Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (32 page)

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.”

EPILOGUE

A PACK OF WILD DOGS

I
f you drive around Cumming today, you will see more than a few black and brown faces among all the white ones—people of color working and shopping in Forsyth County’s stores, walking the streets of the town square, and sending their children to the local schools. What you won’t find is a single trace of 1912, or any acknowledgment of the racial cleansing that defined the county for most of the twentieth century. Instead, the timeless, placeless veneer of American suburbia has so completely covered over the past that not even the young black men and women working the cash registers of the county seem to realize that Forsyth was “whites only” just a few decades ago, or that the ground under some of its subdivisions, malls, and big-box stores once belonged to earnest, hardworking black farmers.

And how could they know? There is no memorial to the lynching of Rob Edwards. There are no photographs of black leaders like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg, Levi Greenlee, and Byrd Oliver among all the Confederate portraits at the county Historical Society. And no marker anywhere tells new black residents that they are far from the first African Americans to live in Forsyth.

Instead, gazing out over the square is a larger-than-life bronze
statue of Hiram Parks Bell, Confederate Congressman, U.S. Representative, and self-described defender of “white over black domination.” Bell is the celebrated native son whose most famous moment in Washington came when King David Kal
kaua of Hawaii was received as a visiting head of state in November of 1874. As Kal
kaua spoke before Congress, the representative from Georgia was overheard joking to a colleague that in the days of southern slavery, the king “would have brought $1,500 on the block.” Bell’s caucus of southern Democrats succeeded, by the end of his second term, in reversing nearly all the gains African Americans had made under congressional Reconstruction, and to the end of his days, “Colonel” Bell was proud of having helped quash what he derided as “this attempted social revolution, to place the African upon an equality with the Caucasian.”