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More than twenty thousand people march for against racism in Georgia. It is the largest civil rights demonstration in two decades.
1987 (Jan 24)
More than twenty thousand people marched for "brotherhood” and against racism in Forsyth County, Georgia. The biracial demonstrators were protected by three thousand state and local police officers and National Guardsmen. There were a few minor injuries and sixty people, mostly white counter-demonstrators, were arrested. It was the largest civil rights demonstration in two decades. The march was organized after a similar, smaller protest a week earlier had been broken up by white counter-demonstrators who threw rocks and bottles. That "brotherhood” march, also designed to honor the memory of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was led by veteran civil rights activist and Atlanta City Councilman Hosea Williams and Dean Carter, a white martial arts instructor. Coretta Scott King, widow of the assassinated civil rights leader, was among the leaders of the January 24th march, as was Williams, Carter, and civil rights leaders Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP and Joseph Lowery of the SCLC. All of the speakers during the demonstration denounced the racist attack on the earlier protesters and called for a renewal of the commitment to racial justice. Hosea Williams, a leader of the January 17th march, called the January 24th march “the greatest.”
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.