Ministers Call Town’s Portrayal During Rights March Not Fair

A day after 25,000 marchers jammed this all-white community in a demand for racial tolerance, ministers complained Sunday that Cumming had been characterized unfairly.

But a counterdemonstrator, one of 56 people arrested in the South’s largest civil rights demonstration since the 1960s, said he would work to oust the officials who welcomed the marchers.

“The politicians and system stooges are through here,” Frank Shirley, Forsyth County leader of the White Patriot Party, a white supremacist group, was quoted as saying in Sunday’s editions of the Forsyth County News. “We’re going to put our own candidates in the next election.”

Response to Klan Attack

The marchers had come in response to a Jan. 17 attack by a jeering crowd of 400 Ku Klux Klansmen and their supporters, who pelted about 75 civil rights marchers with bottles, rocks and mud.

Televised images of that attack spurred Saturday’s huge turnout, when marchers were shielded by 1,700 National Guard troops called out by Gov. Joe Frank Harris and 600 state and county law enforcement officers.

“It looked like Forsyth County is the worst place in the world to live, and is filled with the most hateful people,” the Rev. Gary Armes told his congregation at the First Christian Church. “I wanted to shake the TV and say, ‘That’s not so!’ ”

“It’s a shame that the world cannot know what Forsyth County is really like,” said the Rev. Butch Franklin of First Baptist Church.