The march was Charles Blackburn's idea. A white resident of Cumming, he proposed a civil rights demonstration to confront the county's racial legacy. Death threats forced him to abandon the plan, but Dean and Tammy Carter of nearby Gainesville revived it and brought in Hosea Williams, a veteran civil rights activist and Atlanta city councilman. On Saturday, January 17, 1987 -- the weekend before Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- about 75 marchers set out from an offramp on Georgia State Route 400. They were met by roughly 400 counter-demonstrators, many carrying Confederate flags and nooses. Klansmen and sympathizers overwhelmed the 75 police officers on duty, shouting slurs while the marchers sang "We Shall Overcome." Then came the rocks and bottles. Williams was struck in the head by a brick. Law enforcement could not guarantee safety, and the march was called off. Eight Klansmen were arrested. Afterward, Williams told the New York Times: "In thirty years in the civil rights movement, I haven't seen racism any more sick than here today."

The violence backfired spectacularly. Williams announced a second march for January 24, calling it a "March for Brotherhood." The response stunned even the organizers, who had expected perhaps 5,000 participants. About 20,000 people arrived in Cumming, transported on 175 buses from the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, with an additional 4,000 left behind for lack of transportation. Participants traveled from California, New York, and as far as Nigeria. Both of Georgia's U.S. senators -- Sam Nunn and Wyche Fowler -- marched alongside Congressman John Lewis, Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, and Joseph Lowery. Over 1,000 white supremacists mounted a counter-march, including David Duke and Don Black, both of whom were arrested for blocking a highway. This time, roughly 3,000 law enforcement officers were deployed, including 2,000 Georgia National Guard members in riot gear. A spokesman for Governor Joe Frank Harris called it "the greatest show of force on the part of the state of Georgia in history."

Two weeks after the second march, a young talk show host named Oprah Winfrey brought her cameras to Cumming. The Oprah Winfrey Show had been on the air for only five months, and this was the first time it had filmed outside its studio. Winfrey assembled an all-white audience of about 100 Forsyth County residents and asked them about the marches and the county's racial history. Some expressed open racism and argued for keeping the county white. Others voiced dismay at their neighbors' attitudes. Williams had asked to appear on the show, but producers refused, wanting only locals. He organized a protest outside the restaurant where filming took place and was arrested for unlawful assembly. When the cameras stopped rolling, Winfrey was asked how she felt about being in Forsyth County. Her answer was succinct: "Not very comfortable at all. I'm leaving."

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit against 11 Klansmen and two Klan organizations -- the Invisible Empire and the Southern White Knights -- for their role in the January 17 attack. In October 1988, a federal jury ordered them to pay nearly $1 million in damages. The Invisible Empire's leader, James Farrands, relinquished all organizational assets, including the group's name. By 1993, the Invisible Empire was defunct. The protests also produced an unlikely legal legacy: Forsyth County's attempt to recoup its $670,000 in law enforcement costs through a permit fee ordinance reached the Supreme Court in Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement, where the justices struck down the fees as unconstitutional -- with the ACLU filing a brief on the side of the white nationalist group.

In 1987, about 99 percent of Forsyth County's 38,000 residents were white. The marches cracked open something that had been sealed for three-quarters of a century. A biracial human relations committee was established. The population surged from 49,000 in 1990 to approximately 245,000 by 2019. The demographic shifts were real: in 1990, the county counted 14 Black residents; by 2022, African Americans made up about four percent of the population, and a quarter of the county was Asian American or Hispanic American. In June 2020, during the George Floyd protests, about 1,000 people marched for racial justice in Forsyth County. The protests were peaceful. No counter-demonstrators appeared. Williams had said in 1987 that the January march felt like a resurrection: "The civil rights family has not been together like this since we buried Martin Luther King." It was not a resurrection -- the old movement was over. But what happened in Forsyth County proved the fight was not.