Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (27 page)

When an interviewer in 2010 interjected, “Oh, goodness,” Lewis said, “These were my experiences in Forsyth” in the 1930s and ’40s. “There was a sense of . . . horror.”

Lewis was clearly frightened by tales of lynched men hanging from telephone poles, and by the sight of black workers hiding under tarps when they passed through Cumming. But to her schoolmates, “white Forsyth” seemed like the natural and eternal order of things. By 1941, when Lewis graduated from Forsyth County High, most traces of the black community had long since been burned, dismantled, or silently absorbed into the property of whites.

Of that former time, all that was left were fleeting glimpses, visible only to someone who paid very close attention. Not long before she moved out of the county, Lewis remembered, she was walking up to a friend’s front door and noticed faint inscriptions in the stepping-stones that led up to the house. It was only when she knelt down for a closer look that Lewis realized the path she’d been walking on was paved with remnants of black Forsyth. “They [were] gravestones,” she said, “from a black cemetery. Someone had dug them up, and took them home, and used them for flagstones.”

THE CIVIL RIGHTS
clashes of the 1950s and ’60s came and went without changing much in the lives of Forsyth’s quiet country people, who in the decades after World War II had been busy erecting chicken houses in their old corn and cotton fields, as America’s expanding poultry industry brought new prosperity to north Georgia. The county seat may have been just a short drive from Ebenezer Baptist—the home church of Martin Luther King Jr. and one of the epicenters of the American civil rights movement—but with no black residents to segregate from whites, there were no “colored” drinking fountains in the Cumming courthouse, and no “whites only” signs in the windows of Cumming’s diners and roadside motels. Instead, as segregationists all over the South faced
off against freedom riders, civil rights marches, and lunch-counter sit-ins, Forsyth was a bastion of white supremacy that went almost totally unnoticed.

Even as the nation changed around it, Forsyth’s old, unspoken rules remained, and each new generation of enforcers clung to the code their parents and grandparents had handed down. In May of 1968, just a month after King was assassinated, a group of ten black schoolchildren came north from an Atlanta housing project, as part of a church camping trip led by two white Mennonite counselors—who were unaware of Forsyth’s racial prohibition. At dusk, as the children pitched their tents in a scenic campground beside Lake Lanier, a gang of white men appeared out of the darkness and forced the group to leave, warning them that “we don’t allow niggers in this county after dark.” When Atlanta activists returned a week later to protest the intimidation, they had to be protected by the Georgia State Patrol, as whites gathered around the campsite, chanting, “Wait until the night comes!”

Asked about the clash, Roy P. Otwell, president of the Bank of Cumming, assured a reporter that while he was “sorry to read of it . . . this sort of thing does not represent Forsyth. . . . When we have an incident of this kind it is overplayed and much exaggerated [and] the people of Forsyth County [are] greatly misunderstood.”

BY THE EARLY 1970S
, many of the lynchers and night riders had begun to die off, taking with them the last living memories of the expulsions. The identities of these men will probably remain a mystery forever now. But the account of Marcus Mashburn, a local doctor, leaves little doubt that many of them were well-known residents who—after waging a months-long campaign of terror against their own neighbors—went back to quiet lives as farmers, storekeepers, tradesmen, and God-fearing, churchgoing Christians.

Mashburn was a country doctor who practiced for decades in
Forsyth, and late in his life he told an interviewer that “in traveling over the county to wait on the sick . . . [I] attended many of the men who took part in the riots and lynching on their deathbeds.” Mashburn described old men racked with guilt over the events of 1912 and said he watched a number of them “die horrible deaths because of their part in the negro lynching.” Even sixty years later, the doctor was careful not to name any names, or to spell out too clearly the obvious conclusion: that Rob Edwards had been murdered not by “parties unknown,” and not by Klansmen flooding down out of the hills, but, just as Ruth Jordan remembered, by regular “people of the county.”

After a few generations of silence, what began as an open secret had become a carefully guarded one, revealed only at the very end, and only to a select few. “As they grew older, their minds [were] burdened by having had a part in the killing,” Dr. Mashburn said, and in their last moments “this thing, they knew, was wrong.”

