Blood and Politics (24 page)

Despite the added buzz that such efforts created, Holocaust denial remained under the sole proprietorship of a relatively marginal movement. Only very small groups of people want to sit in a hotel room for two days and listen to long perorations on Romanian fascism. On the surface it seemed as if the white supremacist movement had hit a moment of stasis. Although the warrior set still posed a murderous threat, it had already reached its peak. Subscriptions to Liberty Lobby’s
Spotlight
tabloid had started to taper off. As a whole, the number of movement cadres had grown only slowly. At times stasis seemed to be the principle most at work in a movement dedicated to change.

You learned it in high school. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest—until an outside force exerts itself. And then bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. This isn’t rocket science. It is the physics of throwing rocks and bottles.

Even as federal prosecutors take another crack at Aryan leaders, a second strand of movement activists finds an enlarged following among a stratum of regular white folks. A whites-only ideology takes form as a family-friendly theology, and bands of young subculturalists declare themselves through music and style.

January 17, 1987.
Chicken plants and textile mills had supported the tradition-bound towns and isolated villages of the north Georgia piedmont for generations. But life changed after 1980, when the twisting curves of Highway 19 out of Atlanta became a four-lane turnpike, speeding a torturous two-hour drive into a thirty-minute commute from the metroplex. The low-rent rural reaches of Forsyth County were invaded by upper-middle-class professionals. The green hills and browned-out factories were transformed into an exurban bedroom community. Well-read bourgeois children pushed their blue-collar cousins to the back of area classrooms. Luxury sedans crowded pickup trucks on the local roads. With all these changes, Forsyth County still remained essentially all white, as it had been since the early 1900s. And then, as if to compound further the culture clash, a new multiracial challenge emerged at a crossroads outside the county seat on this Saturday, just days before the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., national holiday.

