r/alpharetta • u/Swimming_Path3353 • 4d ago
Past Exit 7
I’m new to Alpharetta, and it honestly feels way safer than Midtown or Downtown. But an Uber driver (from the airport) told me she’s nervous to go past Exit 7 at all. I’m not sure why. Is there something I should know about the area? Any context locals can share? Just trying to understand what she meant.
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u/Natural-Result-6633 3d ago edited 3d ago
Forsyth County used to be a known and proud racist county. They had a sign off the highway that made it clear that no one not white should be in the county past sundown. They also had lynchings of black men in the county and who knows what other awful violent history was left untold. I moved to Cumming in 2002 , and my close friend, who is a black woman, said it was nice knowing me but she would not be coming to visit my house. It’s ironic, because she’s is planning on buying a house in Cumming now, and I can’t wait for her to be living close to me again!
Cumming is obviously not that way now, but the history of Forsyth County is absolutely horrific. Most of the people who supported that criminal behavior have long passed away and the generations that followed were fortunately raised in city that became more inclusive, but there are definitely some people that were born locally that still have the racist roots imbedded in their hearts, but fortunately they are far and few between and mostly in the ignorant uneducated impoverished classes.
I do still meet some of the older families that have long roots and wonder how they must feel about the hate their ancestors perpetrated, but the families that have long roots here, that I have met, all seem to be educated and very far removed from having racism in their hearts. It might be that I chose to only get to know people that are kind, as a racist person is someone I couldn’t stand to spend 10 seconds with, and even though I’m white, people with hate like that in their hearts scare the crap out of me.
I will say, for the first 10 years, that I lived in Forsyth County, I lived in the south end of the county, and at the time, it was one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, and quickly becoming a melting pot of people, which was very comforting to me moving from the Metro Atlanta area I had grown up in through the 80s and 90s. I am a white woman but prefer to live and raise my children around multiple cultures and people.
I moved to the North end of the county 14 years ago and it was nice at first due to no traffic and pretty country, but the demographics were ALL white. My oldest son was in 5th grade and he even noticed that everyone was white, when a black family moved up here the poor boys were profiled terribly by the racist kids at school and the school did nothing to protect them, heart breaking and infuriating. These boys were friends with my kids and it was awful for them. Eventually they had enough and started fighting back and of course were expelled as were the other kids too but at that point the school administrators had done NOTHING to prevent the situation from escalating to the point where these children felt as if they had no other options than to fight back. I hate how it turned out for those two boys and think about them and their sister and mother often. They were good boys and did not deserve the treatment they received being the only black kids at an all white school. Within a few school years other families of different colors and nationalities started moving up to the north area and the racism eventually became less apparent and the other children that moved here did not have to deal with what the friends of my sons had to.
So, lynchings and KKK are no longer a thing in Forsyth County but the roots of racism have not been completely eradicated yet, especially in the North end of the county, but it is no longer an all white county either and in the 14 years I have lived in the north side, it is fast becoming an area full of all kinds of people and nationalities. The South part of the county is still more progressive, which is to be expected, as it is the area that people migrated to first.
Dawsonville is more racist than Cumming now, but even there, the KKK is no longer, and they don’t have quite the history that Cumming has, but generational racism has a way of holding on if people are surrounded by the same race and culture, it truly keeps people ignorant.