Tag: Civil Rights

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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Lynching in post-Reconstruction Georgia: State-sanctioned terrorism

The following passage is an excerpt from The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, by Donald L. Grant (Jonathan L. Grant, ed.) Published by University of Georgia Press, 2001. All rights reserved. Book webpage. Lynching in the New South: Georgia After the Ku Klux Klan won its battle to maintain white supremacy, the lynch mob of the New South assumed a major role in maintaining blacks as a caste of peasants and serfs.  Between 1889 and 1918, Georgia had more lynchings than any other state, and 94 percent of the victims were black.  By no coincidence, Georgia had the South’s lowest cotton-field wages during this time. The post-Reconstruction reign of terror was nearly totally demoralizing.  With good…

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Big crowd at ACLU of Georgia’s annual membership meeting

Look at us! Big crowd the ACLU of Georgia annual membership meeting tonight in Atlanta. Onstage, an old acquaintance from my days at the PSC, Robert Remar, accepts the group’s Lifetime Service Award. Rob represented poverty-rights groups in utility proceedings before the commission back in the 1980s, and the commissioners thought so highly of him they hired him as an administrative hearing officer for transportation cases. In accepting his well-deserved award, Rob talked about watching the national ACLU go from facing a $30 million deficit to achieving a $50 million surplus, thanks to Donald Trump. Dale Ho, Director of the ACLU National Voting Rights Project, delivered the keynote address. BTW, ACLU Georgia’s executive director is Andrea Young, daughter of former Atlanta Mayor…

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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…

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