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1. Blood at the root : a racial cleansing in America LCCN 2016018237 Type of material Book Personal name Phillips, Patrick, 1970- author. Main title Blood at the root : a racial cleansing in America / Patrick Phillips. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York ; London : W.W. Norton & Company, [2016] Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9780393293012 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER F292.F67 P47 2016 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Patrick Phillips Home Page - https://www.patrickphillipsbooks.com/author

  Patrick Phillips’ first book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, was published by W. W. Norton in September of 2016. Elegy for a Broken Machine appeared in the Knopf Poets series in 2015, and named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. A past fellow of the National Endowent for the Arts and the Guggennheim Foundation, Phillips is the author of two earlier collections, Boy and Chattahoochee, and translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems by the Danish writer Henrik Nordbrandt.
  Photo by Marion Ettlinger
  ​

  His work has appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, and his honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. Phillips lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University.

• Memorious blog - https://memoriousmag.wordpress.com/2015/11/13/patrick-phillips-an-interview-with-the-national-book-award-finalist/

  Patrick Phillips: An Interview with the National Book Award Finalist
  PatrickPhillipsPhotoCreditMarionEttlinger

  Congratulations on the publication of Elegy for a Broken Machine, your third book of poems, and for its being a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. It seems to me that both topically and stylistically the builds impressively upon the accomplishments of your two earlier books, Chattahoochee and Boy. As the central speaker, who appears to be consistent throughout the three books, moves forward through time, experiencing youth, fatherhood, the jarring experience of losing a father, the poems reflect (to mention just one thing I’ve observed) ever-more movingly on the passage of time. What continuity do you perceive between this book and your earlier works, and what if anything has changed or evolved?

  Thanks, Aaron. I appreciate you doing this interview, and thank you for the generous read. In answer to your question, I think there certainly are continuities between the books, in that I have always written about family. That’s a word that has shifting definitions in mid-life: I started out writing about the family into which I was born, and then in my second book I wrote a lot about becoming a father. Much of this new work grows out of my experience watching my parents age, and watching some of the strongest people I know, and some of those I love most dearly, grow weaker.elegycover

  I should add one more thing, which is that my father is alive and well. I hope that doesn’t sound like a refutation of your generous, smart reading of the poems, because I think it is natural to understand the book in exactly the way you have, and the way it’s presented: as a son’s lament for his father. That’s how I hoped it would be read. Some of the poems in the book are about my father, who has survived major heart surgery and a couple of grave illnesses, and some are about my father-in-law, who we tended at home as he died of metastatic prostate cancer. At various points in my life they have both been fathers to me, so I hope no one feels tricked by this intrusion of autobiography into the book. One of the poems says “Patrick Phillips is dead,” and that isn’t the case either—though it is one of those lies that will come true!

  If anything has evolved in my work, I think it’s that I have tried to let more of the world in, and to relax the filter on what does and doesn’t belong in a poem. In this new book there are traffic jams and Kool menthols. There is a poem about my son’s diorama made of Legos. There is a poem with a “loud, horrendous fart”! At one time I don’t think I’d have let that kind of thing past my internal censors, who used to worry a lot about being taken for a redneck… about not being taken seriously. But now I find myself wanting to write not just about the noble and the timeless and the archetypal, but all of it: the whole messy, mutt world in which our lives occur.

  Reading these poems, it seems to me that you’ve found ways for the noble, timeless, and archetypal to exist side-by-side with our messy actual lives–which is of course the only they way they can exist at all! I’m thinking of your poem “Mattress” in which you describe how a place “where we’d dreamt, and read, and made love–” has become “a map of old stains” destined to be hauled to the dump. What a metaphor for our lives! To what extent do you see these questions about content (what does and doesn’t belong in poems) as also being formal problems? I ask because your poems really do contain a lot of this messiness of life–and without being cast in what we’d call “traditional” form, they do so with a great deal of formal rigor.

  I guess I always want to do something to save a spare, heartfelt poem from sounding like cheesy bullshit! After all, it’s pretty late in the game to use certain poetic devices without an awareness of just how many times readers have heard that shtick.

  It makes me think of what happens to the Italian sonnet tradition once it gets to Shakespeare. All those Petrarchan love poems are impressive and elegant… but so, so played. So instead we get “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and the lover swooning not over perfume, but “the breath that from my mistress reeks”!

  He saves it at the end, of course: “And yet I think my love as rare / as any she belied with false compare.” And that’s the kind of engagement with form I’m interested in—putting on the handcuffs, and then finding a way to free yourself.

  All just to say it feels better, to me, to dirty things up a bit… to write a love poem set at the Freshkills Dump, through the eyes of a gull shitting on our hideous old mattress. I don’t mean it’s not a love poem, but I’m not interested anymore in the version that pretends we live forever.

  The compression, economy, and precision that has always been a staple of your poems seems to lend itself extraordinarily well to elegy, a form that involves material that’s difficult to handle for all sorts of reasons, personally as well as aesthetically. The care and reserve we see in the poem’s forms and language (which almost reflect a certain distrust of language) seem especially apt for material of such intense and potentially overwhelming personal importance. What special challenges did you face as you took on the elegy?

