Gary Younge in New York
Tuesday January 11, 2005
The Guardian
A lot has changed since Clayton County, Georgia, provided the setting for Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind.
The county's antebellum architecture has given way to suburban strip malls, and political dominance has passed from the white slaveowners to the African-American middle class.
Nothing quite signifies this transition as much as its newly elected black sheriff.
On his first day Victor Hill invited 27 supervisors, deputies and correction officers loyal to the former, white, sheriff to what they thought was a swearing in ceremony.
When they got there armed colleagues took their badges, weapons and car keys and escorted them from the building under the eye of rooftop snipers - offering them a ride home in prisoner vans. "How do you safely tell 30 people that they're not being reinstated?" Mr Hill told the New York Times from his courthouse office. "You do it in a jail where there are no weapons."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1387421,00.html