Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (31 page)

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.