One of the largest civil rights marches in the history of the South walked a mile down a two-lane road and into the heart of all-white Forsyth County on Saturday.
An estimated 20,000 black and white marchers, shielded by police and national guardsmen in riot gear, gathered around the county courthouse to hear black leaders and elected officials proclaim their right to live anywhere they want.
The march, which some civil rights leaders said exceeded the numbers on the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery walk, was organized in only one week. It was a response to an incident the previous Saturday in which 400 whites threw bottles and rocks at a tiny demonstration here.
There were more than 1,000 counter-demonstrators angrily waving Confederate flags and taunting the marchers Saturday.
Authorities said at least 14 people, including four Ku Klux Klan members with weapons, were arrested before the march began.
A few men and women in white robes and many others in camouflage fatigues shouted insults and chanted as if at a racist pep rally, ”Niggers go home.” Even though the most severe snowstorm in north Georgia in a decade hit a few days earlier, Saturday was a beautiful day for marching, high thin clouds and temperatures in the 40s.
Small groups sang ”We Shall Overcome” softly as they passed men and women on the side of the road who hurled insults in return.
The march a week earlier had only 50 participants. But after the rock throwing incident, this march took on a symbolic value not only to the civil rights leaders but also to elected officials.
Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart and Georgia`s two senators, Sam Nunn and Wyche Fowler, spoke to the marchers who assembled behind the courthouse.
”Racism and violence are enemies of freedom . . . ,” said Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, a former close aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ”We are marching against young men who have turned again to violence and racism because they see the world moving on without them.”
King`s widow, Coretta Scott King, and several of her children were among the marchers.
Though it may have been his first civil rights march, William Bradford Reynolds, head of the U.S. Justice Department`s civil rights division, walked ahead of the main group with his own security guards.
At least a dozen helicopters, some from television stations, circled constantly over the march route and the town square.
Because of fears that the incident a week ago might be repeated, only worse, more than 1,500 Georgia National Guard members, along with hundreds of state and local police, were mobilized to clear the way for the march.
”There`s no question this is big redneck country. Guys with trucks with four-wheel drive, all jacked up, shotgun racks and big whip antennas with those little red balls on the tip. You know what I mean?” said Katrina Bankston, who grew up here. ”And it`s not by chance there are no blacks in Forsyth County.”
The county`s reputation was established 75 years ago, after the rape-murder of a white woman by three blacks and the resulting formation of a lynch mob. One of the black men was killed by the mob and the other two were tried, convicted and hanged. Shortly after that, a vigilante group systematically drove hundreds of blacks out of the county, and they have stayed out ever since.
Only 30 miles north of Atlanta, Forsyth County seems almost a throwback, a pocket of the Old South updated with television satellite dishes on lawns, roadside shopping centers and a few industrial parks on the outskirts of Cumming.
For many, however, the shouts of some locals obscure the deep embarrassment felt because racism has propelled the county into the national news.
”It`s like we`re the damnedest people on earth, the scum of the earth,” said Roger Henderson, a mail carrier whose hurt was evident in his voice. ”I love this county, but this has set back things 20 years.”
The march Saturday focused on Cumming, a town without parking meters and with only two traffic lights. It is a bedroom community for Atlanta on the outer rim of the ”doughnut area,” a term applied to the mostly white suburbs that developed in the late 1960s and early `70s. The town, which has only 2,800 residents, sits around the courthouse square. It is an intimate and traditional Southern town where the restaurants serve fresh-made barbecue and keep a pitcher of sweetened iced tea on each table.
Residents accept its all-white status as natural. ”I don`t think anyone`s given it much thought,” said Don Shadburn, who has taught science in a county junior high school for 26 years and is also the county historian. ”I never heard anyone discuss it. It was just the way it was. The big drawing card for a long, long time around here was the lake.”
It was the absence of blacks and the county`s reputation that attracted a group of 50 marchers a week ago for an ”anti-intimidation demonstration.”
Their walk was timed to celebrate the second national holiday marking King`s birthday. They were beset by a group of rebel-yelling, Confederate-flag-waving counter-demonstrators, a few in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan, a few in the camouflage jackets and pants of neo-Nazi hate groups.
A contingent of state and county police tried but failed to keep the two groups separate. Some of 400-plus white onlookers started throwing bottles, rocks and bricks at the marchers.
The scene was stunning for its quick and close brutality as much as for being anachronistic in what has become known as the New South. As it was repeated on network television news throughout the week, it seemed as if black and white film of marches held two decades ago had been put on videotape and colorized.
”What it boils down to is, the people in these two counties (Forsyth and neighboring Dawson County) just don`t want blacks in here,” said Bankston.
”It used to be, `Out before sunset or you`re dead.` That`s not too awfully long ago, maybe five or six years. Actually, most blacks wouldn`t want to stay here after dark.”
Some townspeople were happy to let their venom go about the blacks, but most were cynical about the motives of both sides. ”My husband says he thinks this Hosea Williams and the Klan must have got together,” said a woman with an 8-month-old baby resting on her hip. ”He thinks it`s so the King people can get money for their group and the Klan can get more members.”
Williams, a former lieutenant of King`s, was always the firebrand of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Though now in his 60s, he is usually the point man in Atlanta-area demonstrations.
”There`s no problem with whites and blacks here,” said Terry Rose, as he stood on a street corner glaring at a group of nine Guardian Angels who had walked up from Atlanta despite the South`s worst snowstorm in recent years. The Angels are self-appointed ”protectors,” operating in Atlanta and several other cities, who ride mass transit and are eager for publicity.
”We have trash here just like everybody else,” said Rose, ”but the problem is Hosea Williams, who wants to bring every degenerate riffraff, scum of the earth and homosexual into town with him. They`re trash, too.”
”We`re just the battleground for these two forces,” said Charles Welch, a member of the Cumming City Council for 14 years. He and others seemed perplexed that suddenly their county was in the glare of national attention, and they tried to analyze what it meant.
”This is part of a new wave among young people. You got it in Chicago. You see it in the Howard Beach incident in New York,” said Harrington, referring to the recent death of a black man fleeing white attackers in a Queens neighborhood. ”There`s a resentment among young people, and we don`t know about what.”
”We got about the lowest unemployment rave in the state,” said Leroy Hubbard, chairman of the Forsyth County Commission. ”It`s about 3.5 percent, so this feeling against the coloreds is not about jobs or anything like that.”
Indeed, Forsyth in the second-fastest-growing county in the state. Its population has increased 150 percent during the last decade, jumping from 16,000 in 1977 to nearly 40,000 today. Though it is impossible to calculate the exact number, many believe a large part of the increase was due to white flight from Atlanta.
More than 60 percent of county residents work in Atlanta or in industries on the city`s perimeter. Forsyth is also a recreation area that borders Lake Lanier. An estimated 75 percent of county residents were born elsewhere. Though it is an area of mostly blue-collar workers, housing prices have risen steeply, and the average home and half-acre of land costs between $60,000 and $80,000.
