Revealed: Starbucks fired over 20 US union leaders in recent months

“Workers at the coffee chain have filed petitions for union elections at more than 250 stores, but chief Howard Schultz publicly opposes the movement

Michael Sainato

Starbucks has fired over 20 union leaders around the US over the past several months as union organizing campaigns have spread across the country, The Guardian can reveal.

The news comes as Starbucks workers have filed petitions for union elections at more than 250 stores, spanning 35 states in the US. Starbucks’ chief executive Howard Schultz has led a campaign against the union movement calling it “some outside force that’s going to dictate or disrupt who we are and what we do”.

The US’s top labor regulator the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued complaints against Starbucks over many of the firings, demanding reinstatement and backpay for seven fired workers in Memphis, Tennessee, three fired workers in Overland, Kansas, six fired workers in Buffalo, New York, and three fired workers in Arizona. These cases will go before an administrative law judge unless a settlement is reached prior to those hearings.

The NLRB has accused Starbucks of more than 200 violations of federal labor laws over the course of union organizing campaigns since late 2021. NLRB Regional offices have issued complaints in regards to 45 cases against Starbucks, according to the NLRB. Starbucks also incited more legal concerns over recently announcing the roll-out of new benefits for all employees, but exempting workers at unionized stores. Workers at several Starbucks storeshave held strikes in protest of the company’s behavior toward union organizing.

I believe I was fired for being a shift supervisor who was pro-union. I’ve been with Starbucks almost three years and have never had any issues.

Ashlee Feldman in St Louis, Missouri none

Laila Dalton, a shift supervisor at Starbucks for about three years in Phoenix, Arizona, was fired the day before her store’s union election ballots were being sent out. Dalton said she started getting write-ups for minor infractions and was interrogated and intimidated by management shortly after her store went public with its intent to unionize. Dalton filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB before her firing over harassment from management.

“I filed a complaint, an unfair labor practice charge, and that’s when that’s when it kind of all started,” said Dalton.

She was fired on 4 April and has since been included in the NLRB complaint calling for reinstatement for her and two coworkers.

“It was the day before the ballots were sent out. It was in front of people I’ve never met before and it was an hour into Howard Schultz being in office and his town hall speech,” added Dalton. “I still can’t believe they fired me since I already had a complaint against them.”

Union organizers at Starbucks have also been fired in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Rochester, New York.

Ashlee Feldman, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks store in St Louis, Missouri for three years, was fired a few days before her store’s union election ballots were to be mailed out. Feldman said she was fired after she closed the dining area of her Starbucks store to drive-thru only temporarily due to short staffing.

“I believe I was fired for being a shift supervisor who was pro-union,” said Feldman. “I’ve been with Starbucks almost three years and have never had any issues.”

She is in the process of filing an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board to get reinstated. 

“I’m shocked at this firing and all I can think about is my eight-year-old autistic son who needs therapy and care that costs money,” added Feldman. “These higher ups don’t care about us. They aren’t in the stores busting ass like we are. They don’t connect with the customers like we do.”

In regard to Feldman’s termination, a Starbucks spokesperson said: “A partner’s interest in a union does not exempt them from the standards we have always held. Any claims of anti-union activity are categorically false.”

According to the National Labor Relations Board, as of 13 May, 69 Starbucks stores have voted to form unions, nine stores voted against, and six union elections are still pending an outcome, determinative based on challenged ballots.“

Tucker Carlson Backtracks After Peddling A Conspiracy Theory Cited By NY...

Opinion | After Tops massacre, African Americans once again hear Ghana calling - The Washington Post

Opinion For African Americans tired of U.S. hostility, Ghana is still calling

Karen Attiah

W. E. B. Du Bois outside his home in Accra, Ghana, c. January 1963. Photo by Ruth Lazarus. (W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.)

"W. E. B. Du Bois outside his home in Accra, Ghana, c. January 1963. Photo by Ruth Lazarus. (W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.)

