
By ten a.m., a gas station on the corner of Bethelview Road and Highway 9 was teeming with pickup trucks and men in white sheets, camouflage, and hunting gear. Frank Shirley, a county resident and head of the Committee to Keep Forsyth County White, assured reporters that “most of the demonstrators [are] from Forsyth.” As a chartered bus filled with civil rights marchers set out from the King Center in Atlanta and made its way up Highway 400, Shirley took a turn with the megaphone and whipped up the crowd, chanting, “Go home, niggers! Go home, niggers!”
Whites milling around the parking lot were treated to the day’s first highlight when a silver-haired man in a suit and trench coat appeared, waving to the crowd as he leaned on a cane and limped up Bethelview Road. His name was J. B. Stoner, and for decades he had been one of the South’s most notorious white supremacists. His defense of segregation grew even more legendary in 1977, when he was indicted for the 1958 bombing of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham. According to court testimony, Stoner targeted Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth for the leading role he and Bethel members had played in civil rights protests in Alabama, and Stoner had instructed his men to place sixteen sticks of dynamite outside the church in a burning paint can. Before it could detonate, the improvised bomb was noticed by a passerby, and men guarding Reverend Shuttlesworth rushed it into the street. The explosion, seconds later, rattled windows all over North Birmingham and left a crater-sized hole in Twenty-eighth Avenue.
After evading prosecution for years, Stoner was finally convicted in 1980 and sentenced to ten years in prison for ordering the bombing. But after serving six years of his sentence, he was granted early parole in November of 1986—just two months before the White Power Rally in Forsyth. Having made headlines as an unrepentant racial terrorist, the newly freed Stoner arrived on Bethelview Road as a kind of celebrity bigot and was swarmed by young Forsyth men eager to shake his hand and get his autograph. Asked by a reporter why he’d come to Forsyth, Stoner said, “To aid God in getting rid of the Jew, part-Jew, and nigger. . . . You bring in the niggers and you bring in AIDS and drugs. We don’t want AIDS and drugs,” he added as the crowd roared its approval, “and we don’t want niggers.”
To hundreds of people gathered around him, Stoner embodied the “never say die” fight against racial integration, even though by 1987 most segregationists had conceded that battle decades before. Stoner was a walking anachronism to the millions of people who would see his face on the evening news that night—a hate-spewing, church-bombing racist who seemed to have stepped right out of the 1950s. But in the parking lot of Jim Wallace’s gas station, where the defenders of white Forsyth waited to do battle with the approaching King Center protesters, J. B. Stoner walked among his kind and was given a hero’s welcome.
Once the excitement of Stoner’s entrance died down, the crowd was ready for the real action to begin. County Sheriff Wesley Walraven had roped off a section of a nearby pasture, and he ordered the Defense League’s supporters to move their rally into the designated area. As they reluctantly made their way toward the field—waving rebel flags and carrying signs that said, “KEEP FORSYTH WHITE!”—Walraven saw just how much larger the counterprotest was than anyone had predicted. Bonnie Pike, an agent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), later admitted that “as the thing began to swell . . . we realized we didn’t have enough manpower.”
J. B. Stoner handing out flyers that read, “Praise God for AIDS . . . Segregation is necessary because AIDS is a Racial Disease” at the First Brotherhood March, January 17th, 1987
Just before eleven a.m., a roar rose from the crowd, and Sheriff Walraven turned to see a chartered bus rolling up the ramp from Highway 400, then coming to a stop on the shoulder of Bethelview Road. Inside, Hosea Williams stood on the last step of the little stairwell, gripping a megaphone as his field sergeants called out final instructions to the marchers. These were rules Williams had first learned from Dr. King: partner up, walk two by two, stay in line, no yelling, no fighting back, no responding to anything said or done against you, no matter how crude, racist, threatening, or violent.
