The Second March
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As many as 20,000 people streamed down Georgia 9 and into Cumming during the second march on January 24. Snow blanketed the ground from the previous day.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center, Southline Press, Inc. Photographs.
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A wall of riot police separated the white supremacist mob from the marchers as they attentively listened to speeches from Williams, Coretta Scott King, and other civil rights luminaries. Some of the racist mob was arrested for trying to take over the stage to hold their own rally following the marchers' departure.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center, Southline Press, Inc. Photographs.
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Around 2,000 law enforcement and National Guard personnel successfully kept the second march from ending in violence like the first. This photo shows National Guard soldiers staging in front of a Cumming hardware store.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center, Southline Press, Inc. Photographs.
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The Forsyth County News published a large spread of photos from the march. Forsyth County Sheriff Wesley Walraven is on the center right of the page, and local banker Roger Crow, who spoke out against racial intimidation before even the first march, is center left.
Copyright Forsyth County News. Courtesy of Georgia Newspaper Project, Georgia Historic Newspapers.
The call for a return march echoed around the nation. And on the morning of January 24, King Center organizers discovered there were thousands more marchers—some of whom came from as far as Nigeria—than they could even transport to Cumming. Around 20,000 made the trip up Georgia 400 and marched in defiance of the previous weekend’s violence.
More than 2,500 National Guard soldiers and state law enforcement officers coordinated with federal law enforcement and the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office to protect the marchers from thousands of gathered white supremacists. Their efforts helped prevent a repeat of the previous weekend’s violence.
After arriving in the courthouse square, the massive throng of cheering and chanting activists drowned out the screams of racist counter-protestors. They listened to speeches from Williams, Coretta Scott King, Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, and comedian Dick Gregory, among others. Many other notable politicians joined the march, including U.S. Congressman John Lewis, U.S. Senators Sam Nunn and Wyche Fowler, and civil rights activists Jesse Jackson, Ralph David Abernathy, and Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).