Accra, Ghana — In 1961, 93-year-old Black scholar and historian W.E.B. Du Bois moved to Ghana, and soon after he was granted Ghanaian citizenship. He had endured Jim Crow racism, FBI surveillance and the confiscation of his passport by the United States, and decided it was enough. He handed White America a scathing resignation notice, in the form of a poem, “Ghana Calls,” which in part reads:

“From reeking West whose day is done,

Who stink and stagger in their dung

Come with us, dark America:

The scum of Europe battened here

Follow Karen Attiah's opinionsFollow

Made fetid swamp a refuge seem …”

Nearly 60 years after Du Bois’s death, America is still trying to perfume itself to the world as a haven of freedom and progress. But the past weekend has been a reminder that America is all too content to tolerate the stench of Black death.

On Saturday, a White 18-year-old allegedly traveled 200 miles to Buffalo with a genocidal mission to kill as many Black people as he could. Donning body armor and armed with an assault weapon, he managed to slaughter 10 people, all of them Black, before he was taken alive by police. His chilling manifesto made explicit references to the great replacement theory and anxieties about immigrants, Jews and nonwhites taking power from Whites.

Two days after the Buffalo massacre, I went to Du Bois’s house, which is now a museum. The full text of “Ghana Calls” is painted on a small portion of a hallway. There, I pondered what Black asylum from white supremacy truly looks like.

It’s hard to find refuge in the political back and forth over the massacre, and over who is responsible for mainstream racism in general. Since the shooting, much liberal commentary has been devoted to blaming Fox News, Tucker Carlson and other race-baiting GOP apparatchiks for promoting racism and the great replacement theory.

But when it comes to white supremacy, White liberals have long held on to dangerously naive replacement theories of their own — that increasing populations of nonwhites will automatically dent anti-Blackness, for instance, and that younger generations are automatically less racist than their forebears. If President Biden’s reactions are anything to go by, the temptation is to believe that the salve for America’s racist spasms is a good ol’ dose of national unity. This liberal complacency puts us all at risk.

With these domestic options, it’s no wonder that in the past several years, there are more stories of Black people yearning for elsewhere. The rise of social media communities such as Nomadness Travel Tribe, Travel Noire and Blaxit Global are a testament to a growing awareness that Black people don’t have to feel trapped in America. “I don’t have to freeze and worry for my life every time I see a police officer,” a Ghanaian American friend who moved back told me in Accra.

There is an American exceptionalist idea that the country is so great that Black people should be willing to endure its ills. We hear all the time “stay and fight” from elected leaders, who do little with their power to protect Black people when we vote for them. Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and Nina Simone all left America for Europe and Africa to feel mentally and spiritually free from White America’s psychic violence. Sometimes, leaving is the most powerful form of resistance.

For the past several years, Ghana has been trying to capitalize off the desire of African Americans to return to Ghana and escape their country’s brutalities. “You do not have to stay where you are not wanted forever,” said Ghana’s tourism minister, Barbara Oteng Gyasi, in 2020, at a ceremony in Accra marking George Floyd’s murder. “You have a choice, and Africa is waiting for you.” Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo’s “Year of Return” initiatives have attracted celebrities and social media influencers. In 2019, he gave Ghanaian citizenship to 126 foreign nationals who had been living in the country for many years. Chance the Rapper has tweeted that he wants to take a group with him to Ghana this summer. Stevie Wonder has plans to relocate to Ghana. According to reports, about 5,000 African Americans have relocated to Ghana since 2020.

As open racism becomes more mainstream in major Western countries, will “Blaxit” become a bigger movement? It’s … complicated. The feeling of having to leave home for a better life comes with grief, guilt and moving costs. Cultural differences, and ignorance on both sides about African and African American history and culture, are not easy to overcome. Black people from the Americas will be confronted with the ugly truth that Africans participated in selling captured Africans to the Europeans. And immigration brings a fear of increased gentrification, and that investment and tourism dollars will not benefit average Ghanaians.

Still, the truth remains that Black people in the diaspora no longer have to be chained to countries that jail them, kill them and subject them to horrific hate crimes. To borrow from Maya Angelou, God gave us traveling shoes, and if Black people choose to use them, so be it."

Opinion | After Tops massacre, African Americans once again hear Ghana calling - The Washington Post

Doug Mastriano’s Pa. victory could give 2020 denier oversight of 2024 - The Washington Post

Doug Mastriano’s Pa. victory could give 2020 denier oversight of 2024

"The Trump-backed GOP gubernatorial nominee has proposed moves that could create election ‘chaos,’ experts say

Rosalind S. Helderman

Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor, takes part in a primary night event Tuesday in Chambersburg. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor, takes part in a primary night event Tuesday in Chambersburg. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

As a Pennsylvania state senator and gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano railed against the rampant fraud that he believes was responsible for Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat.

