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MLK Day in Georgia 1987: Hosea Williams marches on Forsyth County

Above: Some of the 25,000 who came for the second march on Jan. 24, 1987 Excerpt from The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, by Donald L. Grant and Jonathan Grant. All rights reserved. The most startling event during the 1987 King holiday celebration grew out of a “march for brotherhood” at the Forsyth County seat of Cumming on January 17, when a small group of marchers led by Hosea Williams was attacked. Forsyth, just north of Fulton County, was home to thirty-eight thousand people, all of them white. It had a reputation as a racist enclave ever since whites had driven out virtually all the county’s eleven hundred blacks in 1912 after a lynching and orgy…

Answering a musical question about Brambleman

Here’s a one-question interview by Susan Helene Gottfried for her blog at West of Mars (which sounds like the setting for my first three novels). Thanks, Susan. What song makes you think of your book? Answer: “One of Us” written by Eric Bazilian, performed by Joan Osborne, inspired me to write Brambleman the way I did. In other words, it actually made me think of the book. (And they are listed in the Acknowledgments.) Brambleman’s theology is based on the song. Supernatural beings rely on public transportation, and buses are vehicles of both salvation and terrible, sometimes random justice. The book attempts to answer the musical question: “What if God was one of us Just a slob like one of us Just…

The Way It Was in the South: 20 years old & going strong

There were about 8,000 hardcover copies published of THE WAY IT WAS IN THE SOUTH: THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN GEORGIA. 6,000 of those were published in hardcover by Carol Publishing in NY back in late 1993, five years after the author died. It is my father’s life’s work, and the tragedy of his life is not living to see it completed and published. That task fell to me, his youngest son. The book received great acclaim and won some noteworthy honors. Sales were decent. In fact, all the hardcover copies were sold, some of them twice. (Funny story–buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you how that happened.) The publisher went bankrupt in the late 1990s and rights reverted to the author (in this case, Donald…

Why don’t Cumming city officials use e-mail?

A bunch of old white men run Cumming, the Forsyth County seat. Last year, Mayor H. Ford Gravitt created a controversy by ejecting a citizen who was videotaping a City Council meeting–in clear violation of Georgia’s open meetings act. Politifact even weighed in on the case. Fortunately, Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens has gotten involved to enforce the law, but old ways die hard up in the hills. You can watch the video of the hearing of Olens v. Gravitt on the blog of local activist Nydia Tisdale (the woman with the camera in question), who has taken on the task of “Investigating Corruption in Forsyth County, GA” and does so in loving detail. Given this, it’s interesting to see the following…

Judgment on Brambleman

As you may know, Brambleman recently won the Independent Book Publishers Asscoiation’s Benjamin Franklin Award (which was recently sent back to the shop for repairs). The award went to the publisher, not the author. I suppose I’d be irritated if I wasn’t Thornbriar Press, as well. I’v also received the Benjamin Franklin Award judging forms for Brambleman, which might interest you. The book won the tiebreaker rankings for both editorial and design. Now I should write something else, I suppose. Then again, it’s Friday night. Maybe I’ll just watch a movie–or the Braves, going for win No. 14!

What did you have for lunch today?

This is one of my favorite paragraphs from Brambleman. It comes in the middle of the story, after Charlie Sherman has finished his work on the horrors of 1912 Forsyth, County, Georgia. Now he’s investigating something that is, in its own way, even worse. He’s just interviewed an eyewitness to a crime that had occurred seventy years previously, an event the old man remembers in chilling detail. After the interview, Charlie goes to get some food for the desolate, derelict old guy. When he returns, he sees an ambulance and suspects (correctly) that the old man has breathed his last. Charlie stopped at a park in Cumming and ate the food he’d bought for the dying man. The egg yolk and grits ran…

Brambleman

Georgia politics, history, and other stuff

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