CUMMING, Ga. – In October 1912, after the body of Mae Crow, an 18-year-old white youth, raped and brutalized, was laid to rest next to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, the white men of Forsyth County went on a rampage, driving 1,098 Black citizens – about 10% of the population – from the border of Forsyth.
They dragged 24-year-old Rob Edwards, a Black man, from a cell in Cumming town square, beat him with a crowbar, pierced his body with bullets, and hoisted him over a telephone pole. Two black teenagers, 16-year-old Ernest Knox and 18-year-old Oscar Daniel, will hang after the most speculative ordeal.
But the citizenship of this county north of Atlanta was not taken. For much of the 20th century, they would defend Forsyth’s borders as the city to the south was invaded, through violence, intimidation, and intimidation in Greater Atlanta that the county was white only.
The people who drove the Negro residents of Forsyth out of their homes and farms had no name for their hatred, no theory of “The Great Alternative” or “The Genocide of the Negroes.” white”. But the notion that other races are conspiring to “replace” the legal residents of the county took the form of murder more than a century ago, said Patrick Phillips, whose 2016 book made headlines. “Blood at the root” chronicles the history of racial cleansing of the county he grew up in – and his own awakening to the truth of his all-white childhood.
A small group of black farmers, Mr. Phillips said, had started to thrive, acquiring land and outgrowing some of their white neighbors.
They have to go.
If the perpetrators of mass shootings in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand, show how deadly such belief can be in the hands of a single, armed killer well, the Forsyth County of 1912 showed a more organized activity. terrorism can be achieved.
But a century later, Forsyth County also rejects white supremacists, who believe, as Buffalo accused gunman Payton Gendron, said, “Diversity is not strength.” The county’s white-only century was one of stagnation and isolation. It was only after the expansion of Greater Atlanta finally overwhelmed Forsyth’s defenses in the late 1990s and 2000s that the county boomed.
“It caused a stigma in Forsyth County for years, and for some people,” said Jason May, 48, white owner of a real estate company just off Cumming town square. , it still exists.
And it’s exploding.
Its population is now over 260,000 – up from 45,000 when traces of the all-white Forsyth began to disappear. The Black population, at 2.2 percent in 2000, is still just 4.4 percent – Alpharetta, just above Fulton County Street, is 12 percent Black. But other demographic groups have grown significantly, including immigrants. Asians, especially Indian Americans, make up 15.5 percent, and Hispanics 9.7 percent. Median household income, at $112,834, just surpassed Calvert County, Md., to become the 13th highest in the nation. That was $44,162 in 1993, or $89,500 in current dollars.
“Variety can never be bad in my book; I’m sorry,” said Barbra Curtiss, 71, a white businesswoman whose real estate agency is near Cumming town square with a banner welcoming her newest agent, Maria Zaragosa, along with services “Spanish”. “Diversity – it’s like death and taxes. You won’t be able to stop it, no matter what. No matter how much hate speech, how many mass shootings, it won’t stop.”
Curtiss, who moved to Forsyth County in 1984, learned of the white-only status while living in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, when her husband at the time was a “racist,” she said. – want to move to a place completely … white county. Three years later, in 1987, a small group of local and Atlanta civil rights activists, led by Hosea Williams, boarded a bus from Atlanta to Forsyth County to mark the 75th anniversary of Black Deportation Day. They were met with confederate flags and signs declaring “Racial purity is the safety of Forsyth” and “Forsyth Stays White.” And when they tried to march into Cumming, they were pelted with stones, bottles, and bricks, until they retreated onto buses, back to Atlanta.
A few weeks later, this time with national media attention, helicopters in the air and a squad of national guards cleared the way for them, return marchers in much larger numbers – this time with Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.
Among the marchers was Miguel Marcelli, a Black Atlanta firefighter who made the mistake in 1980 of joining his girlfriend’s company picnic on the shores of Lake Lanier in Forsyth County, and nearly paid the price. with his life after the pair were ambushed when they got home. They were less than a mile from Mae Crow’s grave. In November 1986, five Hispanic construction workers were beaten and told they would be killed if they didn’t leave the county immediately.
To the general public, however, Forsyth remained largely white. Ms. Curtiss recalls her first white client, “a little Hispanic” in the early 2000s, who came to her after other real estate agents turned them down. .
“All I remember is it was heartbreaking, because he said no one else would give him the time of day,” she said.
Tony Shivers, 72, remembers exactly when the first Black man was hired by the town of Cumming: It was 30 years ago, and he was that man. He was laying pipelines for a contractor in Cumming; The city liked his job, and got him to work at the water treatment plant. There was a sign outside the sheriff’s office warning Negroes – using racial slurs – that they were better off not being caught by a dog catcher in Forsyth County after dark.
His friends in Atlanta have told him it was crazy for him to come to Forsyth County, and he says he remembers incidents when he was asked to go back to where he belonged. But he was in the Marines. He will not be threatened.
Many in the county are unaware of its history. Ms. Zaragosa said she knew nothing about the county’s past. Instead, she highlights a note many others here make: “Our main focus is on business,” she says, just two months at the real estate agency, which also like the others, advertised: “Se habla Español.”
For others, stories are inevitable. The county didn’t try to bury its history: A plaque on the town square of Cumming tells the story of Edward’s murder and the racial cleansing that followed.
“The loss of Negro-owned property to flee arbitrary mob violence was common in these times, and the Negro residents of Forsyth abandoned their homes and farms. to escape, taking only what they could bring.”
Indeed, much of Forsyth’s wealth per capita was created by the massive increase in the value of properties that had been owned by Forsyth’s former families for a century – much of it taken from from others.
Outside Cherian International Fresh Market, an Asian grocer in the suburbs of Cumming, Avani Vallabhaneni spoke about the persistence of Forsyth’s newcomers. When she and her husband arrived 12 years ago, she said, she heard neighbors whispering behind her back that she should go back to where she came from. Her husband, who was on a business trip, once gave his business card to a savvy Georgian, who wondered if he lived in Cumming.
But she had her two children in Forsyth County, and India’s population had grown so much, she said she couldn’t hear those whispers anymore.
Still, others still hear the same whispers today – although race isn’t necessarily a trigger.
Like Father Bogdan Maruszak, pastor of a small flock of immigrants. He started his Ukrainian Orthodox Church in a trailer, on a piece of land outside Cumming, in 2000, bringing together Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians and others, all of white man, to ban the territory in North Georgia, where he ended up opening a bust shop. He knew vaguely about the history of Forsyth.
“I’m thinking about it, but I’m not worried,” the Polish-Ukrainian immigrant says of iced tea and lemonade right by Fulton County in Johns Creek.
With the war in Ukraine raising genocide and the Buffalo mass shootings focusing attention on “white supplantation,” said Father Maruszak, all of Forsyth County, not just those newcomers, must speak up and speak up. for those at risk.
“We cannot passively observe,” he said. “We can do something. We should react.”
That cannot be taken for granted, says Mr. Phillips, author of “Blood at its Roots”.
Forsyth’s progress and its remarkable prosperity may be evidence that white supremacy is an obstacle, he said, but the county should not be credited with epiphany. Atlanta’s wave spread steadily northward until the wave “finally swept over Forsyth County,” he said.
“What you want to believe,” Mr. Phillips said, “is that there has been some moral change, that people saw the mistake in their way and a light switch clicked.”
But that, he said, is not what happened.