He vowed to decertify voting machines in counties where he suspects the result was rigged.

And he asserted that the Republican-controlled legislature should have the right to take control of the all-important choice over which presidential electors to send to Washington.

As governor, Mastriano would have the opportunity not just to speak, but to act. The Trump-endorsed 58-year-old, who won the Republican nomination for governor on Tuesday, would gain significant influence over the administration of the battleground state’s elections should he prevail in November, worrying experts already fearful of a democratic breakdown around the 2024 presidential contest.

Those concerns are made especially acute in Pennsylvania by the fact that the governor has the unusual authority to directly appoint the secretary of state, who serves as chief elections officer and must sign off on results. If he or she refuses, chaos could follow.

“The biggest risk is a secretary of state just saying, ‘I’m not going to certify the election, despite what the court says and despite what the evidence shows, because I’m concerned about suspicions,’” said Clifford Levine, a Democratic election lawyer in Pennsylvania. “You would start to have a breakdown in the legal system and the whole process.”

Mastriano’s backers appear well aware of the stakes. A video posted to Telegram by election denial activist Ivan Raiklin from Mastriano’s victory party on Tuesday showed the candidate smiling as Raiklin congratulated him on his win and added, with a thumb’s up, “20 electoral votes as well,” a reference to the state’s clout in the electoral college.

“Oh yeahhhh,” Mastriano responded.

Mastriano did not respond to a voice mail or an email sent to a campaign account for media.

But Mastriano told Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Trump who now hosts a podcast popular on the right, that he had already selected the person he would appoint as secretary of state if elected.

“As far as cleaning up the election, I mean, I’m in a good position as governor,” he said in the April 23 appearance on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “I have a voting-reform-minded individual who’s been traveling the nation and knows voting reform extremely well. That individual has agreed to be my secretary of state.”

He added that he planned to decertify voting machines in several Pennsylvania counties, a power given under state law to the secretary of state. “It’s going to be a top issue for me,” he said.

Buoyed by a late endorsement from Trump on Saturday, Mastriano, a retired Army colonel and state senator first elected in 2019, defeated eight other candidates for the Republican nomination, including former congressman Lou Barletta.

A person familiar with Trump’s thinking said he decided to endorse Mastriano because he believed Mastriano was going to win on Tuesday, and he wanted to claim a win in Pennsylvania on Tuesday no matter what. “He was hedging his bets,” this person said. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The Post’s Annie Linskey discusses former president Donald Trump’s uneven influence across key primary races on May 17. (Video: Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)

Other advisers argued that some of the candidates, such as Barletta, had been more loyal to him over the years, but Trump dismissed the arguments.

At times, Trump had grown annoyed with Mastriano, two former advisers said, because the state senator was unable to gain traction in helping Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election. But Mastriano kept in touch with Trump and was willing to talk about the electoral fraud issue when others wanted to move on, two of these people said.

Mastriano told Bannon on Saturday, shortly after Trump made his support public, that he saw the nod as “vindication.”

“President Trump’s loyal to those that stand for truth and are trying to fight for voting integrity in our state,” he said.

Mastriano was a key figure in Pennsylvania’s “Stop the Steal” movement, falsely arguing that President Biden’s more than 80,000-vote win in the state was the result of widespread fraud.

In the weeks after the November 2020 election, Mastriano organized a public hearing in Gettysburg featuring then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and helped commission an off-the-books audit of voting machines in a rural Pennsylvania county that was funded by Trump allies.

It was like this rogue thing’: How the push by Trump allies to undermine the 2020 results through ballot reviews started quietly in Pennsylvania

Though challenges to Biden’s win were rejected by state and federal courts, Mastriano proposed a resolution to declare the outcome of the state’s election in doubt and allow the Republican-controlled state legislature to appoint presidential electors. He told Bannon on Nov. 28, 2020, that the goal was “to reassert our authority to pick the electors for president.”

He claimed that the Pennsylvania General Assembly had “surrendered over to the popular vote” and insisted that the Constitution allowed the legislature to “to reassert our privileges as General Assembly and oversee the electors that they go to the right person.”

