The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He paid price for support of integration
Helped Jimmy Carter win first state seat.
In 1959, 31-year-old Warren Fortson moved to Americus, Ga., and within a few years became attorney for Sumter County and the county school board, as well as president of the Sunday school at Americus’ First Methodist Church. His private law practice included criminal, real estate and corporate cases.
His life had a shimmering veneer of small- town mid-century Southern propriety. He and his wife, Betty, had five children and lived in a circa-1900 18-room mansion. She served on the garden club, the Junior League and was soloist in the First Methodist choir.
But racial tensions were unfurling nationwide, and the Fortsons found themselves in the eye of a media hurricane a few years later. In the early 1960s, he attempted orchestrating a series of mild integrations of city and county institutions. His efforts would lead to the family’s ouster from the county via pressure from the white politicians and the social structure.
Fortson sent his family packing to Atlanta after 1965 and soon followed. In a conversation several years later with Marshall Frady, then writing for Atlanta Magazine, Fortson worried his post-Americus life would prove “anticlimactic.” But he wound up practicing law an astonishing 63 years. Along the way he handled big cases and counseled not only clients but a litany of young lawyers.
“He was my co-counsel and coach,” said former U.S. Senator Wyche Fowler, who worked with him from 197077. “He taught me how to try cases effectively, how to prepare questions and anticipate objections. He had an enduring sympathy for the underdog. That was definitely a theme throughout his life.”
Warren Candler Fortson Sr. died of congestive heart failure in his Atlanta home Aug. 1, two weeks before his 92nd birthday. He was cremated and will be buried later.
Deep Georgia roots
Fortson was the youngest of eight children born in Washington, Ga., to lawyer and school superintendent Benjamin Wynn Fortson and Lillie Wellborn Fortson on Aug. 14, 1928.
He came from a family as embedded in Georgia as the red clay. His oldest brother, Ben, was Georgia’s secretary of state for 33 years. His grandfather, Charles John Fortson, was a college roommate with Warren Candler, who was brother to CocaCola founder Asa Candler, and later a bishop of the Methodist Church and chancellor of Emory University.
Fortson graduated from Emory Law School and moved to Americus, where he befriended a peanut farmer and school board member from nearby Plains named Jimmy Carter. In 1962, Carter lost his first run for a state Senate seat because of ballot-stuffing by a local political boss. Fortson and an Atlanta lawyer challenged the election, getting it overturned in Carter’s favor.
Carter wrote in his 1992 book “Turning Point” that the final verdict was handed down by a Judge Crow, and that night he and Fortson drank “a lot of Old Crow” [bourbon] in the judge’s honor. According to Jane Fortson Eisenach, from then on her father sent Carter a bottle of Old Crow after every election victory, including the one for the White House.
President Carter wrote in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Rosalynn and I are saddened at the passing of our friend Warren Fortson. Warren was a superb South Georgia lawyer who helped me fight election fraud to win my seat in the Georgia State Senate in 1962. …Warren was a brave advocate for racial equality in a time and place where it was a costly position to take, but he never backed down.”
Fortson persuaded school board members to desegregate Americus High School with a token four students. He began accepting Black clients in his practice and helped integrate the town’s largest manufacturer, Manhattan Shirt Company.
The critical point arrived in the summer of 1965 after the drive-by killing of a young white man who’d been protesting the jailing of four Black women arrested at a polling location. Trying to avoid further violence, Fortson delved into establishing a biracial commission. The white community responded with a petition signed by 2,000 demanding his dismissal as county attorney.
He was pelted with telephone threats. Clients stopped showing up at his office and then stopped paying him. Friends would cross the street to avoid conversation.
His oldest child, Jane Fortson Eisenach, was 12 in 1965 and remembers seeing her 9-year-old brother, Warren Jr., attacked by older boys on the playground.
“I jumped in the middle of it with the naive belief that boys wouldn’t hit girls. But when I tried to intervene, they turned on me,” she said.
Fortson walked away from his beloved Methodist church after leadership told him he was no longer welcome.
His daughter Susan Eginton was almost six the day the family left the church. In a recent email she wrote, “We were all climbing into the car to leave when Daddy looked back at the church and said, ‘God welcomes all of His children in His house.’ I will never forget those words.”
After leaving town, he worked for the national Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, defending Blacks across Mississippi. His marriage fell apart in the late 1960s, and Fortson moved to New Orleans to practice law while going through a brief second marriage.
He returned to Atlanta in 1970, working for a major firm before forming his own. He served as general counsel for Atlanta Public Schools from 1972-93 and later as council to the president of Georgia Perimeter College.
He’d been single for 17 years when he met and married Linda Lanier in 1987. He was 59 and she was 37. The two practiced law together and focused on representing educators, included 44 teachers in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal.
“He saw teaching as one of life’s noblest callings,” Linda Fortson said. “He understood they had very difficult work conditions, that they were vulnerable, that they didn’t have money and that they needed legal help.”
It was Linda who finally convinced Warren to retire in 2017. “He did miss working,” she said. “He had a puritanical view. He felt like he needed to produce something. I told him he’d produced enough, that it was time to become a hedonist.”
Warren Fortson is survived by his wife, Linda Lanier Fortson, and his seven children, Jane Fortson Eisenach ( Jeff ) of Oakton, Va., Warren Candler Fortson Jr. (Vickie) of Lawrenceville, Margaret Leslie (George) of Ball Ground, Susan Eginton (Mark) of Ithaca, N.Y., Lyda Kathryn Fortson of Roswell, Dr. Benjamin Fortson (Kelly) of Ann Arbor, Mi., and Savannah Lanier Fortson of Atlanta, along with six grandchildren and two great- grandchildren.