The King holiday weekend had become a flashpoint for white supremacists in the 1980s. Several groups distributed pamphlets attacking King personally and the holiday. One of the most popular was a reprint of a speech by Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who had led the opposition. In fact, only after a long campaign and great pressure did President Ronald Reagan finally sign the bill in 1983 authorizing a national day memorializing Dr. King in the same manner as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Almost all the states had done likewise, the notable exceptions being New Hampshire and Arizona, but even these states recognized King Day before the century ended.
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Dr. King took his place as a founder of the post–Jim Crow American nation.
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In Forsyth County an assemblage of white working-class locals and black civil rights veterans from Atlanta planned to commemorate Dr. King’s birthday with a solemn “brotherhood march” through the county.
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During the weeks prior to the march, Klan groups in north Georgia plotted to stop it. One Klan flyer argued in hyperbolic type that “OUTSIDE AGITATORS AND COMMUNIST RACEMIXERS want to defile our community.” Racist rhetoric often carries sexual undertones, a connection that has been repeatedly explored by scholars.
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These Klan groups weren’t organizing a journal of literary criticism, however. They called for a “White Power Rally” and made plans to be at the same place at the same time that the brotherhooders would march. “LOOK FOR REBEL FLAGS,” the Klansmen instructed. They signed their leaflet “The Committee to Keep Forsyth and Dawson Counties White,” a fake front for the awful events to come. A confrontation was inevitable.
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On that frosty Saturday morning in 1987, a bus of mostly black Atlantans met two dozen local whites at a convenient crossroads, and together the multiracial group rode to a spot on Bethelview Road, just three miles away from the Forsyth County courthouse.
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Seventy-five brave souls disembarked from the bus and were immediately confronted by an angry mob of four hundred white people screaming racist epithets. The Klan’s choice of a bogus “committee” to rally their followers had proved effective. Nine out of every ten in the mob were not Klan members, but run-of-the-mill working people intent on protecting their white enclave.
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Among those commanding the mob, however, were cadres from two different Klan factions, the Southern White Knights and the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Some Klansmen wore white robes or camouflage fatigues, but most wore regular street clothes. They brought professional-looking banners proclaiming
ABOLISH THE KING HOLIDAY
and
FORSYTH’S SECURITY IS RACIAL PURITY
.
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Klan and non-Klan, they all waved large Confederate battle flags, displayed ropes tied into nooses, and surrounded the marchers and their bus on both sides of the rural road. Roving bands threw rocks and bottles and flitted through the nearby woods, evading the small contingent of state law enforcement officers and the even smaller sheriff’s squad. Soon the barrage became so thick the brotherhood marchers were forced back onto the bus in defeat.
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That afternoon the Klan groups quickly claimed victory with a rally outside the Forsyth County courthouse that had all the earmarks of a 1960s-style Jim Crow celebration, including appearances by J. B. Stoner, who had been released from imprisonment for bombing a black church in 1958,
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and Lester Maddox, who had become infamous for
wielding an ax handle to ward off integration of his Atlanta chicken restaurant and was subsequently elected governor.
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The next day one Georgia Klan leader traveled to an anti–King Day rally in North Carolina and advised his comrades: “If those blue-gummed, gorilla-smelling niggers come sticking their nose in your business, you ought to send them home like we did, with bottles and rocks upside the head.”
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Certainly some, like the Klansman above, understood the Forsyth violence only in terms of the crudest racist invective. Others romanticized it as if the great glories of the Civil War were being relived. “Now comes the Confederate counterattack. Shot and shell crack through the air,” Ed Fields boasted in his
Thunderbolt
tabloid. Fields’s description of events had the ring of a first-person account. “Next the Confederate forces charge down the line on both sides of the Brotherhood Bus. Battle flags flying the troops swing in front of the bus [which has] been outflanked and cut off from the rear,” he continued. Fields’s account of the attack was a surprisingly candid statement of how the brotherhood marchers had been denied use of a public highway.
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The mass attack, draped in the Old South’s symbols and sympathies, had all the hallmarks of the past. Adding to the Faulknerian scent hanging over the drama was Forsyth County’s particular history.
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In 1912, an eighteen-year-old white girl had been raped and murdered there. Three black men were immediately arrested for the crime. A mob formed quickly and took one of the prisoners from the county jail, beat him to death, and hanged his mutilated body from a telephone pole. The other two were placed in jails outside the county, tried, and hanged six weeks later before a crowd of ten thousand.

When a black minister protested the illegal lynchings, he too received a beating (which he managed to survive). Shortly thereafter all one thousand of the county’s black residents were forced from their homes and farmsteads and lost their properties without compensation. In a fashion not untypical for the times, a nearby newspaper blamed the victims for the violence: “The conduct of those Negroes in Forsyth County has caused the organization of White Caps, who have notified the blacks to move out and where they acted slow about it their homes were destroyed.”
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Lynchings were common during that period. The NAACP has counted the lynching of 3,436 people between 1889 and 1922, including 28 who were publicly burned to death in the four years immediately after World War One.
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And more people were lynched in Georgia than in any other state.
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Significantly, many of these lynchings were ostensibly the result
of alleged violations at the intersection of race and gender, such as rape. Just six years prior to the 1912 Forsyth County debacle, white mobs in Atlanta had dragged black people from their homes and stores, beaten them, and burned their buildings in a pogromlike riot supported by the city’s business and political elite. Again, race met sex as the city’s newspaper published inflammatory accounts of supposed “assaults by black men upon white women.”
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While the overwhelming majority of Georgia lynch victims were black, a young Jewish man, Leo Frank, was lynched by an Atlanta mob in 1915, just three years after the Forsyth expulsions. Again the crime supposedly involved the rape and murder of a white woman. White riots drove black people from their homes in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. Similarly, black residents were murdered and their homes burned by mobs in East St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919, and Tulsa in 1921. In each of these instances the riots were mass events involving hundreds of white people without direct affiliation to a group like the Klan.
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(Forcing black people from their homes had precedents, of course, in slavery and Indian “removal.”)

