It’s unlikely that Greene’s Forsyth County high school taught her the history of white terror that would have explained the overwhelming whiteness of her classes. Her textbooks also likely omitted Forsyth County’s history dating to 1829, when the discovery of gold drew thousands of white miners to what was then Cherokee territory. The rapaciousness of those white gold seekers led to the cruel forced removal of Creek and Cherokee people westward along the Trail of Tears. Perhaps her ignorance of this long history of ethnic cleansings—and its connection with America’s larger legacy of white supremacy—explains Greene’s videotaped insistence that “the most mistreated group of people in the United States today are white males.”
But it is nearly impossible that Greene is ignorant about Forsyth County’s more recent racist history. The 1987 civil rights march that made international news just five years before the commemorative protest, itself a big news event, took place during her senior year of high school. At a press conference one day ahead of the event, intended to mark the celebration of the new federal holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Hosea Williams called for all “those who support the non-violent philosophy of Dr. King” to march together through Forsyth County in a statement of interracial solidarity.
The group of protesters, numbering about 50, could not have anticipated the rage of the racists they encountered, who outnumbered them by scores. Newspaper accounts describe Williams and other marchers being pelted with so many “rocks, bottles and mud thrown from a crowd of Ku Klux Klan members and their supporters” that they were forced to abandon the two-and-half mile route and return to the chartered buses that delivered them from Atlanta. (Footage of the march, and there is plenty, shows the white racists being barely restrained by police.) Even Williams, the veteran civil rights organizer, was astonished. “I have never seen such hatred,” he told the Times after the march. “There were youngsters 10 and 12 years old screaming their lungs out, 'Kill the n---ers.' ''
A week later, Williams returned to Forsyth County in an attempt to finish what he started. By then, images from the first protest had been beamed around the country and internationally, and “Forsyth County” had become a stand-in for the kind of violent white racism this country fallaciously insists is “not who we are.” The number of anti-racist marchers at the second protest ballooned to somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000, and included Jesse Jackson, Rep. John Lewis, Coretta Scott King, Senator Gary Hart, and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young.