LITMIR.BIZ

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back to the apartment. Family members blamed the act on the post-traumatic stress the young man suffered after being tortured in a refugee camp, an explanation that hardly soothed the anxieties of older Clarkston residents, given the number of people in their town from just such camps.

      A young member of the Lost Boys of Sudan, the 3,800 refugees who resettled in the United States after a twelve-year flight through the desert and scrub of war-ravaged Sudan, died after getting bludgeoned by another Sudanese refugee in a fight over ten dollars. An Ethiopian man was arrested and later convicted for conducting the brutal practice of female circumcision on his young daughter. And so on. Each of these events fed the perception that the refugees were bringing violent pasts with them to Clarkston, and caused even empathetic locals to worry for their own safety.

      THE CITIZENS OF many communities might have organized, or protested, or somehow pushed back, but Clarkston wasn’t a protesting kind of place. The old town’s quiet, conservative southern character didn’t go in for rallies and bullhorns. And the troubles of the 1980s had destabilized the community and imbued longtime residents with a sense of futility when it came to resisting change. Rather than making noise, during the first decade of resettlement the older residents of Clarkston simply retreated into their homes.

      Karen Feltz remembers that when she moved to Clarkston from the nearby Atlanta neighborhood of Five Points—a community with a vibrant nightlife and where neighbors say hello and look after one another—she was struck by the strange wariness of her neighbors. Few people talked. A sense of community was missing. It took a while, but Feltz said she came to realize that the sudden changes brought on by resettlement had simply made people afraid.

      “You’re talking about one-point-one square miles of encapsulated southern ideologies,” Feltz said of her town. “People living their safe quiet lives in their white-bread houses, and all of a sudden every other person on the street is black, or Asian, or something they don’t even recognize, and ‘Oh my God, let’s just shut down and stay in our houses!’”

      For all the unique circumstances of Clarkston’s transformation, there was something altogether normal about the townsfolk’s withdrawal from the public sphere. In 2007, a group of researchers led by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published a study detailing the results of surveys they had done with some thirty thousand residents of forty-one ethnically diverse communities in the United States. Their findings underscored the cost of diversity: when people have little in common, they tend to avoid each other and to keep to themselves.

      “Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life,” the authors wrote, “to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

      In Clarkston, the withdrawal from collective life was matched by growing resentment at the forces and people that had caused the town to change in the first place: the resettlement agencies and the refugees. For a surprisingly long time—the better part of a decade—townsfolk kept their anger to themselves. But as resentment built, it would begin to find its expression.

      “Nobody knew what to do about it, so they just sort of ignored it,” Karen Feltz said of the influx of refugees. “And that’s how we got in trouble.”

      THE FIRST SIGNS of trouble surfaced in interactions between the refugees and the Clarkston Police Department in the late 1990s. The police chief at the time was a man named Charlie—or Chollie, to people in Clarkston—Nelson, an old-school presence whose office wall was adorned with a poster of Barney Fife, the goofball deputy on The Andy Griffith Show, captioned with the phrase, “Hell no, this ain’t Mayberry.”

      The refugees were a constant problem, in Nelson’s eyes. They didn’t understand English. Many were poor drivers. Some, when pulled over, gesticulated and cried out, and even reached out to touch his officers—a sign of disrespect if not outright aggression to most American police officers. Nelson looked askance at diversity training and opposed offering any “special treatment” for refugees, particularly in the arena of traffic violations. Writing traffic tickets to refugees became one of Clarkston’s more reliable sources of revenue. A study by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that the average Georgia town of Clarkston’s size raised about 9 percent of its budget from traffic tickets. In Clarkston, by contrast, the number was 30 percent. Nelson argued that he was simply enforcing the law. It wasn’t his fault, he said, if some refugees hadn’t learned the rules of the road in the United States. But the refugees felt singled out.

      “A lot of our community members felt harassed, discriminated against,” said Salahadin Wazir, the imam of the Clarkston mosque, whose congregation was often ticketed for parking improperly around the mosque at Friday prayers. “They were all just pulled over for anything.”

      Eventually, some members of the refugee community became so fed up with what they saw as harassment from Nelson’s force that they decided to act. For many, doing so meant making a leap of faith. Most had come from war-ravaged regions where the police and other authority figures were not only untrustworthy but frequently active agents of oppression. To stand up to the police in America was to take the nation’s promise of justice for all at face value. In one incident, a Somali cabdriver, after getting pulled over by a Clarkston police officer for reasons he thought bogus, summoned other cabbies from the Somali community on his CB radio. His colleagues quickly drove to the site of the police stop. The officer feared a riot might occur and let the driver off with a warning.

      In 2001, Lee Swaney—a longtime city council member and a self-described champion of “old Clarkston,” that is, Clarkston before the refugees—ran for mayor. As an advocate of life as it was in a simple southern town, Swaney fit the part. The owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, he had a big walrus-y mustache and sleepy eyes that made him look older than his sixty-eight years. He drove a big white pickup truck of the sort you might expect to see on a ranch, wore cowboy boots and an American flag lapel pin, and spoke with a thick, low-country accent that betrayed his South Carolina upbringing. Swaney’s platform reflected his old-school values: he promised the citizens of Clarkston that if elected, he’d work hard to lure a good old-fashioned American hamburger joint to open up within the city limits.

      A year and a half after Swaney took office, something happened that pushed the tensions in Clarkston over the edge: refugee agency officials announced that they planned to relocate some seven hundred Somali Bantu to Georgia, many of them to Clarkston.

      The Somali Bantu presented an extraordinary challenge for resettlement officials. An assemblage of agricultural tribes from the area of East Africa now comprising Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique, the Somali Bantu had undergone more than three hundred years of almost uninterrupted persecution. They were kidnapped and sold into slavery with impunity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Arab slave traders. Later, under the sultanate of Zanzibar and subsequent rule by the Italian colonial government, the Somali Bantu were enslaved to work on plantations, a condition that persisted until as recently as the 1930s. When the British granted Somalia its independence in 1960, the Bantu were hounded, abused, and brutalized by ethnic Somalis. When the Somali civil war began in 1991, the persecution accelerated dramatically as warring factions forced the Somali Bantu off their land in the fertile Juba River valley. Amid the lawlessness and the systematic campaigns of rape, torture, and killing, the Somali Bantu fled en masse with other persecuted Somalis to the empty and dangerous open spaces of northeast Kenya and into four main refugee camps established there by the United Nations. By the late 1990s, the population of those camps exceeded 150,000.

      This history of persecution and wandering had torn at the social fabric of the Somali Bantu and left them, on the whole, poor, deeply traumatized, and far removed from the trappings of the modern world. They had little in the way of education. Many lived their lives in primitive conditions, with no running water or electricity. Their cultural isolation was acute as well. The Somali Bantu were sometimes referred to by Somalis as the “ooji”—from the Italian word oggi,

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