During those decades, mass violence and spectacular public lynchings enforced the customs of everyday Jim Crow and reified the distinction between black people’s secondary status and the first-class citizenship of those with pale skin.
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As a result, the campaign against lynching became a central part of the fight against legal segregation.

The ghosts of lynching victims past may have hung over the brotherhood marchers, but this was 1987, not 1912. De jure segregation had been constitutionally ended, even if de facto segregation, as in Forsyth County, remained. Hundreds of rock-throwing, screaming white people no longer enforced the social order; they destabilized it. The ideology of biological white supremacy no longer enthralled society’s commanding heights. Rather, these ideas were embodied in a relatively distinct social movement. Area newspapers heaped contempt and rebuke upon this mob, instead of understanding and respect as they had when black people were first driven from the county.

Almost as soon as news of the violence in Forsyth County reached Atlanta, civil rights organizations began planning a response. They too invoked the past, not of lynchings and victimization, however, but of bravery and transcendence. During the official King holiday commemoration that Monday, Coretta Scott King announced that she and others would go to Forsyth the following Saturday to “complete the march,” using tones reminiscent of her late husband after a 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery had been stopped by police violence.
Mass rallies in Atlanta that week attracted thousands. An ad hoc Coalition Against Fear and Intimidation in Forsyth County formed. Union officials, politicians, and activists from across the country announced plans to attend the second march.
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The mob violence in north Georgia had hit a national nerve.
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Just seven days after the Klan-led mob had stopped the busload of brotherhood marchers, more than 25,000 civil rights advocates marched into the Forsyth County seat of Cumming. Instead of a small ineffective sheriff’s squad, an army of law enforcement personnel protected the demonstration. They included 1,700 national guardsmen, 600 police from jurisdictions all over the state, and 185 Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) agents. The mayor, the governor, and even Senator Sam Nunn welcomed the march, as did a relatively unnoticed delegation of local (white) clergy.
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For that day at least, official opinion was mustered on the speakers’ platform in the town square. It was the largest civil rights demonstration in the South since the 1960s. The alignment of civil rights leaders and Georgia’s political leadership seemed like the triumph of enlightenment and racial progress over violence and the past.

However, there was another side to the events that second weekend, less visible to the international media, which focused its cameras on the multiracial multitudes and the celebrities onstage. Along the roadside and in the town square, several thousand white people gathered, periodically chanting, “Nigger go home,” or throwing rocks and bottles. Once again they flew Confederate battle flags, a reminder that a supposed symbol of southern heritage had been irretrievably marked as a banner for contemporary racism. In this crowd of white rebels, a colloquy of nasty signs held forth:
PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS
and
KEEP FORSYTH WHITE
, along with one of the Klan’s favorites,
SICKLE CELL ANEMIA, THE GREAT WHITE HOPE
. Dozens of Kluxers, as well as neo-Nazis representing every faction from Florida to North Carolina, showed their faces, some wearing robes and uniforms, others not. J. B. Stoner, the aging church bomber, walked like a Hollywood celebrity, autographing business cards for well-wishers and shaking hands.
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Among the most notable movement personages present that day was David Duke. This was his first public appearance in five years, and he took advantage of the situation to lead an impromptu parade on the edge of town. Using a bullhorn, he told the crowd that Forsyth County was theirs to protect. He claimed that the civil rights march that day was similar to the putative crimes that occurred during the Reconstruction era. Sounding a theme from his Klan days, he said another revolution was needed.
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At his side was Don Black, the onetime Alabama state leader who had gone to federal prison in 1982 for violating the Neutrality
Act in the Dominica affair.
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Now that he had served his sentence, he attended this event without any formal organizational identification. Before the end of the day, fifty-five people were arrested, many on charges of public drunkenness or throwing rocks. Among them was Duke, who later pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a roadway.
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