Such nonengagement resulted from King’s deep Christian faith and his study of Gandhi’s nonviolent protests, but it also grew out of experience: a strict code of discipline and unwavering nonviolence would help make clear to the cameras of the press and to the eyes of witnesses that the marchers were the victims, not the aggressors. Williams knew—particularly after the carnage of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma—that an image of a white man attacking peaceful protesters could raise more awareness than all the speeches and sermons combined. If a word was said in anger, Williams’s team instructed the marchers on the bus, it would not be the protesters who said it. If a fist was raised or a rock thrown, it must not come from within their line.
Sheriff Walraven instructed the bus driver to continue past the counterprotest area and unload his passengers farther up the road, in hopes of keeping the two groups as far apart as possible. When the bus doors opened, march leaders stepped down onto the asphalt, and out into the gray light of Georgia’s famous “white county.” As their eyes adjusted to the glare, it became clear that the crowd of locals gathered in a nearby field were not spectators but something much closer to a mob. When they caught sight of Hosea Williams, hundreds clambered over a barbed-wire fence and ran toward the marchers.
Hosea Williams (front, left) and John Lewis (front, right) leading marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, March 7th, 1965
It was commonly believed, and widely reported, that the peace marchers themselves were all from outside the county. The Forsyth County News said that “People from Forsyth . . . were conspicuously absent from the group of [Brotherhood] marchers.” But while the majority of the activists did come from Atlanta, there were exceptions. For there on Bethelview Road—having waited in our old red Buick half the morning, nervously watching a sea of rebel flags over at the gas station—were my mother, my father, and my eighteen-year-old sister, Rachel.
My father got out of the car and said enough to march leaders to make it clear that while he was white, southern, and a resident of Forsyth, he had come to walk with them and to add his voice to the calls for change. Although they had sat all morning unnoticed by the crowd of counterprotesters, the minute my parents and my sister took their places in line, whites in the crowd started pointing and yelling. “Nigger lovers!” they screamed as my mother and sister stood stone-faced, waiting for the signal to march. “Go back to Atlanta with the rest of them,” spat a man a few feet away from my father. “Back to Niggertown, you white niggers!”
AS THE FIRST March for Brotherhood in Forsyth County finally got under way, the counterprotesters gave up all pretense of obeying the sheriff. Walraven admitted to Williams that he had been caught off guard by the large turnout and had only seventy men—including local deputies, state highway patrolmen, and Georgia Bureau of Investigation officers—to try to control several thousand people from the White Power Rally. Given the size and feverish excitement of the crowd, an attack came to seem almost inevitable, and law officers focused their efforts on guarding the line of marchers themselves, leaving too few police to watch the counterprotesters on the margins. Only a few hundred yards into the planned walk, furious whites lined both sides of the road, forming a gauntlet through which the marchers had to pass. Walraven directed the driver to pull his bus up next to Hosea Williams, and it crept along at walking speed, in an attempt to provide at least some cover.
Hosea Williams (center) leading the First Brotherhood March, Forsyth County, January 17th, 1987
The marchers needed protection, because while most people lining the road stood chanting, “Go home, niggers!” and “Keep Forsyth White,” others started hurling anything and everything they could find, pelting the line of marchers with sticks, clods of dirt, bricks, broken beer bottles, and rocks. After Williams was struck on the side of the head, Sheriff Walraven gathered march organizers and warned them that he could no longer guarantee anyone’s safety. Williams, however, was determined to continue, and that night on news channels around the world, people watched in shock as the gray-bearded sixty-one-year-old winced and ducked the flying rocks, shook his head in disbelief, and carried on.
BORN IN ATTAPULGUS, Georgia, in 1926, Hosea Williams grew up under Jim Crow, and as a boy of thirteen he nearly suffered the same fate as Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel when a mob of whites in Decatur County came to his house and accused him of raping a young white girl. By Williams’s own account, his grandfather held them off with a shotgun, until “a friendly white neighbor interceded to prevent further violence.”
