(And while you’re here, check out the giveaway: Buy Brambleman, get the eBook of Chain Gang Elementary for free!) A five-star review for Brambleman from Forsyth County reader Marcy Theobald (originally posted on Goodreads): “I REALLY enjoyed this book.  Very much a page-turner.  I couldn’t wait to read the next chapter, and the next, and the next… Jonathan Grant’s Brambleman is historical fiction, taking place in Forsyth County in my backyard of Cumming, GA.  It was interesting, to say the least, learning about what’s happened here in the county I’ve lived in for almost 15 years.  More accurately, I was appalled to learn that Oprah’s visit here in the late 80’s was the tip of Forsyth’s history-making iceberg.  Lynching was an acceptable…

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Not a shock—the ACLU regularly defends those outside the mainstream on both left and right–but I think the state has legitimate public safety concerns about allowing Ku Klux Klan members to roam the highways, picking up litter.  Once the signs go up proclaiming that the Klan “owns” a stretch of road, there’s no telling what might happen. RoadKKKill would defeat the purpose of the Adopt-a-Highway program. Besides, the Georgia Department of Transportation, in rejecting the Klan’s application to adopt a stretch of highway in Union County, pointed out that that a successful applicant must be a “civic-minded organization in good standing.” The Klan, with its history of prejudice, racial violence, and terrorism, does not meet this standard. It is the Adolf Hitler of civic groups. I stand by…

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This afternoon, I talked to two girls who live in Forsyth County. They have no idea what happened there 100 years ago. Do you? Some history: Forsyth County, famous as the birthplace of Hee-Haw’s Junior Samples, has for most of the past century, existed as an intentionally all-white community bordering the black Mecca of Atlanta since 1912, following one of the 20th century’s most violent racist outrages—including lynching, nightriding, and arson. In 1987, the sleepy community gained notoriety when a small march led by civil rights firebrand Hosea Williams was broken up by rock- and bottle-throwing Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and their sympathizers. Bloody but unbowed, Williams returned the next week with 25,000 followers in one of largest civil rights marches in history. There was…

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A horrifying story : 21-year-0ld Stephanie Davis left her two-year-old son locked in a room with no food and water; she went out and got arrested for DUI. A suspicious relative notified the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department, and deputies found the child covered in filth in a house that smelled of excrement. They reported 50 bags of garbage on the porch. The woman now faces child cruelty charges in addtion to the DUI. Question: Is the ability to get in a car and start it the last thing to go? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports: Though Davis said someone was watching her son, the family member, who lived more than an hour away, believed the child was home alone and called police. Deputies could hear…

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I meant to post this earlier, but Monday got in my way. Atlanta native Kelly Smith Beaty has taken reality show producers to task for their demeaning portrayals of black Atlantas. Ms. Beaty, a former reality show participant on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice is referring to The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Love and Hip Hop: Atlanta. (Disclosure: I haven’t seen these shows and don’t plan to, especially  after what Ms. Beaty writes in the Huffington Post.) Her post, “Will the Real Black People of Atlanta Please Stand Up,” is well worth reading. She asks: Why can’t the media focus more on African-American women of achievement? Good question. She writes: Time after time, executive producers from L.A. and New York, where I currently…

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  A Klan-themed past has come back to haunt Cherokee County Sheriff Roger Garrison. Ironic, since Klan costumes were originally designed to make their wearers appear to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers in an attempt to frighten newly freed blacks into submission during Reconstruction after the Civil War. (The shotguns and nooses they carried helped achieve the desired effect tremendously.) The Georgia legislature adopted an “anti-mask law” in the 1940s to force Klansmen to show their faces in public. This had a negative effect on the KKK’s membership. By the way, Cherokee, like Forsyth and several other North Georgia counties, conducted a purge of  black residents in 1912—four years after African Americans were Constitutionally disenfranchised in the state. These purges came during a time when there was…

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