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Summary
Summary
A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia, and a harrowing testament to the deep roots of racial violence 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. Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they'd founded the county's thriving black churches.
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. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to "abandoned" land. 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.
Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century.
36 illustrations
Author Notes
Patrick Phillips is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor. A Guggenheim and NEA Fellow, his poetry collection, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Phillips lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Stanford University.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet and translator Phillips (Elegy for a Broken Machine) employs his considerable writing skills to chronicle the racism that held Forsyth County, Ga., in its grip for three quarters of the 20th century. In 1912, an unknown person or persons raped two white women in Forsyth County, one of whom died of her injuries. As a result, a black man was beaten to death by a white mob, and two other black men, their guilt unclear, were convicted of the crime and hanged in a public execution. Forsyth's white residents decided the executions were not sufficient retribution, and they subjected the county's 1,100 African-American residents to a reign of terror that forced all of them to abandon their homes. The deeply embedded racism of a county functionally immune from law was sufficiently powerful to keep Forsyth County completely white for 75 years. On Jan. 17, 1987, a civil rights march 20,000 strong in the county seat, Cumming, brought the scourge of unmitigated white power to national attention, forcing the beginnings of integration. Phillips enhances his exposé of this violent and shameful history through interviews with descendants of the white families who brazenly exiled the county's black community as well as the descendants of those forced to leave. This is a gripping, timely, and important examination of American racism, and Phillips tells it with rare clarity and power. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As current political discourse addresses controversial notions regarding immigrants and race relationships, the events Phillips describes in this harrowing chronicle of racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia, in the early twentieth century feels eerily contemporary and all-too relevant. From murder to rape to robbery, virtually every crime committed in this rural Atlanta farming community in 1912 was attributed to marauding black men. The fact that there was no credible evidence to support these beliefs was secondary; white townspeople rushed to judgment, assigning guilt and sentencing to death the black men they deemed responsible. Lynchings were commonplace; night-riding arsonists burned and bombed black families out of their homes, turning Forsyth County into a whites-only enclave, segregation that would endure for decades. The child of parents who were part of a small cadre of white homeowners brave enough to challenge the status quo, Phillips, nonetheless, subjugates his personal connections in pursuit of the larger story of ethnic profiling and its elaborate cover-up. Although he is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor, Phillips brings a journalist's crisp perspective to this precise and disquieting account of a reprehensible and underreported chapter in America's racial history.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
PATRICK PHILLIPS'S BOOK, at its core, is about the lies told over and over again until they become the truth. Lies crafted to exonerate white residents, who deployed terror, lynching and the law to racially cleanse all black people from Forsyth County, Ga. Lies proffered to explain why, despite the civil rights movement and the area's proximity to Atlanta, the county remained virtually all-white into the 1990s. "Blood at the Root," whose title is taken from a stanza of "Strange Fruit," the hauntingly painful song about lynching, is no redemption tale. By the end, it is clear that the white supremacy responsible for killing black bodies and stealing land and property remains, to this day, unbowed and unrepentant. Phillips begins with his childhood. In the late 1970s, his family had moved out of Atlanta and, like so many, purchased a home in a white suburban setting. But, Phillips began to think: Why this white? Not one black person in the entire county? How could that be? Years later, still asking those questions, he began his quest. He takes us back to the moment in 1912 when a young white woman named Mae Crow is found in a ditch, bludgeoned and raped. Forsyth County's whites immediately assumed that the perpetrators had to be black. Who else would do something so savage? Moreover, there were a few African-Americans who were "outsiders," teenagers taken in by their extended families and given a home in Forsyth County. Because they weren't born there they automatically fell under suspicion. Soon thereafter an upstanding citizen drove one of the black teenagers into the woods, placed a noose around the child's neck and demanded a confession. The frightened youth told whatever story this man wanted to hear and, for good measure, implicated others. Confession in hand, Forsyth County's whites were determined to avenge Mae Crow. And Rob Edwards, one of the "outsiders" seen with the teenager that day and held in the local jail, fit the bill. While the sheriff, who was up for re-election, conveniently slipped away leaving only his rival, the deputy, to protect a young black man whom the voters wanted dead, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. After Edwards was dragged, beaten and shot on the town square, his bullet-riddled body was strung up and left as a warning. Unsated, the lynch mob then went after the other defendants, but they had already been secreted away to Atlanta's Fulton County Jail, known as the Tower. Denied their pound of flesh, bands of night riders turned their attention to the remaining black community and finished the job with dynamite, gunfire, arson and sheer terror. Within a matter of weeks, Forsyth County was racially cleansed. Months later, when the state militia escorted the defendants back to the county seat of Cumming, Ga., to stand trial, the only black faces in the county were theirs. The subsequent court proceedings, designed to exude an aura of decorum amid the lawlessness of vigilante justice, snuffed out the last black lives in Forsyth County for nearly 80 years. Phillips provides powerful insight into the motives of the various class and business sectors in the county's white community, which conducted, acquiesced to or benefited from the terror. Key to the sustained systematic violence was the refusal of law enforcement to enforce the law. Thus, the voices of the few who pleaded for moderation were threatened or ignored. Impunity ruled. Even a crime with parallels to the Mae Crow case - committed after there were no African-Americans left and