Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (28 page)

A local man named Keaton was working in his yard when he heard the sound of gunshots, the squeal of car tires, then shattering glass. He ran to look and found what he described as “an extremely distraught black woman” coming up the road toward him.

“Would you help me? Would you protect me?” Shirley Webb pleaded. “And, please, help him,” she said, pointing back toward the wrecked car. Keaton told the woman that he would “instruct his wife to call the police.” When she begged him to drive her back to the pavilion so she could find her friends, he repeated that his wife was going to call the police. Leaving Shirley Webb standing in the road—still, for all she knew, in the sights of armed white men—Keaton turned back toward his house, shaking his head and saying, “There’s nothing more I can do here.”

As Melvin Crowe stood in his driveway, staring in the direction from which the shots had come, Bob Davis came crashing through the woods behind his house. Melvin could see that Davis had taken
off his shirt and was wrapping a pistol inside it as he ran deeper into the pines. A few minutes later, Davis walked back empty-handed. Still wild-eyed and gasping for breath, he looked at Crowe and said, “I think I killed the black son of a bitch.”

Not even fear of prosecution was enough to quiet Melvin Crowe on the subject, or to dampen his pride when police investigators arrived at his house the day after the shooting. Detective Randy Sims started the investigation at Crowe’s front door only because it was the closest house to the spot where glass from a shattered windshield still littered the street. When he and another officer introduced themselves, Crowe blurted out, “I’m not telling [you] anything. . . . Somebody has got to keep the niggers out of Forsyth County. I’m glad it happened.”

The exchange convinced investigators that Crowe was not just a run-of-the-mill Georgia racist but saw himself as a defender of the “whites only” rule that had been in effect for nearly seventy years. Having instigated the plot to frighten Marcelli and Webb, and having driven Bob Davis to the scene, Crowe was clearly involved in the crime, and as the officers stood on the lawn listening to what was fast veering toward a confession, they had reason to think that Crowe himself might have been the shooter. But even when Crowe realized that he was a suspect, he didn’t tell them about Davis or about how he’d seen his friend hiding a pistol in the woods. Melvin fell silent when asked if he knew who’d pulled the trigger. Having lived in Forsyth all his life, he seemed to fear the consequences of identifying a “person unknown.” “I’m not gonna tell who did it,” Crowe said to Officer Sims. “I’m not gonna tell . . . because [if I do] I’ll get burned out.”

The full story of the shooting came to light during the court testimony of Ethel Crowe, an elderly aunt with whom Melvin lived. Born in 1911, Ethel, too, was a child of old Oscarville, and from earliest girlhood she had heard the tale of Mae Crow’s rape and murder, with its lesson about the monstrous lust of black men. As a member of
the wary, insular community of farmers in Oscarville, she had seen unimaginable changes come to the county since the 1920s. What she hadn’t ever seen, even in 1980, was a black person coming toward her on Athens Park Road and stopping right outside her front door.

But that’s what happened in the minutes after Bob Davis raced into the woods to hide the gun with which he’d shot Miguel Marcelli. Called to testify about that day, Ethel Crowe described “seeing and hearing a black woman crying in the road.” According to news reports, Crowe’s “lips began to quiver and she spoke in between quiet sobs” as a courtroom filled with local whites sat in silence. The lawyer for the prosecution asked her what she’d done to help Shirley Webb.

“Nothing,” Ethel Crowe told the jury. “Nothing like that ever happened at our house before.”

There, in her own driveway, stood a trembling, blood-spattered woman, presenting Melvin Crowe’s aunt with a frightening choice: she could either go out and help the woman and her injured boyfriend or she could turn away and pretend that she had never heard the gunshot, the car crash, or the woman’s cry for help. Asked what she did when she found Shirley Webb sobbing outside her kitchen window, Ethel Crowe stared into her lap and shook her head.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing . . . I was scared.”

DR. MICHAEL FARNELL
, chief surgeon at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, testified that Miguel Marcelli had been shot “behind the left ear with a .38 caliber bullet” and that the entrance wound was close enough to his brain that “Marcelli may suffer neurological problems in addition to injuries already sustained.” After emergency surgery, Marcelli recovered, and he was well enough to testify at the trials of Melvin Crowe and Bob Davis and to tell the story of his trip to Forsyth. All-white juries found both men guilty of two counts of aggravated assault.

After almost a century during which black Georgians had been
lynched, shot at, beaten, and “burned out” of Forsyth, and during which untold acres of black-owned land had been quietly plundered, two whites had finally been arrested and convicted for stalking and shooting a black man. Rather than acknowledging that Crowe and Davis were the first and only men to face such consequences in the county’s long history of white terrorism, the
Gainesville Times
congratulated the juries on dispelling the “myth” of Forsyth’s bigotry and intolerance. “Twelve men and women . . . exploded that myth” by convicting Davis and Crowe, the paper said, reiterating the old claim that “the county’s unusually white complexion is [not] a preoccupation—it is simply a happenstance.”

LOCALS WERE RELIEVED
when the convictions brought an end to all the media attention and sent news trucks back down Highway 400 to Atlanta. But the peace and quiet didn’t last long. Seven years later, a much larger group of African Americans made the trip north, this time crossing the county line not by chance but by choice. They came to publicly protest seventy-five years of segregation in the county and to demand a new era of “peace and brotherhood in Forsyth.”

