Why a county where the Ku Klux Klan once operated should worry Trump today

Forsyth County once kicked out all of its Black residents and the Klan tried to keep out Black people. Now, a not insignificant slice might vote for Kamala Harris

Former President Donald Trump attends a townhall event hosted by Fox News on October 15, 2024 in Cumming, Georgia. (Getty Images)

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.”

Video footage from 11Alive of the march on Forsyth County.

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.

Despite all the fuss, the county remained undoubtedly conservative. In 2008, John McCain won 79 percent of the vote and Barack Obama only won 20 percent. It voted almost exactly the same way in 2012.

But since then, the demographics have shifted. According to the US Census Bureau, about 45,000 Asian Americans live in the county, as do 10,000 African Americans. 22,000 Hispanic or Latino residents also live there.

And like plenty of other white, college-educated areas, it’s seen a shift to the left. In 2016, 72 percent of its residents voted for Trump, and Hillary Clinton won slightly less than a quarter. Then, in 2020, only about 66 percent of its residents voted for Trump compared to about 32.6 percent who voted for Joe Biden.

That might be a reason for Kamala Harris to keep an eye on Forsyth and for Trump to worry.

It can sometimes take decades, or even centuries, to change habits. But at this point, it looks like there is a real chance that a not insignificant slice of residents of a county that previously incited a racist pogrom might be willing to send the first Black and South Asian woman to the White House.