On August 3, the body of a 27-year-old man was found in Georgia’s Lake Lanier. Days earlier, he had disappeared and drowned while swimming. The week before, another man drowned in the lake, and a few days before that, on July 27, a 24-year-old jumped into the lake, where he was electrocuted, and later died. For folks who are familiar with Lake Lanier, a Georgia landmark, these tragic deaths aren’t surprising. Over the years, hundreds of people have died there, making Lake Lanier one of the deadliest lakes in the United States.
Christmas Day 1964 is known as the deadliest day at Lake Lanier, when a driver lost control of their car while crossing a bridge. The car then flipped into the lake, where five children and two adults drowned.
In 2012, the 11-year-old son of Tameka Foster, Usher’s ex-wife, died at Lake Lanier. This year, on the 11th anniversary of her son’s death, Foster launched a petition to drain, clean, and restore the lake. Bearing in mind its history, one can only imagine what will be found if Lake Lanier is drained.
Lake Lanier is a man-made, 38,000-acre lake that attracts about 10 million visitors every year, bringing in around $5 billion annually to North Georgia’s economy. The lake is located in the affluent Forsyth County, which has the highest median income in metro-Atlanta. This fact is especially interesting considering that the body of water covers what was once a thriving Black community called Oscarville. That community, formed during the late 1800s, was filled with successful farmers, carpenters, and blacksmiths — until Oscarville’s more than 1,000 residents were violently forced out by white Forsyth County residents.
Many people say Lake Lanier is haunted, and it's been depicted as such in pop culture, as in the season three opening scene of the FX series Atlanta. In reality, the lake stands as a reminder of the American history today’s leaders are trying to erase, and the parts of history they deem worthy of preservation. Lake Lanier was named after Sidney Lanier, a poet and Confederate soldier during the Civil War. It’s less than 50 miles north of Georgia’s Stone Mountain, which features the country’s largest Confederate monument. Despite protests and legislation aimed at that statue's removal, it has remained in place.
In too many parts of the US, we preserve the ugly stains of this country’s racism, while eliminating memories of the thriving Black communities that once stood strong. Black towns like Rosewood, Florida, and neighborhoods like Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were a testament to the strength, innovation, and independence of their residents — until they were destroyed by white mobs. Lake Lanier is a chilling reminder of anti-Black violence that is still claiming Black lives today.
The lake’s story began more than 100 years ago. In September 1912, a white 18-year-old named Mae Crow was found injured after being assaulted in the woods less than a mile from her family’s home. (She later died from the wounds.) Despite the absence of witnesses or evidence, a 24-year-old Black man, Rob Edwards, was arrested. Edwards was then taken from the county jail by a mob of white residents, brutally beaten with crowbars, shot repeatedly, and dragged to the town square where his mutilated body was lynched.
Additionally, Edwards’s wife, Jane Daniel, their neighbor Ed Collins, Jane’s cousin Oscar Daniel, and Oscar Daniel’s cousin Ernest Knox, were arrested. Knox and Oscar Daniel, both teens, were convicted by all-white juries before being hung in front of about 5,000 spectators.
In the aftermath of those brutal killings, during September and October 1912, mobs of white people set fire to local Black churches and Black-owned businesses. They forced all of the Black residents out of the county.
Decades later, in 1987, on an episode of The Oprah Show, Oprah Winfrey visited Forsyth County, which at the time hadn’t had a Black resident in 75 years. Today, only 4.9% of the county’s population is Black, 9.7% is Hispanic, and an overwhelming 72.6% of residents are white, with 63.9% identifying as non-Hispanic white people.
In the 1950s, what was once Oscarville was flooded for the creation of Lake Lanier. According to historians, many of the community’s structures were not removed, including unmarked graves.
In 2017, CNN reported that a longtime diver, Buck Buchannon, claimed “he sometimes felt body parts in the lake” while underwater. “You reach out into the dark and you feel an arm or a leg and it doesn’t move,” he said.
Just last year, it was announced that one of the lake’s rescue teams would no longer be using divers for underwater rescues; instead, to decrease risks to divers, they would use robots for underwater rescues.
The horrific history of wiping out Black communities — and often, simultaneously stripping Black folks of their wealth — is not unique to Lake Lanier. Alabama’s Lake Martin, also man-made, covers a Black community that formed in 1895, and residents of New York’s Seneca Village, which was covered by Central Park, were forced out in 1857. Similarly, highways have been built over Black communities for years, and recent reports of plans to build a highway through a Black community in South Carolina are proof that this isn’t a thing of the past.
We live in a country that went from enslaving Black people to wiping out the communities they built post-slavery. Today, some politicians are prohibiting the teaching of that history while simultaneously promoting a false account of that history (see: Florida’s new African American studies curriculum teaches students that enslaved people saw “personal benefit” from their captivity). It’s a heartbreaking testament to the legacy of racist cruelty that too many Americans insist on upholding.
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