The whole nation soon learned that there were whites in the county who considered themselves exempt from
Brown v. Board of Education
, from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and from a host of federal laws against racial discrimination in housing and employment. When a double-file line of black and white civil rights marchers appeared on Bethelview Road on January 17th, 1987, and began walking toward the Cumming courthouse, a raucous army of Forsyth residents was waiting to meet them. Just like their grandparents and great-grandparents, they were convinced that they had a right to live in an “all-white” community. As photographers and news crews set up their cameras, the crowd erupted into a chorus of rebel yells and unfurled a long white banner. “
RACIAL PURITY
,” it said, “
IS FORSYTH’S SECURITY
.”

17

THE BROTHERHOOD MARCH, 1987

R
acial violence was making headlines all over the country in December of 1986 after four black men were beaten by a mob of whites in the Howard Beach section of Queens, in New York City. A twenty-three-year-old African American man named Michael Griffith died after the gang of baseball-bat-wielding white teenagers attacked him for trespassing across an unwritten racial border. Already badly injured and running for his life, Griffith had sprinted across a busy highway, where he was struck by a passing car. In response to the killing, Reverend Al Sharpton led twelve hundred demonstrators through the streets of Howard Beach on December 27th, 1986, as furious local whites screamed racial slurs and demanded that black protesters get out of their neighborhood.

Less than a month after the Howard Beach protests, a man named Chuck Blackburn came up with what he thought was a modest proposal for the people of Forsyth: that all those opposed to “fear and intimidation” gather for a short march along Highway 9, ending at the Blackburn Learning Center, where he taught karate classes and meditation. “Overcoming fear of aggression is a basic theme of martial arts,” Blackburn told reporters, and
with the march he wanted to prove that “racism is on the wane in Forsyth.”

Cumming, Georgia, January 17th, 1987

Blackburn had moved to Cumming from San Francisco in the early 1980s, and he had been shocked to learn that none of his black friends from Atlanta would set foot across the Forsyth County line. And so in January of 1987, Blackburn announced his plan to protest the situation publicly. He called on like-minded residents to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of 1912 with what he called a “brotherhood walk,” which was timed to coincide with the second annual—and still highly controversial—Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.

Once local newspapers and radio stations picked up the story, there was widespread opposition to Blackburn’s plan. He sent letters to area clergy, in hopes that some of their parishioners might join the walk. But, Blackburn told reporters, “only one minister responded . . . and then he backed down.” That minister was Reverend Jim Martin of Shiloh United Methodist, who withdrew his
support after his own congregants objected vehemently. “Chuck was talking about there being a silent majority who favor brotherly love and who think race doesn’t really matter,” Reverend Martin said in the days leading up to the brotherhood walk. “But I don’t think he’s right. I think he’s realized that’s not right. It would take changing the hearts of a lot of people.”

Blackburn learned just how naive he’d been when the phones at his office started ringing day and night, with men and women, young and old, calling to warn of the consequences if he went ahead with the demonstration. The mildest was a caller who said, “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to try to get the niggers to come up here. . . . That’s why we live in Forsyth County—to get away from them.” An old woman’s voice echoed the sentiment, and added an overt threat: “You can’t change it, no matter how bad or how hard you try,” she said. “You’re going to have to end up leaving this county. Or leave in a box.”

Then there were the men, whose voices were laced with such menace that Blackburn and his students armed themselves and posted round-the-clock guards at his storefront school. “I know [someone] whose house was burned,” one caller said. “So you’d better watch out.” As Blackburn peered out through the blinds and double-checked the door locks, his office phone rang again, and the answering machine clicked to life. Through its little speaker a man whispered, “I got a thirty-aught-six bullet with your name on it.”

Fearing for his life, Blackburn canceled the protest on January 9th, telling the
Forsyth County News
that “the threats . . . were much more violent than I thought they would be, and the good folks [in this community] just aren’t ready to stand up for it. . . . Forsyth County is just not ready for it yet.”

When he announced his decision, the brotherhood walk was taken up by a friend of Blackburn’s named Dean Carter. Carter was a white construction worker and fellow martial arts enthusiast who
lived in Gainesville, where so many of Forsyth’s expelled families had resettled. Carter and his wife, Tammy, also received threats, like one from a caller who told them, “After Saturday . . . you’re dead.” But they were determined to go ahead, and in the week leading up to the protest, Carter joined forces with the veteran Atlanta activist Hosea Williams, who had been a key member of Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle during the civil rights battles of the 1950s and ’60s. When Williams agreed to lend his name and experience to the cause, the Brotherhood March—and the shocking story of the Forsyth expulsions—started to gain national media attention.

Faced with so much negative coverage, civic leaders in Cumming did what they had always done: rather than acknowledge and confront the county’s history, they pointed to racially motivated attacks elsewhere in the state and the country and asked why Forsyth, of all places, was suddenly being singled out. “We haven’t had any incidents up here as far as race is concerned that I can remember, and I’ve been here since 1956,” said County Commissioner James Harrington—a surprising claim, given that only six years earlier, Atlanta firefighter Miguel Marcelli had been gunned down by Melvin Crowe and Bob Davis. Harrington must have also read newspaper reports about an attack in November of 1986, when “five Mexican construction workers, in the county [to work for] a Cumming man . . . were beaten by four men and a woman who broke into their house.” The Mexican men said the whites “threatened to kill them unless they left the county.”

In the days leading up to the march, the dominant tone of the
Forsyth County News
was annoyance, along with an unabashed desire to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. In a column titled “Let’s Get on to Better Things,” editor Laura McCullough argued that it was Forsyth residents, not black citizens of Georgia, who were being victimized by the negative attention: “By the time
this newspaper is printed, the march for freedom, or brotherhood, or martial arts, or whatever, will be thankfully over. Maybe then we can become Forsyth County again. You remember, the sleepy town north of Atlanta that has its own problems with land rezoning and bulging schools?”