16

THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF MIGUEL MARCELLI

T
here were long periods when Forsyth’s prohibition went untested, and largely unnoticed, at least by white Georgians. For African Americans, the county’s reputation was so well established that it was rare for anyone to make the mistake of straying over the line. Once in a while, a black truck driver from Atlanta or Chattanooga would take the risk of speeding through, and simply pray he didn’t run out of gas or get a flat tire. But more often than not, black Georgians went far out of their way to avoid Forsyth, even if it meant hours of extra driving, or switching assignments with a white co-worker, or simply refusing to go into the cracker county they’d been warned about since they were children.

When my family moved to Forsyth, in 1977, my parents saw Cumming as an appealing escape from suburban Atlanta—close enough for them to commute to jobs in the city but far enough away that the county was still pastoral, with its rolling green pastures and quaint town square. Our house on Browns Bridge Road was just a few miles west of Oscarville, and while we had heard rumors that Forsyth was home to plenty of racists and Klansmen, the same could be said of almost any rural county in Georgia in the 1970s.

At age seven, I had only the vaguest sense that something “bad” once happened in Forsyth, and no idea at all that it had begun just a few miles from where we lived. My classmates at Cumming Elementary explained to me, the newcomer, why there were “no niggers in Forsyth County,” the same way their elders had once explained it to Helen Matthews Lewis in the 1930s. And when my Little League team piled into the back of a pickup truck and joined Cumming’s Fourth of July Parade in 1978, I watched a group of Sawnee Klansmen stroll along behind us, all wearing their pointy hoods and white robes, as they waved and lobbed handfuls of Super Bubble to the crowd.

But for all that, Forsyth still seemed normal to me as a kid. It was a quiet, close-knit community, as locals liked to say, where boys played football and baseball and where girls rode horses and took ballet. My friends’ fathers spent their weekends fishing and hunting, and on Friday nights you could find almost everyone in the bleachers of the Forsyth County High football stadium. I learned to sit silently when my friends told “nigger jokes” and to keep my family’s liberal views to myself. My parents had grown up in the Birmingham of George Wallace and Bull Connor, and the kind of deep-seated bigotry we found in Forsyth was nothing new to them. My father and mother had fought with their own parents over integration, and they had been taunted by racists as they’d marched in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham and Atlanta. In the same way, they told me, we were going to help change Forsyth County from within.

BUT THEN IN
July of 1980, three years after we arrived, something happened that I knew wasn’t normal at all. I first heard about it when my mother, who worked as a freelance reporter for the
Gainesville Times
, got a call from her editor, C. B. Hackworth. Hackworth said that the night before there had been a shooting
not far from our house, and he asked my mother to drive down to Athens Park Road and try to get the full story.

In those days, it wasn’t unusual to hear a shotgun blast echoing across Lake Lanier or filtering through the pines when some good ol’ boy was hunting whitetail or flushing out quail. So my mother headed toward Athens Park, expecting to learn about a hunting trip gone wrong, or a domestic violence case, or maybe just some redneck taking a potshot at a stray dog.

But after spending the afternoon stopping at one house after another, she began to sense that something very different had happened on Athens Park Road the day before. No one would talk about the shooting, and more than a few people slammed the door in her face when they realized why she’d come. Over the course of the next few weeks, she learned the truth: that whites in Forsyth had once again attacked a black man for stepping across the county line.

ON THE MORNING
of July 26th, 1980, Miguel Marcelli and his girlfriend, Shirley Webb, were invited to a company picnic thrown by Sophisticated Data Research, the Atlanta-based computer firm where Webb worked. The organizers had chosen to hold the gathering on Lake Lanier, which was a popular weekend playground for young professionals, particularly after an extension of Highway 400 made the lake an easy drive from northside Atlanta.

Marcelli, a twenty-eight-year-old Atlanta firefighter, had been born and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and his girlfriend, Shirley Webb, thirty-seven, had moved from her hometown of Chicago to take a job at Sophisticated Data. So as they drove over the two-lane country roads to meet Shirley’s co-workers for the company party, Marcelli and Webb knew nothing about Forsyth. When they pulled into the public park where employees and guests were laying out their picnics and setting up a volleyball net, the scene
looked idyllic: a shady pavilion set between tall pines and the red-clay banks of the lake.

