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On the surface, former president Donald Trump's Fox News town hall to discuss women's issues in Georgia earlier this week was the ultimate safe space. Many of the audience there were part of local Republican clubs.
The location of the town hall also had historical significance. Fox chose to have the town hall in a barn in Cumming, about an hour outside of Atlanta.
Cumming serves as the county seat of Forsyth County, an overwhelmingly Republican area with one of the darkest chapters in the South's history of racial violence.
But underneath the surface, Forsyth reveals why Trump and Republicans should worry.
In the years after the Civil War, when Union General William Tecumseh Sherman marched his troops to Georgia, Forsyth became a cradle of racial apartheid.
In 1912, a white woman named Ellen Grice reported that a Black man assaulted her, according to the Digital Library of Georgia. In response, white rioters sieged the Cumming Jail and dragged a farmhand out and brutally beat him. Two of the accused were later publicly hung in front of 5,000 people — despite the fact that public executions were technically forbidden in Georgia.
In the subsequent weeks, Forsyth County all but expelled every Black resident. One newspaper from October had the headline "Negroes Flee from Forsyth."
Almost no Black people lived in the area after that.
Seventy-five years later, Charles Blackburn tried to organize a march in Forsyth to show that it had shed its image as a bastion of racial intolerance — but he faced a huge backlash. After Blackburn canceled the event, Dean Carter and civil rights luminary Hosea Williams, a former confidante of the late Dr Martin Luther King Jr, picked up the idea. But they were met with jeers, aggression, and racial slurs from the county's residents. David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who would later run for governor of Louisiana, was arrested during the melee. Carter later said he thanked God that he did not bring his wife and two children.
A subsequent march was later held successfully, however, with more than 20,000 people making the trip. The scenes made national headlines. Oprah Winfrey — whose show had just gone on the air the year before — even hosted an episode of her show in Forsyth County.
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