Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white "night riders" launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.
National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth's tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and '80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth "all white" well into the 1990s. In precise, vivid prose, Blood at the Root delivers a "vital investigation of Forsyth's history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America" (Congressman John Lewis).
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[H]umanizes its subjects and brims with detail....[G]raphic, unflinching, important.--Jennifer Senior (09/15/2016)
Phillips' book feels timely, unapologetically discussing the way fear, panic, ignorance, and timing may have kept Forsyth County trapped in the past.--William Lee (09/21/2016)
Deeply researched and crisply written, "Blood at the Root'' is an impressive and timely case study of the racial violence and historical amnesia that characterize much of American history. Phillips...is a gifted storyteller.-- (09/23/2016)
The burden of southern history lies not in what we know about the past but what we do not know. Patrick Phillips uncovers an important untold piece of history... What he reveals in this important book does not make this chilling piece of the past any easier to bear, but he brings it into sharper focus, which is long overdue.-- (06/08/2016)
Phillips brings a journalist's crisp perspective to this precise and disquieting account of a reprehensible and underreported chapter in America's racial history.-- (06/08/2016)