But soon after they arrived, word started to spread up and down Athens Park Road: there were “a couple of niggers” down at the lake, laughing and frolicking, having a party with a bunch of white friends. As locals at the park watched Marcelli and Webb hit the volleyball back and forth, they were shocked—not just by the appearance of two black faces in Forsyth but by the fact that this man and woman didn’t seem to realize where they were, or just how much danger they were in.

MELVIN CROWE’S BRANCH
of the family added an
e
at some point, but in Oscarville everybody knew that he was blood kin to Bud, Azzie, and Mae Crow. Melvin’s father, Burton, was nine years old in 1912 and had grown up with Obie and Ovie, twin brothers who were among the siblings Mae had been sent to fetch on the day she was attacked. As a son of old Oscarville, born in 1929, Melvin Crowe had learned the story of Mae’s death not as a legend but as something his father, uncles, grandparents, and cousins had all witnessed firsthand, and told him about many times.

So when Crowe heard the rumors and drove down to see for himself, he could hardly believe his eyes. There, less than a mile from the spot where Mae had been found with her skull bashed in—where she had sickened and died, and where Ernest Knox had first “confessed his crime”—stood two black people, holding hands and wading knee-deep in the waters of Lake Lanier.

Crowe watched them through somewhat bleary eyes, since, according to his neighbors, he “customarily spent much of Saturday drinking, then driving around the area, sometimes stopping by to see friends.” Crowe had been doing exactly that all morning, and after catching sight of Marcelli and Webb, he drove to the house of his friend Bob Davis, and together with a friend of Davis’s
named Bryine Williams, they started plotting to “do something” about what they’d seen. Before they drove back down Athens Park Road, Davis grabbed a pistol. The idea, Crowe said later, was to scare the black couple away: “We talked about shooting out their tires.” For anyone who’d missed his point, he added, “I don’t like colored people.”

Marcelli got his first inkling of trouble when he heard the crunch of gravel under the tires of a pickup truck, rolling slowly past the grassy picnic area. The vehicle cruised by several times that afternoon, always disappearing up the dirt road leading out of the park only to return a few minutes later. When at one point Marcelli ran over near the truck to get a volleyball, he said he found the driver “looking at me with a mean face.” As a black man living in Georgia, Marcelli had seen scowling white men many times before. “I didn’t pay much attention,” he said. “I just thought maybe he looked like that all the time.”

But around six-fifteen p.m., as Marcelli and Webb were shaking the sand out of their towels and packing the trunk of their car, the same truck appeared again, and this time the driver pulled sideways across the road, blocking their exit from the park. A middle-aged white man sat behind the wheel, glaring at them. Without a word, he gunned the engine and drove off.

With the light fading, Marcelli and Webb said good-bye to the rest of Webb’s friends and got in their car, eager to put the whole episode behind them and relieved at the thought of getting back to Atlanta. But as they drove up the hill toward the main highway, Webb noticed a huge dust cloud filling the road ahead. At that same moment, inside Melvin Crowe’s truck, Bob Davis raised his hand, nodded at Crowe, and said, “Stop and let me out right here.”

As Marcelli and Webb drove up the dusty road, struggling to see, Webb suddenly heard a blunt pop, then another, and watched in horror as Marcelli went limp, his body slumping over the steering
wheel. “I felt a great weakness come over me,” Marcelli recalled later. “Then, I felt a ‘wiggling’ sensation in my head and neck. I heard Shirley scream and the car seemed to be moving on its own.”

When she looked over at Marcelli, Webb said, she “thought he was dead . . . the whole left side of his face was covered in blood.” She struggled to grab the steering wheel as the car veered, climbed a bank beside the road, then flipped, the engine revving and smoking as the wheels spun. With Marcelli drenched in blood and unconscious in the front seat, Webb dragged herself out through the shattered rear window. As she staggered away from the overturned car and called out for help, she saw “a group of men . . . standing on a hill above the road,” and she headed toward them. But when she got closer, Webb was shocked to find that “they were pointing and laughing.” Convinced that these were the same men who had just shot Marcelli, a terrified Webb turned and ran back down the road, screaming for someone to help her.