Qualla: 1987 Forsyth County Protests

1987 Forsyth County Protests: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Of the county's 1980 population of 27,958 people, exactly one was Black. That number is not a misprint. Forsyth County, Georgia, a rural stretch of rolling hills northeast of Atlanta, had maintained itself as essentially all-white since 1912, when night riders terrorized and expelled nearly every African American resident after a lynching. For seventy-five years, the arrangement held. Signs in the 1960s read plainly: "Don't Let the Sun Set on You in Forsyth County." Black truck drivers making deliveries to the local Tyson Foods plant required escorts from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Then, in January 1987, a small group of marchers walked into Cumming and forced the nation to see what Forsyth County had been all along.

1987 Forsyth County Protests: Seventy-Five Against Four Hundred

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The march was Charles Blackburn's idea. A white resident of Cumming, he proposed a civil rights demonstration to confront the county's racial legacy. Death threats forced him to abandon the plan, but Dean and Tammy Carter of nearby Gainesville revived it and brought in Hosea Will...

1987 Forsyth County Protests: Twenty Thousand Come Back

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The violence backfired spectacularly. Williams announced a second march for January 24, calling it a "March for Brotherhood." The response stunned even the organizers, who had expected perhaps 5,000 participants. About 20,000 people arrived in Cumming, transported on 175 buses fr...

1987 Forsyth County Protests: Oprah Arrives, and Leaves

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two weeks after the second march, a young talk show host named Oprah Winfrey brought her cameras to Cumming. The Oprah Winfrey Show had been on the air for only five months, and this was the first time it had filmed outside its studio. Winfrey assembled an all-white audience of a...

1987 Forsyth County Protests: The Reckoning in Court

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit against 11 Klansmen and two Klan organizations -- the Invisible Empire and the Southern White Knights -- for their role in the January 17 attack. In October 1988, a federal jury ordered them to pay nearly $1 million in damages. The Invis...

1987 Forsyth County Protests: A County Transformed

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1987, about 99 percent of Forsyth County's 38,000 residents were white. The marches cracked open something that had been sealed for three-quarters of a century. A biracial human relations committee was established. The population surged from 49,000 in 1990 to approximately 245...