After serving with an all-black army unit in World War II, Williams was awarded the Purple Heart for injuries sustained during a Nazi bombing. When he came home from the war in 1945, still recovering from his wounds, he was nearly beaten to death in a bus station in Americus, Georgia—for having the audacity to wear his army uniform and for trying to take a drink from the “whites only” water fountain. As Williams put it, “I had watched my best buddies tortured, murdered, and bodies blown to pieces. French battlefields had literally been stained with my blood. . . . So at that moment . . . I realized why God, time after time, had taken me to death’s door, then spared my life . . . to be a general in the war for human rights.”
Williams went on to become a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and a close confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., who called Hosea “my wild man, my Castro,” for his willingness to defy court orders, stare down club-wielding policemen, and march against even the most dangerous white supremacists. Williams was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when James Earl Ray assassinated King in 1968, and in the wake of the murder, he vowed to carry on King’s work. More than any other member of the SCLC’s leadership, he continued to fight at street level, leading marches and protests throughout the 1970s. Along the way, Williams became a prominent and controversial figure in Atlanta politics, ridiculed by many whites after he was arrested on charges of drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident.
By 1987, nearly twenty years had passed since King’s death, and Williams, far from his glory days, was a frequent punch line to racist jokes on the talk-radio stations of Georgia. But as he walked through a hail of rocks and bottles in Forsyth, he also walked back into the arena of his greatest triumphs and returned to the role where his greatest strength—old-fashioned bravery—had always been on display. The more the mob on Bethelview Road screamed and threatened, the more Williams felt in his element. Just as King had taught him, and just as they had done in Birmingham and Savannah, St. Augustine and Selma, Williams met the violence in Forsyth with nonviolence. Walking toward the county courthouse of Georgia’s last bastion of segregation, Williams clutched a megaphone and, in his raspy, wavering voice, led the marchers in verse after verse of “We Shall Overcome.”
ALL AROUND THEM, officers of the county police and the GBI were making arrests, and when they frisked the handcuffed men, they discovered that many had come to the White Power Rally with loaded guns tucked into their jeans and hidden under their jackets. After Walraven told Williams that he feared a shooting if the demonstration continued, the marchers reluctantly agreed to get back on the bus. As soon as the doors opened and marchers began filing on board, the mob let out a howl of celebration.
As a final act of defiance, the bus drove the last few miles to Cumming, and the marchers made a symbolic gesture of walking across the finish line at Blackburn’s school, just outside of town. But as journalist Elliot Jaspin put it, “If the gesture was intended to show that the Brotherhood March had triumphed over racism, it persuaded no one.” During the long ride back to the King Center, it was clear to everyone involved that they had been defeated by an army of Confederate flag–waving, rock-throwing whites who weren’t about to yield territory their ancestors had been defending since 1912. It was going to take more than one afternoon to end seventy-five years of segregation in Forsyth County.
JOURNALISTS COLLECTED REACTIONS to the day’s events and spoke with people on all sides in the conflict: dismayed activists, elated white counterprotesters, and county leaders who claimed that the root of the problem was not Forsyth’s history of expulsions and racial violence but the media’s unfair portrayal of a peaceful community.
Hosea Williams was typically blunt. “I have never seen such hatred,” he told a reporter from the New York Times. “I have been in the civil rights movement 30 years, and I’m telling you we’ve got a South Africa in the backyard of Atlanta. . . . There were youngsters 10 and 12 years old screaming their lungs out, ‘Kill the niggers.’ ” Asked if he planned to return for a second march, Williams said, “I think I have to go back.” Reverend R. B. Cotton Raeder, another veteran of the civil rights struggle, echoed Williams’s shock. “I’ve been in many such situations,” he said, “but never one that was any worse.”
