Martin Luther King 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…

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