Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (29 page)

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