Spokesmen for the chamber of commerce, the city of Cumming, and local churches quickly went into damage-control mode. Roger Crow of the chamber admitted that the violence was “an embarrassment,” but he characterized the hundreds of locals who had attacked the marchers as “outsiders.” “The vast majority of the citizens [of Forsyth] support the rights of everyone,” he said. “They’re God-fearing, hard-working, and most of them, law-abiding.” B. V. Franklin of the First Baptist Church concurred, saying, “I don’t think what we saw was indicative of the people here,” and County Commissioner James Harrington assured reporters that “people here don’t teach their kids to hate anybody”—even as news stations ran footage of children raising their fists and chanting, “Go home, niggers!”
Roy Otwell Sr., the ninety-two-year-old patriarch of one of the county’s most prominent families, summed up the wish of most residents, which was that all those demanding an end to segregation in Forsyth—and a reckoning with the county’s past—would simply drop the subject. “If they would let us alone,” Otwell said, “it would die down and blacks would be more accepted.” Otwell had witnessed the events of 1912 with his own eyes as a seventeen-year-old, and he had lived his entire life in a place that showed no signs of changing. Yet even seven and a half decades after night riders had first terrorized the black residents of Forsyth, Otwell still clung to the idea that the integration of the county was only a matter of time and patience. The march, he believed, had been an unnecessary provocation.
In order to claim that “most people” in Forsyth were innocent bystanders, leaders like Crow and Otwell had to ignore the statements other locals made to reporters. Asked why he had come to the White Power Rally, a thirty-four-year-old Forsyth man named William Griffan said, “I figure they could pick a better place to do it than Cumming. My granddaddy helped run the niggers out of here in 1912. They hanged some.” Rayford Grindle, who had lived in the county all his life, told a reporter that “most people here don’t want them to move in.” His wife, Janice, nodded as they stood outside the Second Baptist Church and added, “This has been our home, and having it all-white is all we know.”
Another local man, Ron Seaman, came to the march on horseback, and he made a striking figure at the White Power Rally, galloping back and forth with a rebel flag flowing behind him. Asked what he thought of the protesters, Seaman said, “They ought to have printed up . . . targets and given it to them as they got off the bus.”
EVEN AMONG FORSYTH residents who stayed home from the rally, there was plenty of support for the Forsyth County Defense League. Kelly Strickland, who lived only a mile from the scene of the violence, wrote to Governor Joe Frank Harris a few days after the march. “I am tired Governor Harris,” she said.
I just want this to all be over [and] I want everyone to leave us alone. . . . I would, without doubt invite a black person into my home for dinner. I love them and respect them, I just do not prefer to live with them. I am sorry. This is my right.
A Forsyth man named Bill Bolton wrote to the governor to decry not the violence that had greeted the marchers but the suffering whites were enduring as a result:
We the people of Forsyth County have been used, abused, and criticized without just reason. What ever happened to our civil rights? . . . The people in Forsyth County are just trying to carve out a living and build a decent place to raise our families. . . . We have not bothered the rest of the world, so why does the rest of the world want to bother us now?
Others wrote to assure the governor—despite news reports to the contrary—that the “trouble” was the work of outsiders and had nothing to do with Forsyth’s history or the majority of residents’ feelings toward blacks. As a Mrs. Hartsfield of Cumming put it,
Most of those arrested were not natives. I knew of no one who even ventured into town that day. . . . Forsyth County is by far the friendliest and safest place we could ever imagine. Everyone waves to everyone on the road. . . . This town has kept a low profile and [we] have been living in peace & harmony. Until now, we haven’t hurt anyone and certainly don’t want the whole country to think badly of us.
The erasure of Forsyth’s violent past had been so complete that most residents believed what Mrs. Hartsfield told the governor: that there was no place more peaceful and no place less deserving of the outrage that had followed the attacks on the Brotherhood Marchers. To people who’d spent their whole lives inside the bubble of “racial purity,” keeping Forsyth “all white” seemed like the most natural thing in the world.