Racial Cleansing of Forsyth County and Lake Lanier

People

Rob Edwards

The story of Lake Lanier is the story of two displacements separated by four decades, layered on top of one another until the water covered both. In September 1912, the entire Black population of Forsyth County, Georgia, approximately 1,098 people including 58 landowners, was violently driven from the county in one of the largest and most successful racial cleansings in American history. The terror was triggered by the alleged assault on an 18-year-old white woman named Mae Crow in the small community of Oscarville. A 24-year-old Black man named Rob Edwards was dragged from his jail cell by a mob of 2,000, beaten with a crowbar, shot repeatedly, dragged through the streets, and hanged in the town square of Cumming. Two Black teenagers, 16-year-old Ernest Knox and 17-year-old Oscar Daniel, were convicted by an all-white jury and publicly hanged before a crowd of approximately 8,000. Knox's confession had been extracted through a mock lynching. In the weeks and months that followed, bands of mounted white vigilantes calling themselves "Night Riders" terrorized Black families across the county, firing guns into homes, burning churches, killing livestock, and posting letters warning residents to leave within 24 hours or be killed. An estimated 98 percent of the county's Black population fled, abandoning homes, land, livestock, and personal possessions. Many Black-owned properties passed into white hands without a sale or legal transfer of title. Forsyth County remained an all-white "sundown county" for 75 years. By the 1990 census, of 44,083 residents, only 14 were Black. Then, in the 1950s, the federal government authorized the construction of Buford Dam on the Chattahoochee River, creating Lake Sidney Lanier, a 38,000-acre reservoir spanning five counties. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acquired over 56,000 acres of land through eminent domain, displacing more than 250 families, relocating 20 cemeteries and 6 churches, and submerging the remnants of several communities, including Oscarville. The former site of Oscarville, the village where Black families had once farmed, worshipped, and raised children, now lies beneath the water. Although the lake was not built because Oscarville had been a Black community (its Black residents had been expelled 40 years earlier), the flooding completed the erasure. The structures were not demolished before submersion, and divers have found remnants of foundations, roads, and debris beneath the surface. It is widely believed that not all graves were relocated, and unmarked burials remain at the bottom of the lake. The lake itself is named after Sidney Lanier, a Georgia-born poet who served in the Confederate Army, a naming decision that has become the subject of ongoing controversy. In January 1987, 75 years after the racial cleansing, civil rights activist Hosea Williams led approximately 75 marchers toward the Forsyth County Courthouse in Cumming. They were attacked by approximately 400 white supremacists, including Ku Klux Klan members, who threw rocks and bottles and injured several marchers. One week later, Williams returned with approximately 20,000 people in the largest civil rights demonstration since the 1960s, joined by Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Ralph David Abernathy. Between 1,000 and 1,500 white supremacist counter-protesters were present, and notable white supremacists David Duke and Don Black were among the 64 people arrested. Two weeks later, Oprah Winfrey taped an episode of her show in Cumming with an all-white audience of Forsyth County residents, during which several openly expressed their desire for the county to remain white. No one has ever been arrested, indicted, or prosecuted for the 1912 lynching, the Night Rider terrorism, or the mass theft of Black-owned property. As author Patrick Phillips wrote, the effects of the 1912 expulsion "are not over, not buried in the past, but ongoing, as African American descendants continue to lose out on all that suburban wealth generation."