Oscarville and the expulsion of Black Forsyth County

Forsyth County, north-east of Atlanta, counted 1,098 Black residents in the 1910 census, fifty-eight of them property owners, with churches, schools, farms and businesses built in the two generations since slavery. Oscarville was one of the farming settlements at the eastern edge of the county, on the Chattahoochee.

In early September 1912 a white woman named Ellen Grice said a Black man had been in her bedroom overnight, and the sheriff arrested Toney Howell and four other men. On 9 September eighteen-year-old Mae Crow, who lived at Oscarville, was found beaten in the woods a few miles east of Cumming; she died of her injuries. On the evening of 10 September, after Sheriff William Reid left his post, a mob overpowered Deputy Gay Lummus, dragged Rob Edwards - a twenty-four-year-old farmhand - out of the Cumming jail, beat and shot him, and hanged his body from a telephone pole by the square. Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel, both teenagers, were tried on 4 October before all-white juries, sentenced the next morning by Judge Newt Morris, and hanged on 25 October in front of an estimated 5,000 spectators, although Georgia law had prohibited public executions.

The expulsion did not wait for the trials. White men rode at night, firing into houses, burning and dynamiting homes and outbuildings, and burning the county's Black churches; families were told to leave. By the end of 1912 every Black resident was gone. Of the fifty-eight Black property owners, twenty-four managed to sell, generally at a loss - Alex Hunter took $550 for a farm he had bought for $1,500 - and for the remaining thirty-four there is no record of any sale: white neighbours simply took the abandoned land. The 1930 census counted seventeen Black people in Forsyth County.

Nobody was prosecuted for the night riding, and the county stayed closed in practice for most of the century. When civil rights marchers walked into Cumming on 17 January 1987 they were violently obstructed, and a week later 15,000 people returned under state protection for the Brotherhood March. In the 1950s the Army Corps of Engineers closed Buford Dam and Lake Lanier flooded about 38,000 acres of the Chattahoochee valley, Oscarville's land among it; thirty per cent of the shoreline is in Forsyth, and the lakefront is now part of what makes the county's land expensive. The legend that the lake drowned a Black town, and that the graves are still down there, has the sequence backwards. Forsyth's Black community was not drowned in the 1950s. It was driven out in 1912, and the people who lost that land were never paid for it.