Forsyth County (US), Nov 7 (PTI) Nearly two centuries ago, White European settlers, motivated by greed for land and gold, drove native American Indians out of their ancestral lands in northern Georgia, and made it their own.
Now, Indians of another kind – those who speak Telugu, Hindi or Tamil – are settling into that land in their thousands, buying up million-dollar homes and creating mini-Indias all over Forsyth County in northern Georgia’s gently rolling verdant hills.
And that doesn't always go down well with the locals.
Community leaders say Indians tend to practice a kind of self-segregation by rarely interacting with White Americans socially. This causes resentment and fuels anti-immigrant sentiments, which have risen in recent years with the growth of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, they say.
Indians first came to Georgia in the 1960s as academics or students at the local Emory University and Georgia Tech. But their numbers remained small.
Even with increased migration to the US in the late 1990s, Forsyth County had only 160 Indians in 2000, according to the official census.
Today, the number has climbed to about 52,000, radically altering the character of Forsyth County. Indians now comprise 16 per cent of the county, the second-largest ethnic group behind White residents, who account for 63.5 per cent.
A county is broadly comparable to a district in India, comprising several cities and towns, but it is administered by elected officials.
Ani Agnihotri, the programme chair of the USA India Business Summit, said Forsyth is the preferred choice of new Indian migrants to Georgia because of the well-established support system it provides: other Indians who know their way around, Indian shops, temples and good schools.
He pointed out that the median annual income of Indians is about USD 150,000, putting them well above the average American, which becomes another source of resentment.
“What do Indians want? We come to the US with these five goals: we want to buy big houses, big cars, earn good money, go to temples and send our kids to Ivy League colleges,” said Agnihotri, who came to Georgia as an MBA student in 1991.
An agglomeration of affluent communities, Forsyth was once a rural backwater blighted by a dark history of racism, first against the Cherokee Indians in the 1830s and later against Blacks who had only recently emerged from slavery.
"Few Indians are cognizant of the irony that they are settling on a soil that was once splattered by the blood of racist violence for two centuries", said Venu Challa, a longtime Georgia resident who recently moved to Cumming, the main town of Forsyth County.
Challa lives in a newly built community of 56 sprawling, five-bedroom homes worth USD 1.5 million each, of which 45 are owned and occupied by Indians. One house is occupied by a White American family, one by an African American family and the rest by East Asians.
The community is a short drive from a shopping strip in Suwanee town where, on a recent Saturday evening, the aisles in the Suvidha supermarket were buzzing with muted conversations, mostly in Telugu and some Hindi.
Shopping trolleys were being filled with dosa and idli batter bins along with dahi cans and atta (flour) bags. With Diwali around the corner, doda barfi, chamcham and Hyderabadi sweet balushahi were displayed in abundance.
Next door, Fresh Roti - sandwiched between Chinese Dhaba and Sara salon - was ringing up brisk sales of chapatis – olive, organic and natural.
The electronic billboard at the end of the strip of shops - Rahul Clothing, Drishti Flowers, Sports Adda etc - flashed ads by Malabar Gold & Diamonds.
Agnihotri pointed out that there are 100 Hindu temples in the greater Atlanta area alone, including the massive BAPS Swaminarayan temple that was inaugurated in 2007 with a city procession, complete with elephants, on a scale never seen before in this area.
Every year, Ganesh Chaturthi is celebrated with a rented helicopter showering petals.
While the presence of rich Indians has clearly benefitted the local economy, Agnihotri said Indians should make a greater effort to assimilate with the locals and contribute more to the community.
Challa pointed out that the lack of assimilation is typical of first-generation migrants of all nationalities. Usually, the second generation does a better job of assimilating.
What makes Indian Americans stand out is that their regional, linguistic, sartorial and caste divisions stem from a non-European context that is less familiar to the average American observer, he said.
The second generation of Indian Americans does not carry this baggage.
Take, for example, Shuchita Patel, a second-generation Indian American who ran for a seat on the Forsyth County Commission on a Democratic Party ticket in recent elections.
She lost, but narrowly, showing that Indians are now being seen as Americans and not just as IT nerds living in Indian ghettos.
Similarly, many other second-generation Indian Americans also made their mark in the November 3 midterm elections.
Patel’s participation in public service would have been unimaginable as recently as 1987 when Forsyth was emphatically White and racist.
In January that year, civil rights activists from Atlanta who wanted to carry out a peace march in Forsyth were stopped and chased away with violence by White residents. Men, women and children blocked the peace marchers’ bus on the outskirts of Cumming with chants of "Go home, niggers!" and signs "FORSYTH STAYS WHITE".
Forsyth became exclusively White in 1912 after the rape and murder of an 18-year-old White girl, Mae Crow, in Cumming. In retribution, one man, Rob Edwards, was dragged out of the county jail by a mob, shot, his head bashed with a crowbar, and then lynched. As his limp body hung from a telegraph pole, people took turns with pistols and shotguns to mutilate the corpse further. Later, two other Black men were hanged after a one-sided trial.
"There was nothing unusual about the lynching of a black man in Georgia in 1912, and the next morning the sight of Edwards' body, laid out in the courthouse lawn, seemed to satisfy those most hungry for vengeance," wrote Patrick Phillips in his 2016 book "Blood at the Roots" about racism in Forsyth.
After the lynching and hangings, all Blacks in the area were evicted by White supremacists and it remained an all-White community for decades, even as Georgia became the birthplace of a resurrected Ku Klux Klan in 1915 after a 45-year hiatus.
White colonialists from England arrived in 1733 in Georgia, where Cherokee Indians had been living for centuries. By the early 1800s, expanding White settlements had forced the Cherokee into a small section of Georgia in present-day Forsyth.
After the discovery of gold in 1828, the Whites evicted the Cherokee Indians en masse with threats, coercion and legal subterfuge to reservations in present-day Oklahoma. Their forced removal is known in American history as the Trail of Tears.
Today, overt racism is almost unheard of in Forsyth, and hardly any Indian faces discrimination.
“But it is important for Indians to know the past of the land where you want to build a new life. It gives you context and helps you adapt and shape your conduct,” said Challa.
(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)