In October 1912 the raped and brutalized body of Mae Crow, an 18-year-old white girl, was buried next to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. Shortly thereafter, the white men of Forsyth County went on a rampage and expelled all 1,098 black citizens from the region, about 10% of the population.
They had already dragged black Rob Edwards, 24, from a jail cell in Cumming’s main square, beaten him with crowbars, riddled his body with bullets and hung him from the lintel of a telephone pole. Two black teenagers, Ernest Knox, 16, and Oscar Daniel, 18, were to be hanged after undergoing spurious trials.
But citizens of Forsyth, a county north of Atlanta, would do more. For much of the 20th century they defended the Forsyth boundary against the advance of the city to the south, using violence, intimidation and making clear with threats that this county in Greater Atlanta should remain reserved exclusively for whites.
The people who drove the black inhabitants of Forsyth from their homes and farms gave no name to this hatred – there were still no theories about the “great replacement” or “white genocide”. But the idea that other races were conspiring to “take the place” of the county’s rightful inhabitants took brutal form more than a century ago, said Patrick Phillips, whose 2016 book “Blood at the Root” recounts the history of racial cleansing in the county in which he grew up, as well as his own awareness of the fact that his childhood was among whites.
According to Phillips, a small group of black farmers was starting to prosper, buy land and do better than some of their white neighbors. They, however, had to leave.
If the perpetrators of the Buffalo, New York, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Texas, and Christchurch, New Zealand massacres showed how lethal ideas of this sort can be in the hands of a single well-armed shooter, Forsyth County in 1912 showed what could be carried out by a better organized terror operation.
A century later, however, the Forsyth County case also refutes white supremacists for whom, in the words of Payton Gendron, accused of the Buffalo massacre, “diversity does not mean strength.” The century of white exclusivity in the county was a century of stagnation and isolation. The county only began to grow when the Greater Atlanta advance overtook Forsyth’s defenses in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“What happened put a stigma on the county for many years, and for some people that’s still there,” said Jason May, 48, the white owner of a real estate office on the side of Cumming Square.
And the county is now booming. Its population now exceeds 260,000, against the 45,000 it had when traces of the exclusively white Forsyth began to disappear. The black population, which in 2000 was 2.2% of the total population, still does not exceed 4.4%; by way of comparison, Alphareta, in neighboring Fulton County, has 12% black among its inhabitants.
But other demographic groups have grown substantially in Forsyth, including immigrants. Asians, especially those of Indian origin, make up 15.5% of the population, and Hispanics 9.7%. The median annual household income is $112,834 and has just surpassed Calvert County, Maryland, to become the 13th highest in the country.
“I’m sorry, but diversity can never be a bad thing for me,” said white businesswoman Barbra Curtiss, 71, whose real estate office on the side of Cumming Square, County Forsyth, has a banner welcoming the its most recent brokerage, Maria Zaragosa, and offering services in “Spanglish”. “Diversity is like death or taxes. There is no way to avoid it. No matter how much hate speech there is, no matter how many slaughters can happen, diversity will not stop.”
Curtiss settled in Forsyth County in 1984. She was aware of her all-white status when she lived in Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta, and her then-husband — “racist,” she said — wanted to move to a white-only county. .
Three years later, in 1987, a small group of Atlanta and local social rights activists, led by Hosea Williams, rode the bus from Atlanta to Forsyth County to mark the 75th anniversary of the black expulsion. They were greeted with Confederate flags and posters that read: “Racial purity is Forsyth’s safety” and “Forsyth remains white.” And when they tried to march to Cumming, they were stoned and attacked with bottles and bricks until they retreated to their buses and returned to Atlanta.
A few weeks later the protesters returned in far greater numbers, this time including Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young and Oprah Winfrey – to name just a few famous names. They were surrounded by national media attention, with helicopters flying overhead and a phalanx of National Guard members clearing the way for them.
Many county residents are unaware of its history.
Zaragosa, for example, said he didn’t know about Forsyth’s past. “Our main emphasis is on business,” she said two months after starting work at the real estate company, which, like others, advertises, “Se habla español.”
Contrary to popular belief, however, the county did not try to bury its history. A sign in Cumming’s main square recounts the story of Rob Edwards’ lynching and the racial cleansing that followed.
The sign reads: “The loss of black property to flee arbitrary mob violence was common at this time. Black residents of Forsyth abandoned their homes and farms to escape, taking with them only what they could carry.”
In fact, much of Forsyth’s per capita income came from the enormous appreciation of properties that had been in the possession of the county’s old families for a century — and much of those properties had been taken from others.
Outside an Asian grocery store on the outskirts of Cumming, Avani Vallabhaneni spoke about the perseverance of newcomers to Forsyth. She said that when she and her husband arrived in the county 12 years ago, they heard neighbors whispering behind her that she should go back to where she came from. Her husband, who travels for work, once showed his business card to a Georgian who was surprised to learn that he lived in Cumming.
But Avani had her two children in Forsyth County, and the Indian population has grown so much that she no longer hears the same whispered comments.
Others, however, continue to hear similar whispers, even if the complaint made is not necessarily racial.
This happens to Bogdan Maruszak, pastor of a small congregation of immigrants. He founded his Ukrainian Orthodox church in 2000 in a trailer parked on a plot of land on the outskirts of Cumming, drawing Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian worshipers — all white — to inhospitable northern Georgia, where he opened a body shop to pay his bills.
Maruszak was vaguely aware of Forsyth’s story. “I thought about it, but I wasn’t afraid,” said the Ukrainian-Polish immigrant as he sipped iced tea with lemonade on the Fulton County line in Johns Creek.
With the Ukrainian War intensifying fears of genocide and the Buffalo massacre drawing attention to “white replacement”, Maruszak said, it is up to all Forsyth residents, not just newcomers, to speak out in defense of those that are threatened.
“We can’t just watch passively,” he said. “We can do something. We need to react.”
For Patrick Phillips, author of “Blood at the Root”, this cannot be taken for granted.
According to him, Forsyth’s progress and remarkable prosperity may prove that white supremacy is a hindrance, but this understanding should not be attributed to the county itself. Metro Atlanta sprawled northward until it finally invaded Forsyth County, he said.
“What we would like to believe is that a moral change has taken place, that people have understood that they were wrong and that a light has been turned on.” But for him, that’s not what happened.
