Last fall, as the election loomed, then-Douglas County Commission Chairman Tom Worthan whispered what many other white folks were thinking would happen if black Democratic opponents prevailed.
“Probably going to have to pack up and get out of here, you know?” the Republican incumbent said to a fellow who, unbeknownst to him, was recording it. “Do you know of another government that’s more black that’s successful? They bankrupt you.”
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The surreptitious video made it to FOX 5 TV and energized black voters, who swept Worthan and other Republican candidates from office in a county whose population has shifted from white to black.
A visit to the defeated chairman’s Facebook page finds several supporters saying they’re packing up. One posted a picture of his “For Sale” sign. Another, who has moved, complained about minorities buying foreclosures, writing, “With the help of Obama dollars these buyers busted up clean, honest homeowners who lived in those neighborhoods for years.”
In 1990, Douglas was 91 percent white. But by 2010, the black population surpassed that of whites and the county began undergoing many of the struggles and high emotions that occur when racial change happens.
It’s within this backdrop that a judge this week hammered two blockheads for their part in an incident that started as a rolling clown show but turned into racial terrorism.
In July 2015, just a month after South Carolina's Charleston church massacre, a caravan of pickup trucks — Confederate flags flapping — rolled through two counties west of Atlanta, the occupants spending two days making asses of themselves and threatening people.
They happened upon a child’s birthday party thrown by a black family in Douglasville, where taunts turned to racial slurs, and one of the flaggers, Jose Ismael Torres, pointed a shotgun at kids and adults as a fellow cretin yelled, “The little ones can get one too.”
Douglas County Superior Court Judge William "Beau" McClain sentenced a weeping Torres and Kayla Norton to 13 and 6 years in prison, respectively, calling the incident a hate crime, even though Georgia has no such law.
“With the tension in this country, the absolute last thing we need is people riding around with the Confederate flag threatening people,” McClain said. “It was grace that there wasn’t a lot of dead bodies on Campbellton Street that day.”
That the two are headed to prison is no surprise. Douglas has long been known for its hard-nosed response to crime. But the length of the sentences surprised many and has led to debate in this county.
Carl Pope, a former Douglasville city councilman, thought the sentence was severe but sent a strong message.
“Had that happened a few years ago, the sentence would have been entirely different,” said Pope, who is black. “The police department was getting more progressive and turned it over to a D.A., who’s a Republican in a Democratic county, and he has to run in a Democratic county.
“The judge, who’s a Republican but well thought of, said, ‘You can’t do that anymore. You can’t run around threatening people.’ Times were wrong for that to happen.”
Actually, there has never been a good time for crime in Douglas County. In the early 1990s, I wrote that the county was among the tops in the state in getting the death penalty. Beau McClain was chief assistant district attorney then.
Stories about Earl Lee, the snakeskin-boot-wearing sheriff known as a “modern-day Wyatt Earp,” remain legendary in the county. Lee, who left office in 1992 and was often accused of running an overly aggressive department, kept a photo of a dead man on a morgue slab under the glass of his desktop. Lee had killed him.
Douglasville Police Chief Gary Sparks cut me short last week when I mentioned Lee’s legacy.
“That day is gone; that old way is gone,” said Sparks, who has been on the force for 30 years and is the city’s first black chief. “We’re up to the 21st century. Douglasville gets that stigma of the Old South.
In 2014, not long after the racial crisis in Ferguson, Mo., I spoke with then-Deputy Chief Sparks about a national story that said his department had among the largest gaps in the nation between the percentage of black residents (about 60 percent African-American) and black cops (11 on the 91-person police force in 2014).
“We’re still working on diversifying,” he said this week. There are now 21 on the 94-officer force.
Terry Miller, a white architect who has twice run unsuccessfully for mayor, said many residents are threatened by the changes, which he ticked off: “black mayor, black county commissioner, black sheriff, black police chief.”
“This ain’t your grandpappy’s county anymore,” he said. “It’s a new world. Get over it.”
The sentence, he said, sent a needed message.
“Judge McClain was basically laying down a marker for the community,” Miller said. “He has seen how the nature of the community has moved in the past few years and he has moved, too. That he’s very conservative makes his ruling all the more meaningful.”
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Miller pointed me to a community Facebook site that was having a running debate on the severity of the sentences.
Rhonda Clark, who is white, wrote: “If they were sentenced any other way, there would be riots.”
Clark recently moved from Douglas west to Carrollton County because she wanted a small farm.
But also, she moved because she “didn’t feel particularly comfortable with (her sons) in a predominately black school.”
She said her teenage son, “who is kind of a nerd,” had been picked on and beaten up at school.
Former Douglasville Mayor Harvey Persons, who is white, sighed when I told him of the people contemplating moving from the county.
“Where do you move?” said Persons. “What’s going on in Douglas County is the same thing going on in Covington and Newton County and Cobb County.”
“People complain, ‘My neighborhood’s changing.’ Well, the key is to be involved and make sure it can be the best neighborhood it can be. Have you worked to make a change? Are you engaged?”
These days lots of engagement is needed.
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