Reid-who would go on to co-found a Forsyth County KKK “klavern” in the 1920s-hastily arrested a 24-year-old Black man named Robert Edwards for the attack on Crow. Notably, the Black men arrested for the crime later saw the charges dropped.) Crow spent two weeks in a coma, then succumbed to death. (News of her assault came just days after another local white woman, Ellen Grice, alleged that she had been “awakened by the presence of a Negro man in her bed.” White vigilantes horsewhipped Grant Smith, a prominent Black preacher, to within an inch of his life after he publicly named Grice a “ sorry white woman” who had lied about having consensual interracial sex. 9, 1912.Ĭrow had been raped and beaten bloody, left for all but dead by her assailants. Their lives would change almost overnight after Mae Crow, an 18-year-old white girl, was found unconscious in a wooded area roughly a mile from her Forsyth County home on Sept. Elliot Jaspin, author of Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing, estimates that local Black residents “ owned or rented 109 of the county's farms and paid over $30,000 in local taxes.” Many of the area’s Black occupants had generations of antecedents who had been enslaved in the area. history.”īefore 1912, Black folks made up roughly 10 percent of Forsyth County’s population of nearly 11,000. That land was long ago stolen from Black folks during a campaign of terror that has been called “the most successful racial cleansing in U.S. The county was recently ranked one of the richest counties in Georgia, its grand houses and country clubs obscuring a history of Black bloodshed and standing on sites once occupied by Black churches and homes. But only 4 percent of its denizens are Black, in a state where one-third of the people are Black. 4 vote when a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to strip Greene of House committee seats, she gave a speech blaming her most outrageous comments on “cancel culture,” “Facebook posts” and “big media,” which she described as wanting to “crucify me in the public square for words that I said.” But while the internet and the media made me do it may be a convenient, if stupefying, excuse, it seems more likely that Greene’s existing views, perhaps developed during her time in Forsyth County, found affirmation in Trumpist corners online.įorsyth County today is nearly one-quarter Asian and Hispanic. “I'm telling you we've got a South Africa in the backyard of Atlanta, Georgia.''Īfter the 1987 protest, many of Forsyth County’s white residents lashed out at the media for supposedly shaming them, including one local who told the Atlanta Constitution that “we should have busted every camera down there and kicked every reporter’s ass.” Thirty-three years later, before the Jan. ![]() ''I have been in the civil rights movement for 30 years,” Hosea Williams, an acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr and organizer of the Forsyth County march, told the New York Times in 1987. ![]() The county’s reputation as too dangerous for Black folks to even drive through-a courthouse lawn sign in the 1950s and ‘60s warned “ N-er, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You” - was well earned. Forsyth County had maintained an unwritten whites-only policy dating to 1912, when white vigilantes lynched a black man and drove out nearly all of the African American residents. ![]() Newspaper accounts describe protesters being pelted with so many “rocks, bottles and mud thrown from a crowd of Ku Klux Klan members and their supporters” that they were forced to abandon the two-and-half mile route. The marchers had been marking five years since the 1987 “Walk for Brotherhood” drew international condemnation to all-white Forsyth County. When Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new congresswoman known for her racist and anti-Semitic rants, was a senior at South Forsyth County High School in 1992, a few dozen Black marchers made their way through the Georgia county’s rain-slicked streets singing old protest songs and carrying signs reading “We Shall Overcome” and “Black and White Together.” The route was flanked by hundreds of snarling white racists waving Confederate flags and shouting ″Go home, n-ers.”
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