Lake Lanier: The History of a Black Town, Enduring Racism, and Mysterious Deaths

More than 100 years ago, the story of the lake began. In September, an 18-year-old white girl named Crow Mae was found injured after being assaulted in the woods less than a mile from her family’s home. Unfortunately, she later died from her wounds. Despite the absence of evidence or witnesses, a 24-year-old Black man named Rob Edwards was arrested. He was then taken from the county jail by a white mob of residents who brutally beat him with crowbars, dragged him to the town square where his mutilated body was lynched, and repeatedly shot.

Edwards’s wife, Jane Daniel, their neighbor Ed Collins, Jane’s cousin Oscar Daniel, and Oscar Daniel’s cousin Ernest Knox were apprehended. Prior to being executed in front of approximately 5,000 onlookers, both adolescents Knox and Oscar Daniel were found guilty by all-white panels of jurors.

In the aftermath of those brutal killings, during October and September of 1912, mobs of white people set fire to the businesses and churches owned by Black residents and forced them out of the county.

African Americans constitute merely 4.9% of the population in the county presently, whereas Hispanics account for 9.7%, and an astonishing 72.6% of inhabitants are of Caucasian descent, with 63.9% identifying as non-Hispanic Caucasians. Several years later, in 1987, during an episode of The Oprah Show, Oprah Winfrey paid a visit to Forsyth County, a place that had not seen a single African American resident in 75 years.

Historians state that numerous structures of the community, including unmarked graves, were not eliminated. In the 1950s, Oscarville, which is now submerged under Lake Lanier, was flooded for its creation.

He said, “it does not budge” and a leg or an arm, you sense and extend into the darkness. Submerged, while in the lake, body parts were occasionally sensed, he asserted, Buchannon, Buck, an experienced diver, as reported by CNN in 2017.

To mitigate risks for divers, robots would be utilized for underwater rescues; it was recently declared that one of the rescue teams operating in the lake would cease employing divers.

Evidence shows that in the past, there have been reports and plans to construct a highway through the Black community in South Carolina. Similarly, highways have been built in Black communities over the years. In 1857, the residents of New York’s Seneca Village were displaced, and in 1895, a Black community was established in Martin Lake, Alabama. This community is not unique in terms of having their wealth stripped away, as it often happened simultaneously in Black communities. The history of wiping out Black communities is a horrific one.

It is a heartbreaking testament to the racist legacy of cruelty that many Americans insist on upholding. The new African American studies curriculum in Florida teaches students that people enslaved saw a “benefit” from their captivity, promoting a false account of history while simultaneously prohibiting the teaching of that history. Today, some politicians are wiping out the communities built by post-slavery Black people, living in a country that went from enslaving them.