Television viewers around the country were shocked by scenes from the First Brotherhood March: young white women yelling “Nigger!” in the faces of peaceful protesters; children joining chants of “White Power!” from atop their parents’ shoulders; civil rights leaders like Hosea Williams dodging rocks and bottles. Within days, there was talk of a second demonstration, as march organizers regrouped. Dean Carter told the Gainesville Times that this second march would go all the way to the county courthouse, and Sheriff Wesley Walraven promised to be ready “even if it takes 300 state troopers and every GBI agent in the state.” When forecasters called for snow on the proposed date of the protest, Hosea Williams told reporters, “We’re going to march [again] in Forsyth County whether it’s cold as ice or hot as it is in hell.”
I woke to the sound of helicopters passing over our house on the morning of January 24, 1987, and I realized just how different the second march was going to be when we were stopped at a military checkpoint just outside of Cumming and had to wait as bomb-sniffing dogs checked our car. Forsyth’s white supremacists might have dominated the headlines on January 17, but a week later it looked as if the whole county was being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. This time, 1,500 jeering counterprotesters were held in check by 350 state troopers, 185 Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents, and 2,000 soldiers of the Georgia National Guard.
The Second Brotherhood March is the best-known part of Forsyth’s story, as it was covered by national and international news outlets, which broadcast images of two hundred chartered buses driving up Highway 400, bringing more than 20,000 peace marchers to Georgia’s notorious “white county.” Among those who marched were famous veterans of the 1950s and ’60s civil rights struggles, including John Lewis, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, Joseph Lowery, and Coretta Scott King, who called the protest “a great coming together of the family, the movement, and the followers of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Georgia senators Sam Nunn and Wyche Fowler were near the front of the line, along with NAACP president Benjamin Hooks, U.S. presidential candidate Gary Hart, and dozens of celebrities and media personalities.
Even Miguel Marcelli, the black firefighter shot in Oscarville, made the trip from Atlanta, returning to Forsyth for the first time since he was nearly killed by Melvin Crowe and Bob Davis in 1980. “Seven years ago,” he told a reporter, “I could have been dead for no reason and never known what I was killed for. . . . But now I’m going to march for the freedom and the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.” The story of Marcelli’s return was typical of the day, which became both a reunion of the American civil rights movement and a repudiation of Forsyth’s long history of intolerance. As Reverend Joseph Lowery told locals from the steps of the courthouse, “We did not come to Forsyth County to scare you to death. We came . . . to challenge you to live a life of decency.”
When the speeches on the Cumming square were finally over, near dusk, my father, mother, sister, and I walked back to our car and watched dozens of buses, filled with weary peace marchers, making their way out onto the blue highways of the county and back down the on-ramps toward Atlanta. All around us, national guardsmen were walking toward their operations base in a strip-mall parking lot, where they climbed into troop carriers and left in a long convoy of hulking green trucks. Eventually even the satellite news vans broke down their gear, and the army of journalists disconnected their lapel mikes, closed their notebooks, packed up their cameras, and drove away.
Buses arriving for the Second Brotherhood March, January 24th, 1987
For the second time in a week, we were left alone in Forsyth, and we made the short drive back to our home on Browns Bridge Road just as darkness fell. There, our house on the edge of Lake Lanier, just a few miles west of Oscarville, sat just as it always had: surrounded by pine trees and green pastureland, and ringed with neighbors who came from the old families of Forsyth: Mashburns and Cains, Castleberrys and Stricklands, Whitlows and Bensons and Crows. We knew that these people were, at best, irritated by all the attention and inconvenience the marches had caused and, at worst, infuriated by the thought of thousands of black faces—and white supporters like us—rallying on the Cumming square. Nonetheless, my parents felt elated, just as they had during protest marches in the 1960s. They were certain that we had done something historic: that by speaking out against the racial segregation of the county, we were changing hearts and minds and leading backward Forsyth toward a more just future.