Mastriano then traveled to Washington for the rally on Trump’s behalf on Jan. 6, 2021. Videos show him among a crowd moving toward the Capitol as another man removes a bike rack blocking the sidewalk. He has said he respected police lines, left the area when it became clear the event was no longer peaceful and did not enter the Capitol building.

Leading GOP candidates in Pennsylvania were in Washington on Jan. 6

Since the 2020 election, Mastriano has proposed a series of measures in the Pennsylvania Senate that would dramatically reshape the state’s elections.

He proposed removing requirements that poll watchers live in the counties they are sent to observe and imposing new penalties on election workers who block access to poll watchers. He has said he is opposed to any mail-in balloting. And he’s proposed a bill that would remove the power to oversee elections from the secretary of state and hand it to a new election commission with members appointed by both the governor and the legislature, expanding the power of the General Assembly.

As the law now stands, Pennsylvania is one of just three states where the governor directly appoints the state’s top elections official.

One crucial function that the governor performs himself is signing the official certificate of the electoral college votes, and it is not clear what recourse there would be if a governor refuses to do so. “It would be chaos,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former election administrator and partner at the Elections Group consulting firm. “We would be in the same precarious situation we were in on January 6. “In Pennsylvania, operational decisions on running elections are made at the local level. The secretary of state can issue guidelines but has limited power to enforce them, which could be a check on the ability of an election denier to manipulate the system, Morrell said.

But she said an appointee who embraces election conspiracy theories could use the position to amplify claims that, even if untrue, can erode public confidence in the system.

At a gubernatorial debate in April, Mastriano said he would appoint a secretary of state who would require all voters in the state to renew their registration to be eligible to participate in future elections, a proposal that experts said probably would violate federal law.

“I saw better elections in Afghanistan than in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano said.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, has signaled that Mastriano’s rhetoric on the election and presence in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, will be core to his argument that Mastriano is too extreme for the swing state.

“When Republicans in Harrisburg sought to undermine our elections, I took them to court to defend our democracy. My opponent enabled their attacks by standing idly by, and even attended the January 6th insurrection,” he tweeted Wednesday.

Though Trump can now add Mastriano to his prized tally of successful primary endorsements, the nod came so late, and after Mastriano was already leading in polls, that it wasn’t seen as decisive.

“Trump’s intervention was jumping out in front of the parade as it was crossing the finish line,” said Matt Brouillette, CEO of Commonwealth Partners, a pro-business group that responded to Trump’s endorsement of Mastriano by calling on other candidates to clear the field and rally behind Barletta. “If Doug loses in November, Trump will actually own more of it than not.”

Some Republicans have worried that Mastriano’s singular focus on 2020 could turn off voters who believe Biden’s win was legitimate or who are otherwise more interested in looking to the future.

David Urban, a longtime Trump adviser, said Mastriano would have a difficult time winning a general election in Pennsylvania. Urban said Mastriano would have to moderate his message and that he was not sure that was a likely possibility.

“In the general election, people have to moderate their message and move back to the middle. If he does that, he could be a viable candidate. If he doesn’t want to do that, he won’t be a viable candidate,” he said.

Dave Ball, chairman of the Washington County GOP, agreed that Mastriano will have to reach out beyond his base. During the primary, Mastriano made his stance on the 2020 election central to his pitch. “That’s been his whole campaign,” Ball said.

But he said Mastriano will need to build a broader coalition and agenda to win in November. “He’s got to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans and everything else,” Ball said. “Given what we’ve seen so far, that’s gonna be a trick. He’s gonna have to rebrand himself.”

Those who know Mastriano well say he’s unlikely to shrink from his pledges to overhaul elections. State Rep. Aaron Bernstine, an ally of Mastriano’s in Harrisburg, said voters could expect Mastriano to govern like he campaigned.

“The things he talks about are the things he would intend to do as governor,” Bernstine said. “I’ve always been of the basic view that when people tell you what they’re going to do, believe them.”

Doug Mastriano’s Pa. victory could give 2020 denier oversight of 2024 - The Washington Post

Racists Once Terrorized This Georgia County. Diversity Made It Prosper. - The New York Times

Racists Once Terrorized This Georgia County. Diversity Made It Prosper.

"The slow return of diversity to an area that brutally drove out its Black residents has been accompanied by a boom that gives the lie to “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories.

