THE ROOTS OF MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE

Democracy is supposed to be a system in which people get the representation they want. It turns out to be true in the case of the worst Member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, because she represents a district that - if not The Worst Place In America - is in serious competition for the title. Forsyth County has been A Bad Place for a long time.

When Marjorie Taylor Greene, known for her racist and anti-Semitic rants, was a senior at South Forsyth County High School in 1992, and event called the “Walk for Brotherhood” happened. It involved some 50 African-Americans who marched through the county singing old civil rights songs and carrying signs that read “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.” Newspaper accounts described 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 march.

Thirty years ago. In 1992.

The march had been to mark five years since the 1987 “Walk for Brotherhood” drew international condemnation to all-white Forsyth County, which had maintained an unwritten whites-only policy dating to 1912, when an African-American man was lynched and the African American residents of the county were driven out during a campaign of terror that has been called “the most successful racial cleansing in U.S. history.”

Prior to the events of 1912, African Americans were approximately ten percent of the county population of 11,000 and owned or rented 109 of the county's farms, paying over $30,000 in local taxes. Most were the descendants of slaves who had worked the farms in the county.

Everything changed on September 9, 1912, when Mae Crow, an 18-year-old white girl, was found unconscious in a wooded area roughly a mile from her home; she had been raped and beaten bloody and left for dead - she spent two weeks in a coma before dying. The news of the assault came days after Ellen Grice, another local white woman had claimed she had been “awakened by the presence of a Negro man in her bed.” When Grant Smith, a prominent Black preacher, publicly called Grice a “sorry white woman” who had lied about having consensual interracial sex, he was horsewhipped and nearly killed by White vigilantes.

Sheriff William W. Reid, who later founded a KKK “klavern” in the county during the 1920s, hastily arrested 24-year-old Robert Edwards as Crow’s attacker. Following the arrest, Sheriff Reid left the jail unmanned long enough for a white mob to enter and shoot Edwards, bashing his skull in crowbars. Dragged out alive, Edwards died while as he was dragged from the back of a wagon, a noose around his neck.” After the lynching, the white mob took turns shooting the mutilated corpse to the cheers from a crowd of hundreds.

Two more African-Americans, 16-year-old Ernest Knox and 18-year-old Oscar Daniel, were also arrested and confessed after torture. Both were convicted and sentenced to death by hanging by all-white juries in two separate trials held the same day. A crowd of 5,000 turned up to witness “justice” enacted, bringing picnics baskets and quilts to sit on the hillside where they had clear views of the lynchings.

The lynchings occurred amidst rampant white violence and terror in Forsyth County. Between the discovery of Crow and the end of October, an estimated 1,098 African-Americans were forced out, schools and churches firebombed, lives threatened by night riders in hoods and cloaks. White neighbors harvested abandoned crops without apology or compensation, stole the horses, cows, and hogs, and plundered property for fence posts, house timbers, and barn boards with impunity. Headstones from Black cemeteries were taken and turned into flagstones for white property owners.

Things didn’t change over the decades. Forsyth County was a “sunset county.” In the 1950s and 60s, a sign on the courthouse lawn warned: “N---er, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You.” In 1968, a group of 10 African-American childrean and their adult chaperones on an overnight trip from Atlanta were told by locals to leave the Lake Lanier campgrounds or be removed “feet first.” In the 1970s, African-American delivery truck drivers stoping at the Tyson chicken factory had to be escorted by agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to ensure their safety. In 1980, an African-American Atlanta firefighter who was attending his girlfriend’s company picnic in a public park was shot by a county resident who later reportedly told police, “Somebody has got to keep the n---ers out of Forsyth County.” That same year, the U.S. Census reported one Black person among Forsyth County’s population of 30,000, about which a regional newspaper wrote “even county leaders think that must have been someone playing a joke with the questionnaire.”

In the aftermath of the 1987 march, civil rights leader Hosea Williams, who had organized the event, told the New York Times, ''I have been in the civil rights movement for 30 years. I'm telling you we've got a South Africa in the backyard of Atlanta, Georgia. I have never seen such hatred. There were youngsters 10 and 12 years old screaming their lungs out, 'Kill the n---ers.' ''

After the march, many Forsyth County white residents attacked the media for supposedly shaming them. On told the Atlanta Constitution, “... we should have busted every camera down there and kicked every reporter’s ass.”

A week later, Williams returned in an attempt to finish the march. By then, images from the first protest had been shown across the country and internationally The second march saw 12-20,000 particpants, including Jesse Jackson, Rep. John Lewis, Coretta Scott King, Senator Gary Hart and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. When Oprah Winfrey brought her talk show to the county seat a week later, the audience was Forsyth County residents. The head of the Committee to Keep Forsyth County White took his turn at the mic and boasted that the angry white mob represented “the largest white people's protest against communism and race-mixing in the last 30 years."

Digging a bit deeper into the history of Forsyth County, one discovers that it was the site of the 1829 discovery of gold that drew thousands of white miners to what was then Cherokee territory and led to the forced removal of Creek and Cherokee people along the Trail of Tears.

In 2022, Forsyth County is nearly 25 percent Asian and Hispanic. But African-Americans make up only four percent of the population; statewide, Georgia is one-third African American. It is ranked one of the richest counties in Georgia, its grand houses and country clubs obscuring a history of bloodshed and standing on sites once occupied by African-American churches and homes on land was long ago stolen.There have been gestures toward tallying the land reparations. The 1912 lynching of Robert Edwards has been acknowledged with a historical marker that states: “Forsyth County would remain essentially all white until the 1990s. No one was held accountable for Edward’s lynching or the racial cleansing that followed. Like all victims of racial terror lynchings Rob Edwards died without due process of law.”

All of which explains MTG’s videotaped insistence that “the most mistreated group of people in the United States today are white males,” and why the Georgia State Legislature has determined that “critical race theory” must not be taught in the state’s schools.

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