But even at sixteen, I had my doubts. Could a culture of fear as deeply ingrained as Forsyth’s really be changed by a peace march—even one attended by twenty thousand people and broadcast all over the world? After seventy-five years of bigotry and one afternoon of imported racial harmony, was it really time to declare that the county had awakened from the long nightmare of “racial purity”? Could we really say, as white observers had been saying since 1912, “All quiet at Cumming. . . . No further trouble expected”?
Brotherhood Marchers walking to the Forsyth County Courthouse
National Guard troops and counterprotesters, January 24th, 1987
LATE ON THE day of the Second Brotherhood March, Roger Crow, head of the county chamber of commerce, shrugged and told a reporter, “When all these people finish their grandstanding, we’ll go back to living . . . just like we always have.” Another Forsyth resident, writing to the Gainesville Times, agreed that once the marchers went home, things would get back to normal in Forsyth: “Whites don’t want the blacks [here],” the letter writer said. “We need to put a halt to it and forget about it, and let it go like it’s been going for the past 75 years. . . . Drop the subject, because if you don’t, there’s just going to be trouble.” And in an opinion piece for the Times, a Forsyth man named Steve Whitmire summed up the feelings of many locals. The Brotherhood March, Whitmire believed, was part of an “anti-Forsyth movement.” Despite hours of news footage to the contrary, he assured readers that “not once [have] I ever observed any Forsyth County folks hassle anyone.” Whitmire ended with a response to Hosea Williams’s call for whites in Forsyth to formally apologize for the expulsions of 1912. “Do you think this is a free ride, Hosea? The world in general, and Forsyth in particular, owes you nothing.”
THAT SAME BRAND of defiance was broadcast all over the country when Oprah Winfrey, in only her sixth month as a television talk-show host, arrived in early February of 1987 to film an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show on the Cumming square. The goal, Winfrey said, was “simply to ask why Forsyth County has not allowed black people to live here in 75 years.” In hopes of getting honest answers, Winfrey and her producers decided to admit only residents of Forsyth into the taping—which meant that besides Oprah and her staff, the televised town-hall meeting was an “all-white” affair.
In a restaurant packed with locals, Winfrey passed a microphone from one white guest to another, asking why they still supported the seventy-five-year-old racial ban. Many in the audience said they regretted the recent violence, but most admitted, even to Winfrey, that they preferred to “Keep Forsyth white.”
“You don’t believe that people of other races have the right to live here?” Winfrey asked a middle-aged woman. “They have the right to live wherever they want to,” she replied. “But we have the right to choose if we want a white community.”
Winfrey looked from face to face and asked, “What is it you are afraid black people are going to do?” A tall, bearded man in his mid-twenties stood up and said that more than anything he was afraid “of them coming to Forsyth.” “I lived down in Atlanta,” the man said, but now “it’s nothing but a rat infested slum!” As people around him clapped and nodded their heads in agreement, he said, “They don’t care. They just don’t care!”
Asked if he meant “the entire black race,” the man said no, “just the niggers.” When Winfrey raised an eyebrow and asked, “What is the difference to you?” the man offered to help her understand the distinction.
“You have blacks and you have niggers,” he said. “Black people? They don’t want to come up here. They don’t wanna cause any trouble. That’s a black person. A nigger wants to come up here and cause trouble all the time. That’s the difference.” Many in the crowd applauded as Winfrey lowered the mike to her side and simply stared into the camera.
By the time it was over, Winfrey had concluded that “a lot of white people are afraid of other white people in this community,” and she told a reporter that as a black woman she was “not very comfortable at all in Forsyth.” Her crew made a point of packing up before dark, and when she was asked about the next day’s plans, Winfrey said, “I’m leaving.”
LESS THAN A week after the second march, and emboldened by its success, Hosea Williams formed the Coalition to End Fear and Intimidation in Forsyth County, with an executive committee that consisted of himself, NAACP president Benjamin Hooks, Coretta Scott King from the King Center, Rabbi Alvin Sugarman of the Temple in Atlanta, and SCLC president Joseph Lowery. Now that the Brotherhood Marches had gotten the whole country’s attention, Hosea’s coalition hoped to turn a symbolic victory into a real one by negotiating with officials in Forsyth.