May 19, 2022Updated 8:31 a.m. ET

Cumming, Ga., is in Forsyth County, where the population is now over 260,000 — up from 45,000 when the vestiges of all-white Forsyth began falling away.Audra Melton for The New York Times

CUMMING, Ga. — In October 1912, after the raped and brutalized body of Mae Crow, a white 18-year-old, was laid to rest beside the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, the white men of Forsyth County went on a rampage, driving its 1,098 Black citizens — about 10 percent of the population — from Forsyth’s borders.

They had already dragged 24-year-old Rob Edwards, a Black man, from a jail cell in the Cumming town square, beaten him with crowbars, riddled his corpse with bullets and hoisted him over a telephone pole yardarm. Two Black teens, Ernest Knox, 16, and Oscar Daniel, 18, would hang after the most specious of trials.

But the citizens of this county north of Atlanta were not done. For much of the 20th century, they would guard Forsyth’s borders as the city to the south encroached, through violence, intimidation and a menacing understanding in Greater Atlanta that this county was to remain for whites only.

The people who drove Forsyth’s Black residents from their homes and farms had no name for their hatred, no “Great Replacement” or “White Genocide” theories. But the notion that other races were plotting to “replace” the rightful inhabitants of the county took murderous form more than a century ago, said Patrick Phillips, whose attention-getting 2016 book “Blood at the Root” chronicled the racial cleansing of the county he grew up in — and his own awakening to the fact of his all-white childhood.

The recently restored graveyard at Cumming Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia.Audra Melton for The New York Times

A small group of Black farmers were starting to prosper, acquire land and outdo some of their white neighbors, Mr. Phillips said.

They had to go.

If those who carried out mass shootings in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand, showed how deadly such beliefs could be in the hands of a single, well-armed killer, the Forsyth County of 1912 showed what a more organized operation of terror could accomplish.

But a century later, Forsyth County also refutes white supremacists who believe that, as Payton Gendron, the charged Buffalo gunman, put it: “Diversity is not a strength.” The county’s whites-only century was one of stagnation and isolation. Only after the sprawl of Greater Atlanta eventually overwhelmed Forsyth’s defenses in the late 1990s and 2000s did this county boom.

“It put a stigma on Forsyth County for many, many years, and for some, it still exists,” said Jason May, 48, the white owner of a real estate company just off the Cumming town square.

And booming it is.

Its population is now over 260,000 — up from 45,000 when the vestiges of all-white Forsyth began falling away. The Black population, at 2.2 percent in 2000, is still only 4.4 percent — Alpharetta, just over the Fulton County line, is 12 percent Black. But other demographic groups have grown substantially, including immigrants. Asians, particularly Indian Americans, represent 15.5 percent, and Hispanics 9.7 percent. Household median income, at $112,834, just surpassed Calvert County, Md., to become the 13th highest in the country. It was $44,162 in 1993, or $89,500 in current dollars.

Maria Zaragoza, left, and Barbra Curtiss sell real estate from an office in downtown Cumming.Audra Melton for The New York Times

“Diversity can never be bad in my book; I’m sorry,” said Barbra Curtiss, 71, a white businesswoman whose real estate company off the Cumming town square includes a banner welcoming her newest agent, Maria Zaragosa, along with “Spanglish” services. “Diversity — it’s just like death and taxes. You’re not going to be able to stop it, no matter what. No matter how much hate speech, how many mass shootings, it’s not going to stop.”

Ms. Curtiss, who moved to Forsyth County in 1984, knew of its whites-only status while living in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, when her husband at the time — a “racist,” she said — wanted to move to an all-white county. Three years later, in 1987, a small group of local and Atlanta-based civil rights activists, led by Hosea Williams, boarded buses from Atlanta for Forsyth County to mark the 75th anniversary of the Black expulsion. They were met with confederate flags and signs proclaiming “Racial Purity is Forsyth’s Security” and “Forsyth Stays White.” And when they tried to march into Cumming, they were pelted with stones, bottles and bricks, until they retreated to their buses, back to Atlanta.

The Rev. Hosea Williams, in overalls, an Atlanta city councilman, led a 1987 march against efforts to keep Forsyth County, Ga., all white.Gene Blythe/Associated Press

A few weeks later, this time with national media attention, helicopters overhead, and a phalanx of National Guardsmen clearing their path, the marchers returnedin far larger numbers — this time with Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.

