Basic Information
- Type of Place
- County
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Strongly Democratic
- Unions, Organized Labor?
- Don’t Know
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Possible
- Was there an ordinance?
- Don't Know
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Surely Not
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | 8,562 | 3,070 | ||||||
| 1900 | 10,545 | 2,097 | ||||||
| 1910 | 2,321 | |||||||
| 1920 | 11,814 | 2,548 | ||||||
| 1930 | 9,703 | 963 | ||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | ||||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | 10,308 | 364 | ||||||
| 2000 | 14,422 | 464 | ||||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Violent Expulsion
- Threat of Violence
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
Georgia Historian:
“Will Holmes wrote article(s?) about whitecapping
several years ago. I believe he dealt with all white
towns.
“I found that different counties responded
differently to the whitecapping movements of the
early twentieth century. Some cast out all blacks,
such as Forsyth County. Others did not. I am giving
particular attention to Banks County, which
quashed an eviction movement in the late 1910s
after an African American was accused of raping
and murdering a white prostitute. Banks had a large
black landowning community with close ties to
white leaders who came to their defense. One
elderly black woman I interviewed remembered her
white neighbors warning her landowning father to
let them use violence to defend the black family
and not to respond to attacks with violence
themselves. Unfortunately, there are no existing
copies of the county newspaper for this period, but
I’ve gotten at the story through oral interviews.
“I wonder if you have run across counties that
struggled over eviction and did not take that path?
That phenomenon seems as interesting a topic of
exploration as the question of ‘successful
whitecapping.’ A study contrasting the two patterns
might reveal a more interesting story of class and
ideological divisions within racial groups than
would a study of only one pattern. Perhaps a
conversation with old courthouse men or elderly
black preachers in a county adjacent to an all white
county?
“I interviewed Charity Scott, a black woman born in
1911, in 2001. She remembered the event about
as you describe it briefly below. It was initiated, in
her memory by an accusation of rape against a
black man who had just been released from the
chain gang. The victim was a white prostitute who
my interviewee knew personally. A poor girl who
would come by her parent’s house for food and
would eat at the table of this black home. Scott
doubted the guilt of the accused man. She said
that whites were trying to run off blacks as a result.
Her family were landowners and were protected by
white neighbors and warned not to shoot back if
anyone shot into the house. The families knew
each other well, helped each other out with work,
and even dined together. (I’m finding this very well
hidden pattern of what I think you called ‘anti
racism’ in other places as well.) Scott said that the
big men in the county put down the movement.
Protection given blacks by white elites in north
Georgia fits Fitzhugh Brundages’ take on
whitecapping in his first study on lynching.) It’s a
lively interview.
“The second interview was with Hoyt Duncan, a 100
year old middle sized white farmer from Banks. He
denied that an effort had been made to evict blacks.
Then, he said he ought to know, that he’d been on
the jury of the murder case.
“One other thing. They both seemed credible, so
I’m wondering if, as they came from opposite ends
of the county, they are each describing local
conditions around their farms. It seems likely.
Duncan remembered that the brothers of the
murdered girl were poor whites, and rough
characters. He remembered that they’d come to the
courthouse and tried to stir up a lynching, but were
dispersed. Maybe they went riding around Scott’s
neighborhood, planning to begin a mass anti black
movement there? At any rate, blacks weren’t
evicted. There are four black churches in the
county. There never were really large numbers of
blacks in Banks County, although it had one of the
highest percentages of blacks who owned their own
farms in the northern third of the state. When I
asked black residents why their neighbors or family
members left, it was always for economic motives.
The county really is poor. There’s nothing to do
there, except farm, and once the cotton prices
tanked, well, there really wasn’t any reason at all to
stay.
“This summer, I also ran into two elderly black
brothers who claimed to have owned land along the
southern boundary of Forsythe County. They said
they never had any trouble, and they do have a lot
of money. They had parcels of land all over from
middle Georgia to Forsythe. They hit the bigtime
when a pig farm they ran in Atlanta was bought for
housing plots. They always had close ties to
powerful whites. Perhaps they are one of those
cases in which green trumped black. Since I’ve
started doing interviews in North Georgia, I’ve
heard a few stories of black men who were
threatened by mobs for stopping a truck at a truck
stop there or some such offense to the low lifes.”