On January 30th, 1987, Williams sent a letter addressed to Roger Crow and other civic leaders. It listed the coalition’s demands and vowed to organize a third Brotherhood March if they did not receive a reply. “We agree that the majority of the citizens of Forsyth County are loyal, patriotic American citizens,” Williams began.
But there is a sizeable crowd that has been possessed with a violent KKK mentality [and] these lost, un-American sisters and brothers must be redeemed. Yes, we know this is a most difficult job, but if good people like yourself and the other responsible leaders of Forsyth County will sit around the “Table of Brotherhood” and work with us. . . . all things are possible in the eyesight of God.
After that conciliatory opening, Williams shifted gears and listed the steps county leaders would have to take if they wanted to avoid a repeat of the previous week’s march. Williams demanded, first and foremost, that “persons whose land [was] unlawfully seized be fully and completely compensated.” He also demanded an investigation into violations of federal laws regarding equal employment opportunity. Third, he demanded an investigation into violations of the 1968 Fair Housing Act and, fourth, that “blacks be employed in local law enforcement in significant numbers.” Finally, Williams demanded that “educational exchange programs for teachers, students, ministers, and law enforcement officers . . . be developed between Forsyth and [Atlanta’s] Fulton County.”
With his list of demands, Williams made it clear that the coalition would not be satisfied with vague promises and smiling reassurances and, instead, wanted specific, concrete action. Twenty-nine years later, Hosea’s letter looks like a blueprint for confronting deeply ingrained bigotry and for combating the kind of institutional racism that persists in so many American communities in the twenty-first century—from Ferguson to Charleston, Baltimore to Staten Island. Instead of lip service, the coalition wanted financial reparations; the enforcement of federal laws; an affirmative action program to recruit and retain black police officers; and a comprehensive plan to break down racial barriers through education. Essentially, they believed that Forsyth’s “race trouble” in 1987 could be cured with the same methods that had worked in Hall County in 1912: prosecute crimes committed against black victims and stop treating Forsyth whites as if they were somehow exempt from the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States Congress.
The coalition’s list of demands was a bold opening, but what happened next was a repudiation of nearly all their goals. Cumming leaders agreed to the formation of the Cumming/Forsyth County Biracial Committee but disagreed on both its composition and its mission. Hosea had proposed that his own coalition make up half of the committee, with the other half drawn from Forsyth groups. But Cumming’s white leaders said that the African American half of the biracial committee should be made up of unspecified “leaders of the black community” and that it should work broadly on the issue of race relations and “respond to issues and questions raised in recent weeks.”
After a lifetime of fighting for equal treatment—and after being told throughout the 1950s and ’60s that white southerners needed patience and time to change—Hosea smelled a rat. His reply was unequivocal:
Gentlemen, this is almost unbelievable. . . . Please understand [that in order to] change Forsyth County to a just democratic society . . . we will not accept you going out across this State [and] getting some black “Uncle Toms” who are controlled by other white interests.
Hosea also made it clear that he expected the biracial committee to discuss not broad issues of race in America but the coalition’s specific, itemized grievances:
The primary responsibility of the Bi-Racial Community Relations committee is to solve the demands that were stated in our communication. If you are not willing to do this then you leave us no other alternative than to launch the same vigorous kind of movement in Forsyth county that we have implemented in Birmingham, Selma, Savannah . . . and other bastions of racism.
After the Brotherhood March’s soaring rhetoric about a new day dawning, by early February this is where things stood: a group of local white leaders were unwilling to accept Williams’s group as equal partners, even though the coalition included the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., the head of the NAACP, a leading Atlanta rabbi, and the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Whites in Forsyth were also reluctant to investigate violations of federal employment and housing law or to seriously consider compensating victims of the 1912 expulsions.
