"The sustained legal campaign of subjugation, called Jim Crow, plus targeted law enforcement, lack of education resources, and limited economic opportunity, resulted in "the Great Migration." Starting in the first decade of the twentieth century, more than a million African Americans left the racial violence and poverty of the South for the industrial cities of the North and West. In 1900, Georgia's Black population was over 47 percent of the total. By 1970, the figure had dropped to just over 25 percent. In the 1910 census, Walton County recorded 25,393 people. The next time it would reach that level was in the 1980 census, the year I graduated from high school. By then, Walton County benefited from its proximity to a booming Atlanta. The racial terror and Jim Crow laws decreased Georgia's population and retarded its economic potential for generations. Racism isn't just morally wrong; it's economically stupid."