the barricades were destroyed, so was whites’ confidence in the neighborhood. In less than a month, most homes in Peyton Forest—including that of Virgil Copeland, the head of the homeowners’ resistance movement—were listed for sale with black real-estate agents. “When the barricades came down, everything collapsed,” he told a reporter. “It’s all over out there for us.” Indeed, by the end of July 1963 all but fifteen white families had sold their homes to black buyers and abandoned the neighborhood.