Only a week after news cameras recorded shocking scenes of mob violence out on Bethelview Road, the meeting rooms of the Forsyth County Courthouse were also filled with racial strife, as local lawyers and businessmen rebutted the notion that Hosea Williams and the black people he represented deserved anything at all from the county.
GOVERNOR JOE FRANK HARRIS eventually settled the dispute over the makeup of the biracial committee by appointing six members favorable to Cumming whites and six members deemed acceptable by Hosea’s coalition. Williams himself was excluded, but his daughter Elisabeth Omilami served instead. This Cumming/Forsyth County Biracial Committee met many times over the next ten months, tasked by the governor with improving race relations in the county.
The most striking thing about the official report the committee submitted to Governor Harris on December 22nd, 1987, is that it contains not one set of findings but two: one position paper written by local white members and another written by the coalition’s mostly black, Atlanta-based members. In other words, even after working together for almost a year, the two races were as divided as ever in Forsyth—and above all on the very first issue they discussed: reparations for the victims of 1912.
Not surprisingly, white members of the biracial committee—many of whom owned large amounts of property in Forsyth—rejected the idea of returning land and paying monetary reparations, and they wrote at length about the fear this demand had stirred up in the local community. Committee co-chairman Phil Bettis, a Cumming title attorney, vehemently denied that land had been stolen in the first place and went on to claim that the exodus of blacks in 1912 could only be “partially attributed” to white violence.
Forsyth members of the biracial committee admitted in their position paper that “racial incidents . . . allegedly drove a substantial number of blacks from the confines of Forsyth County,” but they claimed that “economics played an instrumental role in the black exodus.” They argued that “the advent of the boll weevil, early signs of the depression, and the shifting [of the] black population to Atlanta . . . certainly had an equal impact upon blacks leaving.” In their view, most of Forsyth’s 1,098 black refugees “voluntarily relocated.” It is hard to say whether the authors of the Forsyth position paper knew that the first boll weevil was not introduced into Georgia until 1915. They surely did know, as whites had bragged of it for generations, that the mass exodus of Forsyth’s black population was not coincidental with mob violence, but in direct reaction to it.
Despite the denials of men like Phil Bettis and Roger Crow in 1987, when journalist Elliot Jaspin went looking in 2007, he discovered a mountain of evidence that the land of black owners had been plundered—as “abandoned” lots were slowly, quietly absorbed into the property of their former white neighbors. Ironically, the written records of these thefts were housed in the basement of the county courthouse, just below rooms in which the biracial committee met. Nonetheless, the position paper written by Forsyth whites concluded that “the charge of unlawfully taken land . . . is an allegation without sufficient foundation in law or fact.”
Today many of those same lots are home not to chicken houses, cow pastures, and hog pens but suburban housing developments, filled with multimillion-dollar homes. What was once stolen with a wink and a nod at the county courthouse has now become some of the most valuable real estate in all of metropolitan Atlanta, in a place that is among the top twenty-five wealthiest counties in America.
AFTER REJECTING HOSEA WILLIAMS’S demands for change, the position paper that white leaders submitted to the governor instead scolded descendants of the expelled families themselves. The report blamed them for “perpetuat[ing] divisive and contrived issues” and for harassing local whites with “an ever-pointing finger of blame” which, the report said, “fosters deep and perhaps volatile resentment.”
Having turned the tables and laid the blame on “divisive” African American protesters, the white leaders of Cumming called on blacks to “cast aside confrontational tactics and intimidation.” The report ended by declaring that “Forsyth is a thriving, modern suburb of metropolitan Atlanta, with no similarity . . . to 1912. Forsyth County has no apologies to make to anyone. Forsyth County also has no handout, only a welcoming hand for fairness and effort . . . as has built this county for over one hundred and fifty years.”
