3. From Ethnic Cleansing to Pretty Park
Many white Forsyth County residents resented Oscarville’s blacks for years. The resentment finally exploded into mass violence on September 5th, 1912. That day, a white woman alleged that she had been assaulted by two black men. Two black men were duly arrested shortly thereafter. When a black preacher suggested that she might have had a consensual relationship with one of them, a white mob attacked and beat him. The sheriff put the preacher in jail to protect him from angry whites eager to lynch him. A few days later, the corpse of a teenage white girl was found in the woods near Oscarville. Several black men were suspected, and one of them reportedly confessed and implicated others. He was transferred to Atlanta for his own safety. A white mob nonetheless marched on the local jail, which held another black man.
He was beaten to death by a lynch mob broke into the jail. Thousands of whites flocked to Forsyth, and began to attack the county’s blacks. Blacks were beaten up, bullets were fired into their residences, their homes and barns were torched or dynamited, and their livestock were killed. They were threatened with worse, if they did not leave Forsyth County. Authorities did nothing to stop the terror campaign. Within weeks, 98% of Forsyth County’s blacks, including all of Oscarville’s residents, had fled, never to return. Some sold their land for pennies on the dollar, but many others simply had their farms seized by whites. When the US government created Lake Lanier decades later, its waters covered what had once been the thriving black community of Oscarville. Almost none of its expelled black residents or their heirs were ever compensated for their property.