Edwards had been lynched and his co-defendants executed - was not enough to compel local whites to admit that a killer was still on the loose and that racism and greed had been guiding their own actions. Phillips's goal in this book, however, is not just to tell the tale of whites who rained down violence on their black neighbors but also to capture the voices, hopes, fears and subsequent lives of Forsyth County's African-American population as they emerged from slavery, built their lives around Cumming, and then lost everything - sometimes hundreds of acres - as whites drove them out. This part of the book is the most hopeful, ambitious and, unfortunately, least successful. Phillips's effort is hampered by the scarce records, biased contemporary newspaper reporting, traumatized family memories and oral histories that are few and far between. His tendency to throw block quote after block quote onto the page can't sufficiently make up for what really isn't there. Indeed, it is in these moments where the book is weighed down by supposition and tangents - like a section on the 1943 Detroit race riot, which one of Forsyth County's former black residents may or may not have experienced - that ruminations overtake the once taut text. There are also times when Phillips's history isn't as precise as it needs to be. The end of Reconstruction did not immediately lead to Jim Crow. There was an intervening Redemption period that is crucial for understanding black agency, the alliance between African-Americans and white ruling elites, and the subsequent race-baiting that blamed blacks' right to vote for the economic and political ills of the South. Redemption helped fuel the disfranchisement and vulnerability that put Forsyth County's black population in the hands of whites more than willing to scapegoat, terrorize and kill. PHILLIPS REGAINS HIS storytelling rhythm when he moves to the 1980s and unveils the story of a black couple from Atlanta, who were on a corporate outing in Forsyth County and tracked like prey by local whites. When the couple got on the road to drive home, the hunters took aim and fired. Although one of them was severely wounded, they somehow managed to get out with their lives. A few years later, in 1987, the civil rights legend Hosea Williams, who had endured Bloody Sunday in Selma, took marchers, who were joined by Phillips's parents, into Forsyth County. It wasn't a fair fight. Men, women, children and Klansmen, proudly waving the Confederate flag and a noose, overwhelmed law enforcement and hurled stones, debris and epithets as they surged at the nonviolent protesters. "Keep Forsyth white!" scraped through the air like fingernails on a chalkboard. The only thing that finally broke Forsyth County open was the pressure of Atlanta's sprawl and the onslaught of economic development. Still, white lore in Forsyth County insists that blacks were never driven out. Rather, the story goes, African-Americans left in 1912 because of the boll weevil or, if there was violence, the Klan. But, as Phillips demonstrates, neither the insect nor the K.K.K. was around then. The lie surrounding black erasure absolves Forsyth County's whites of racial cleansing and mass theft of black-owned property. The lie removes any justification for compensating the families' descendants. And the lie undergirds the tale that whites alone built that county and made it among the wealthiest in the nation. "Blood at the Root" thus meticulously and elegantly reveals the power of white supremacy in its many guises - be it active, complicit or complacent; rural or suburban - to distort and destroy, not only lives and accomplishments, but historical memory, the law and basic human civility. 'Keep Forsyth white!' scraped the air like fingernails on a chalkboard. CAROL ANDERSON is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of African-American studies at Emory University and author of "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide."
Choice Review
Phillips (English, Drew Univ.) presents research about a town in Georgia in which he lived and came of age that may break the hearts of some. In Cumming, Forsyth County, what came to be perceived as racial cleansing began in 1912 with the hanging of three African American men accused of assaulting and killing a white woman. Mob violence throttled by racial hatred fed by white paranoia led to night riders' burning, looting, and threatening African American families, forcing more than 1,000 to flee the county, leaving their farms and possessions behind. Soon, whites fell upon the land, taking it for their own. Forsyth County became known after "the cleansing" as an exclusive enclave for whites where African Americans, despite the civil rights movement of the 1960s and after, entered at their peril, with Forsyth County whites touting their racial exclusiveness there as a badge of honor. Nearby Atlanta's growth and diversity has helped alter racist attitudes in Forsyth County today. An excellent companion read is James W. Loewen's Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (CH, May'06, 43-5585). Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Paul D. Travis, Texas Woman's University
Library Journal Review
In gripping and devastating detail, writer and poet Phillips (Elegy for a Broken Machine) uncovers a history of lynching, racial violence, terrorism, and white supremacy that marked the history of Forsyth County, GA, for a century and made it the "whitest" place in the United States. The story is both personal and pertinent, as the author digs into a forgotten past of his hometown and asks probing questions about the persistence of racism and the tenacity of hatred. The book focuses on the lynching of two black teenagers for the murder of a young white girl in 1912. The subsequent "racial cleansing" of the county involved angry mobs and night riders driving blacks out of the area and cheating them of their property. There were many and varied efforts to keep the county a "white man's country" even in the face of a modernizing South and civil rights activism. This was balanced with the posturing of public officials wanting to gain respect and business investment from "outsiders" while supporting their constituents' demands for racial cleansing. VERDICT There are few heroes in this accounting, which stands as a sobering reminder that the racial fantasies and fears that have ruled so much of our history only continue to haunt the present.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction Law of the Land | p. xi |
1 The Scream | p. 1 |
2 Riot, Rout, Tumult | p. 17 |
3 The Missing Girl | p. 30 |
4 And the Mob Came On | p. 45 |
5 A Straw in the Whirlwind | p. 55 |
6 The Devil's Own Horses | p. 70 |
7 The Majesty of the Law | p. 83 |
8 Fastening the Noose | p. 97 |
9 We Condemn this Conduct | p. 108 |
10 Crush the Thing in its Infancy | p. 120 |
11 The Scaffold | p. 126 |
12 When They Were Slaves | p. 140 |
13 Driven to the Cook Stoves | p. 153 |
14 Exile, 1915-1920 | p. 173 |
15 Erasure, 1920-1970 | p. 183 |
16 The Attempted Murder of Miguel Marcelli | p. 198 |
17 The Brotherhood March, 1987 | p. 207 |
18 Silence Is Consent | p. 224 |
Epilogue A Pack Of Wild Dogs | p. 241 |
Author's Note | p. 247 |
Notes | p. 255 |
Credits | p. 285 |
Index | p. 289 |