That Bettis and the rest of the white committee members still believed they had “no apologies to make to anyone” suggests the ways in which white Forsyth’s denial was not just a product of racism but a primary cause of it. By wiping the crimes of the past out of memory, generations of otherwise decent, law-abiding white citizens could go on believing that each new violent episode was an extraordinary event, for which they bore no real responsibility.
AFRICAN AMERICAN MEMBERS of the biracial committee recognized the role of denial in perpetuating Forsyth’s bigotry, and they said as much in the competing report they sent to Governor Harris. “There seems to be a prevailing philosophy” in Forsyth, wrote committee member Felker Ward,
that if the undesirable activity . . . of the hatemongers and violence-prone . . . is ignored, it will go away. The fact is, however, that . . . seven of the eight people arrested and charged after the first march were Forsyth residents. [Such] denial and inaction allows for the growth and spread of hate-filled philosophies and activities. Silence is interpreted as consent.
To combat Cumming leaders’ long tradition of remaining silent, which had indeed been “interpreted as consent” by generations of violent whites, black committee members recommended that the governor help Forsyth make an “institutional change that clearly enforces a democratic atmosphere.”
Their position paper called for the creation of a permanent race relations committee that would “work closely with law enforcement [and] civic, religious and community groups to eliminate the influence and presence of hate groups and those who operate through racially motivated violence.” Such a committee, the position paper said, “should be empowered to investigate complaints, hold hearings, gather information . . . provide conflict negotiation, and monitor human relations progress in the county.”
In other words, representatives of the African American community called for the establishment of a permanent watchdog group in Cumming, legally empowered to investigate racially motivated crimes, to name names when violent incidents did occur, and to ensure that equal protection under the law was afforded to all people, even inside the lines of Georgia’s notorious “white county.”
The creation of such a group must have sounded wildly progressive to Governor Joe Frank Harris when the biracial committee report reached his desk on December 22nd, 1987. Certainly he never acted on the recommendation. Yet it was a much older idea than many people realized. Had Harris used the power of the governor’s office to make it a reality, Forsyth would have finally gotten back to the place where it had last been 120 years earlier, in 1867. That was the year Major William J. Bryan packed up the crates and ledgers of the federal Freedmen’s Bureau, locked his office on the Cumming square, and left Forsyth County in the hands of the local sheriff.
GO TO CUMMING today, and you will find that time has wrought many of the changes Hosea Williams’s coalition fought so hard, and so unsuccessfully, to achieve in 1987. Back then, the biracial committee’s competing reports—one black and one white—were received by the governor not as a solution to Forsyth’s ongoing segregation but as evidence of just how intractable the problem was. Governor Harris disbanded the committee without any of Williams’s original demands having been answered, without serious discussion of reparations by county leaders, and without the creation of the permanent race relations committee that many saw as vital to the future integration of the county.
Instead, Harris—a pro-business, pro-development Democrat—seemed to echo the leaders of white Forsyth when he told a reporter, “There are other Forsyth counties . . . all around the USA. This is not just a Georgia problem. It’s a problem that exists wherever people are.” Asked if there was anything he could do to stop the violence and intimidation in Forsyth, Harris downplayed legal remedies and emphasized the role of economic development. “People’s attitudes are already changing and have been changing for many years,” he said. “The growth and momentum that we’re having I think attest to that fact.”
Both Hosea and white counterprotesters came out again on the one-year anniversary of the Brotherhood March, in January 1988, but there were fewer demonstrators on both sides this time, and, wary of more negative attention, the people of the county mostly stayed home. Asked if the marches had changed anything in Forsyth, local resident Tom Pruitt shook his head. “It doesn’t bother me that they march, but [to some people] it’s antagonizing. . . . You can’t push yourself on people, they get wild . . . like rattlesnakes.”
In 1988, the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued Ku Klux Klan organizers for conspiracy to deprive the Brotherhood Marchers of their civil rights, and my mother was a witness at the trial, testifying about her experiences on January 17th, 1987. The class-action civil suit resulted in a judgment that forced Klan leaders to pay nearly a million dollars in damages, and that hobbled both the Invisible Empire and the Southern White Knights.
