Racial Tensions Persist in King's Back Yard
Southern Christian Leadership Conference Confronts Cobb County

By Alan Sverdlik
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, February 14, 2004; Page A03

ATLANTA -- It is only a dozen miles from the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Cobb County border, but as soon as Interstate 75 crosses the line it takes the name of a late congressman and John Birch Society member who accused the civil rights movement of having communist ties.

The Larry MacDonald Highway, however, is not the only symbol of white resistance within close range of the organization founded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A bit up the highway from the MacDonald marker is a bridge named for the late Georgia governor and segregationist Lester Maddox, who chased African Americans out of his restaurant with an ax handle and retired to Cobb when his political career ended.

On Sunday, with the oratory of the January King holiday still in the air and Black History Month in full throttle, the SCLC is scheduled to open a branch in Cobb County, a devoutly conservative boom-town suburb. In announcing the expansion into Cobb, the chapter president vowed to lead a series of marches -- whether the county granted the SCLC a permit or not -- against the interstate markers and alleged racial profiling and employment discrimination.

"I have 150 people willing to march and go to jail, if necessary," the Rev. O.J. Brown said. "If they can take the Berlin Wall down, why shouldn't they remove those markers? It would help us forget the past. And the past haunts."

As Brown left a King Day memorial service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King once preached and the King family still worships, he said: "You would have thought that his influence would have filtered into his own back yard. But in Cobb, it simply didn't."

Even by the standards of Georgia's rightist political culture, Cobb has been conservative. It was the nucleus of the congressional district that elected MacDonald -- a longtime Birch Society member who had railed against the civil rights legislation of the Great Society -- to four terms. MacDonald died in 1983, a passenger aboard a South Korean airliner that was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter. A year earlier, the city of Kennesaw passed a law requiring all heads of households to own a firearm and ammunition. Only felons and those with religious objections were exempt.

Cobb continued to wage a culture war in the decade to come. In 1993, its county commission passed a resolution that condemned "lifestyles advocated by the gay community" and cut off funding for a local theater company that had staged Terrence McNally's play "Lips Together, Teeth Apart," which touched on some homosexual themes. When the county resisted pressure from the organizers of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta to reverse its stand, it lost two events, a volleyball competition and a visit from the torch relay.

Now, Cobb may soon meet the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the flamboyant, larger-than-life character who was one of the gladiators of the civil rights movement -- "a man who built Birmingham, Alabama, into the strongest grass-roots movements in the South" despite a number of savage beatings, said Stewart Burns, a historian at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has written about the civil rights movement.

Shuttlesworth, who is 81 and lives in Cincinnati, took over as SCLC's president last month, replacing Martin Luther King III. Given his history of confrontation, speculation has abounded that he might savor a showdown in Cobb, but in a recent interview he would not go that far, saying only that he would not rule out a protest, principally of the county's honoring of McDonald and Maddox.

But one prominent conservative doubts the SCLC has that kind of pull. "The civil rights leaders of yesterday are no longer listened to by the young blacks of today," said Bill Byrne, who was the Cobb County Commission chairman during the controversy over the gay resolution. "The blacks in Cobb are conservative people with conservative ideals."

On the other hand, "it would be vintage Shuttlesworth to take on a place like Cobb," Burns said. "He had a clearer activist vision than King."

As quixotic as a Cobb campaign might be, Burns said, it could "solve an identity crisis that has crippled SCLC's effectiveness over the years." The organization has cycled back and forth between the decentralized, grass-roots orientation that its founders envisioned and a hierarchy that functions from the top down. "Fred could redeem SCLC and return it to its original mission," Burns said.

There are dissenters from that view, however. "Two fundamental questions about bringing in Shuttlesworth come to mind," said David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. "One is he's 82. The other is that he lives in Cincinnati. And by this I mean no diminution of Shuttlesworth's historical reputation."

The new SCLC branch will operate out of the Emmanuel Tabernacle Christian Church, a storefront ministry in a northeast Cobb shopping center. In a county teeming with white, evangelical megachurches, it is common to see biblical verse quoted on signs in their front yards. Last Sunday, Emmanuel greeted worshipers with the message, "Christ was a liberal."

Cobb's conservative majority has been largely silent in the face of promises by the SCLC chapter's founders to engage in civil disobedience. The only reaction thus far has been from the county's substantial black middle class, which was a negligible presence in 1990 but has grown to nearly 19 percent of Cobb's 600,000-odd residents.

When the Rev. Dwight Graves, Emmanuel's preacher, called Cobb a "plantation that gives some blacks a nice standard of living as long as they don't rock the boat," the telephone lines to several talk shows on African American radio stations were buzzing with calls from incensed listeners.

"I'm not going to beat myself up because I'm an upper-middle-class black," said Chris Orange, a 39-year-old technology analyst with the telecommunications giant Sprint. "What other group gets attacked for being successful?"