Cherokee County, Georgia

Cherokee County, Georgia, is both a landscape of Atlanta’s outward expansion and the site of one of Charlie Croker’s most consequential land maneuvers. Its wooded, still-developing terrain promised room for a new commercial center, but the gap between that future promise and the county’s present isolation left Croker Concourse conspicuously exposed—and made the land’s price vulnerable to manipulation.

Setting and metropolitan growth

The county belongs to the northern geography of Greater Atlanta, where commercial development had moved beyond the old downtown into highway-served clusters. Charlie understood that pattern through the idea of the edge city: commercial centers forming at the metropolitan perimeter rather than in the historic core. Buckhead and Perimeter Center had already established the model, while further centers were appearing around major highway junctions and pushing into the surrounding woods.

In that expanding map, Cherokee County offered a new frontier. Charlie imagined an edge city there, west of Forsyth County and north of the Galleria, bearing his own name. Yet the promise depended on infrastructure and continued growth. From above, Croker Concourse appeared as a tower, mall, cineplex, and hotel-and-apartment complex rising from an immense stretch of parking and trees. The outer perimeter highway that might eventually connect it to the region had not yet arrived, leaving the development isolated from Atlanta’s established center.

Land and Croker Concourse

When Charlie sought land in the southern part of the county for his large mixed-use development, speculators had already bought most of the available acreage. They expected the county’s future growth to raise prices and were prepared to hold their property until that moment came. The land Charlie needed would otherwise have cost about four million dollars, a prohibitive price for assembling the site.

The resulting development embodied the tension between speculative confidence and present-day reality. Charlie had built ahead of the surrounding growth, betting that roads and metropolitan expansion would eventually catch up. For the moment, Croker Concourse stood as a lonely outpost among the trees, its extensive parking area visibly empty. The county’s distance from the old city was not incidental: it was the risk on which the development’s future value—and its vulnerability—rested.

The land maneuver and its exposure

Charlie found an opening while driving along a back road in Cherokee County and meeting Darwell Scruggs, a former high-school classmate. Scruggs had been known in school for joining the Ku Klux Klan as a teenager and was now living in the county, where he had formed a Klan group of his own. The encounter connected Charlie’s search for affordable land to a local racial conflict that could be made dramatically visible.

The plan unfolded as a public spectacle. Andre Fleet led Black protesters from Atlanta through Canton, the county seat, while Scruggs and a group of young men hurled racial abuse at them. Television crews arrived from around the country, and Frank Farr’s network talk show broadcast from Canton’s main street, presenting the confrontation as a national denunciation of racism. The coverage dragged the reputation of the county’s leafy setting through a racial crisis even as it drew attention to the deeds transferring land to Charlie.

The disclosures showed that Charlie had assembled the acreage for about two hundred thousand dollars—roughly one-twentieth of the estimated four-million-dollar cost before the protest and Klan spectacle. Harry Zale later recounted the scheme in a documentary sent to Charlie as an unconventional attempt to get his attention after other requests went unanswered. Zale’s account said that, as far as he could determine, Charlie’s actions were not illegal: he had manipulated public opinion. The county’s racial conflict had therefore served not only as a political spectacle but also as leverage in a land deal, sharply reducing the cost of the ground on which Charlie’s projected edge city depended.

Political geography and significance

Cherokee County’s role in Atlanta’s development is framed by a broader imbalance between the city and its surrounding counties. Wes Jordan describes Atlanta politics through the image of a small Black core controlling the city itself, surrounded by millions of largely white residents in the northern suburbs and counties, including Cherokee. In that account, development and political influence are linked through bargaining over projects and community benefits rather than through simple city-versus-suburb divisions.

The county thus occupies two positions in the novel’s geography. It is part of the metropolitan frontier where growth and investment are expected to move next, and it is a place where local racial conflict can be turned into a spectacle with consequences far beyond the county line. Charlie’s scheme makes that connection concrete: the future value of Cherokee County land is shaped not only by highways and development forecasts, but also by political power, public reputation, and the human cost of manipulating racial tensions.