While it would be nice to think that such victories changed Forsyth overnight, in reality few people of color dared or even wanted to move to the county in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly after TV screens all over the country showed crowds of whites chanting “Go home, niggers!” on the Cumming square. For years after the marches, most black Georgians continued to view Forsyth as a place to be avoided at all costs. As Nelson Rivers, the NAACP’s regional director, put it, “Forsyth has a negative connotation [for] most African Americans around here. . . . Just like Memphis will forever be the place where Dr. King was assassinated, Cumming will always be known for that march.”
IN 1990, CENSUS takers counted a total of fourteen African Americans in Forsyth, out of a total population of more than forty-four thousand. While those fourteen people technically lived within the county’s borders, it would be a mistake to conclude that they were part of the cultural or social life of Forsyth or that they felt at home on the streets of Cumming. Instead, these earliest trespasses across the old racial border seem to have occurred as a handful of blacks who lived in northern Atlanta suburbs like Alpharetta, Johns Creek, and Suwanee moved into homes that lay just across the southernmost county line. It is possible that some were among the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals to the state, who came with no knowledge of where exactly the county line was or that moving onto the Forsyth side put them in danger.
Whatever their reasons, those earliest black families took a tentative first step into the old “whites only” zone, and for the first time in living memory, the arrival of African Americans in Forsyth seems to have been met with silence. By 1997, their number had grown to thirty-nine black residents, out of a total population of 75,739. According to the New York Times, this still made Forsyth “the whitest of the country’s 600 most populous counties . . . with a white population of 99.3 percent.” Three years later, at the turn of the new millennium, census workers counted 684 black Georgians who had chosen to live in Forsyth. This still represented only .7 percent of a total population that was nearing 100,000, but ten years later, in 2010, the African American population had increased to 4,510, or 2.6 percent of county residents.
What these numbers show is that in the twenty years after the Brotherhood Marches, time, money, and economic growth slowly but steadily changed Forsyth—into a place that tolerates a small minority of black residents and no longer violently enforces its century- old racial ban. As tens of thousands of Atlanta commuters and new corporate employees moved into the county—increasing its population from 38,000 in 1987 to more than 200,000 in 2015—the old guard of Forsyth and the traditional defenders of “racial purity” were simply outnumbered by newcomers with no history in the county and only the faintest inkling of its racist past. In the early 2000s, Forsyth was among the fastest-growing counties in the entire nation, and once the great tidal wave of Atlanta’s suburban sprawl finally broke and washed over Cumming, the place was transformed almost beyond recognition. According to University of Georgia sociologist Doug Bachtel, the old racial ban eventually “died a natural death.”
IN 2007, ON the twentieth anniversary of the First Brotherhood March, the Gainesville Times noted that at the little crossroads where white supremacists attacked civil rights marchers in 1987, there are now “banks [and] eateries, a supermarket, and that true indicator of suburban life: a Starbucks.” Where once there were pine forests and green pastures, there are now acres and acres of subdivisions, with invented names like Sawnee Plantation, Chattahoochee Oaks, and Bethelview Downs.
The people living in those manicured neighborhoods and gated communities are still overwhelmingly white, and many work for the multinational corporations that have established headquarters in the county, including Siemens, Tyson Foods, and Lafarge. But whereas in 1987 non-white residents barely registered in census data, today Forsyth is 10 percent Latino and 8 percent Asian. The African American community still accounts for just 3 percent of the total population, but that number rises every year, as the county’s old reputation for bigotry fades into the prosperity and anonymity of the Atlanta suburbs, and as middle-class black Atlantans are drawn north by the same features that have attracted so many white transplants: a short commute to northside Atlanta, deep housing stock, and one of the best public school systems in the state. As Alanda Waller, a new African American resident of Forsyth, told a reporter, “I am the treasurer of the PTA. . . . Come on, that should tell you something. They’ve come a long way.”