Railroaded: Residents of predominantly Black Georgia community fight back against train proposal
Written by Black Hot Fire Network on February 24, 2023
It was 1926 and Jim Crow reigned in the American South when James Blaine Smith managed something rare for a Black man in the middle of Georgia: He acquired 600 acres of land. The descendant of enslaved people, Smith was a poor farmer living in a shack just outside a city called Sparta. But he had big dreams for the tract he had been leasing for years, driving a mule to plow its fertile rows and grow cotton.
Eventually, 97 years ago, Smith amassed enough to trade his harvest for the land.
The company the . . .