Among the marchers was Miguel Marcelli, a Black Atlanta firefighter, who in 1980 had made the mistake of joining his girlfriend’s company picnic on the Forsyth County banks of Lake Lanier, and nearly paid with his life after the couple was ambushed as they headed home. They were less than a mile from the grave of Mae Crow. In November 1986, five Hispanic construction workers were beaten and told they would be killed if they didn’t leave the county immediately.

Yet for all the publicity, Forsyth remained nearly all white. Ms. Curtiss recalled her first nonwhite customer, “a little Hispanic guy” in the early 2000s, who came to her after other real estate brokers refused their services.

“All I remember was that it was heart-wrenching, because he said nobody else would give him the time of day,” she said.

Tony Shivers, 72, remembers exactly when the first Black man was hired by the town of Cumming: It was 30 years ago, and he was that man. He was laying pipe for a contractor in Cumming; the city liked his work, and took him on at the water treatment plant. There was a sign outside the sheriff’s office, warning Black people — using a racial slur — that they had better not be caught by the dogcatcher in Forsyth County after dark.

Tony Shivers, 72, was the first Black man hired by the town of Cumming 30 years ago.Jonathan Weisman/The New York Times

His friends in Atlanta had told him he was crazy to go to Forsyth County, and he said he remembered incidents when he was told to go back where he belonged. But he had been in the Marines. He wasn’t going to be intimidated.

Many in the county do not know the its history. Ms. Zaragosa said she was unaware of the county’s past. Instead, she struck a note that many others here do: “Our main focus is on business,” she said, just two months into her job at the real estate agency, which, like others, advertises: “Se habla Español.”

For others, the stories are inescapable. The county has not tried to bury its history: A plaque on the Cumming town square tells the story of Mr. Edward’s lynching and the racial cleansing that followed.

“The loss of Black-owned property in order to flee arbitrary mob violence was common during this era, and Forsyth’s Black residents left behind their homes and farms to escape, taking with them only what they could carry,” it reads.

Indeed, much of Forsyth’s per capita wealth was generated by the vast run-up in value of properties that had sat in the possession of Forsyth’s old families for a century — much of that property taken from someone else.

Outside Cherians International Fresh Market, an Asian grocery store on Cumming’s outskirts, Avani Vallabhaneni spoke to the perseverance of Forsyth’s newcomers. When she and her husband arrived 12 years ago, she said, she heard neighbors stage-whispering behind her back that she should go back to where she came from. Her husband, who travels for work, once showed his business card to a knowing Georgian, who marveled that he lived in Cumming.

But she had her two children in Forsyth County, and the Indian population has grown so much, she said, that she does not hear those whispers anymore.

Others do still hear similar whispers today, however — though race is not necessarily the irritant.

Like the Rev. Bogdan Maruszak, the pastor of a small flock of immigrants. He started his Ukrainian Orthodox Church in a trailer, on a plot of land outside Cumming, in 2000, bringing together Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians and others, all of them white, to forbidding territory in North Georgia, where he made ends meet opening a body shop. He knew vaguely of Forsyth’s history.

The Rev. Bogdan Maruszak at St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Cumming, Ga.Audra Melton for The New York Times

“I was thinking about it, but I wasn’t nervous,” the Ukrainian-Polish immigrant said over iced tea and lemonade just over the Fulton County line in Johns Creek.

With the war in Ukraine heightening fears of genocide and the mass shooting in Buffalo focusing attention on “white replacement,” Rev. Maruszak said, it is incumbent on all of Forsyth County, not only its newcomers, to speak out, and to speak up for those who are threatened.

“We cannot be passively observing,” he said. “We can do something. We should react.”

That can’t be taken for granted, said Mr. Phillips, the author of “Blood at the Root.”

Forsyth’s progress and its remarkable prosperity may be proof that white supremacy is a hindrance, he said, but the county should not be credited with the epiphany. Atlanta’s sprawl spread steadily northward until the wave “finally broke over Forsyth County,” he said.

“What you would like to believe,” Mr. Phillips said, “is that there was some moral change, that people saw the error of their ways, and a light switch clicked.”

But that, he said, isn’t what happened."

Racists Once Terrorized This Georgia County. Diversity Made It Prosper. - The New York Times