  There’s no rush when someone dies, right? Especially after a long illness, death is not a beginning of talk, but an end to it—an end to the planning, the work and tedium of caring for someone, the interminable, terrible coping. It’s over. So the prevailing mood, at least in my experience, is quiet: a kind of astonishment and disbelief. And yes, relief.

  I think we all know that one enters the death house quietly. It calls for a kind of Roman decorum that I have always admired in poets like Donald Justice, Kay Ryan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Stanley Plumly—and especially John Keats. Keats writes an elegy for his brother who has died, but never mentions the brother at all, not the deathbed, not the blood-cough, none of it. Only the stubble plains, the gathering swallows twittering in the skies. There is a restraint there—and yes, a distrust of language—that breaks my heart. The quietness of “Autumn” seems so much more accurate and significant as a representation of grief than “all that blab about death,” as Alan Shapiro puts it.

  So I hope the spare sound of my poems comes across not so much as a style as a necessity. It wasn’t that I set out to write in a certain way, and many of the poems started out three times as long. But those poets gave me faith that it might be possible to speak of the beloved dead in a way that felt worthy. Or at least not recklessly unworthy.

  That leads to spare, quiet poems, which is a risk, of course, since it’s so hard to pick out any one voice in the chatter and din of America in 2015. That makes me even more grateful to the National Book Foundation for the nomination. I’m delighted, and still amazed, that they heard me.

  Thanks for doing this interview. The book is wonderful, and I’m sure I speak for many readers in saying that we’re grateful to have it! It may be too early to say so soon after Elegy for a Broken Machine‘s publication, but any sense of what’s next? Future directions in the work? New books?

  For the past ten years I have been working on a non-fiction project, and I’m coming to the end of the story. It’s called Blood at the Root: A Lynching, A Racial Cleansing, and the Hidden History of Home, and is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2016.

  The book tells how in 1912 bands of violent white men drove out the entire black population of Forsyth County, Georgia, where I was raised. They declared Forsyth “all-white,” and imposed a racial ban that their decendants enforced for nearly a hundred years. When I grew up there in the 70s and 80s, it was still known all over Georgia as a “white county.” As a kid I heard a kind of mythic version of the expulsions, stripped of names and dates, and any details about the vanished black people of Forsyth.

  So for the past decade I’ve been tracking down descendants of the families forced out, and digging in census records, land deeds, and newspaper archives, trying to find out the real story of what happened. It’s a very different kind of work from poetry, but fascinating, and related to a lot of my obsessions in the poems. This book also grew out of a kind of astonishment and wonder at the past.

  Interviewer Aaron Baker is the author of Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin), winner of the Katherine Bakeless Prize in Poetry. He is an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago.

  For original poetry, fiction, art song, and interviews, please visit our magazine at www.memorious.org.

• Drew University - https://www.drew.edu/news/2017/02/02/patrick-phillipsblood-at-the-root-is-a-finalist-for-two-awards

  Patrick Phillips’ Blood at the Root Is a Finalist for Two Awards

  Phillips began teaching at Drew in 2007.
  Phillips began teaching at Drew in 2007.
  Drew professor’s first nonfiction book also recognized as a Notable Book.
  February 2017 – The first nonfiction book from Drew University Associate Professor Patrick Phillips is being recognized as one of the best books of 2016.
  Blood at the Root is a finalist for a PEN America Galbraith Award and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award and has been named a Notable Book by the American Library Association.
  In each case, Phillips’ work is in select company: there are only five finalists for the Galbraith Award in Nonfiction, three for the Discover Award for Nonfiction and just 12 Notable Books in nonfiction.
  Blood at the Root tells the story of how African Americans were rooted from Forsyth County, Georgia in 1912 after three black men were accused of raping and killing a white woman. Based on original and secondary research, the book questions whether the men were wrongly accused (and hanged) and explores why Forsyth remained unwelcome to blacks for eight decades.
  The book also represents a personal story, as Phillips, who teaches English, grew up in the all-white county and traveled back there to conduct research and interview descendants of the accused and the victim.
  BloodAtTheRoot-w-Frame_978-0-393-29301-2.insideThe professor’s latest recognition follows a series of positive reviews in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and the New York Journal of Books. In addition, Phillips and his story were featured in a PBS NewsHour piece that aired on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
  The professor, who joined Drew in 2007, said all the exposure is “great if it brings new readers to the story. We live in a very crowded moment in terms of media and information streams. So, these things certainly help bring attention to the story. That’s all really the best part.”
  On campus, Phillips will discuss the book next month at the sixth annual Merrill Maguire Skaggs Lecture. The March 2 event will include an introduction by Thomas Kean, the former governor of New Jersey and past president of Drew.
  The Galbraith Award and Discover Award nominations come a year after a book of Phillips poetry became a finalist for a National Book Award. Elegy for a Broken Machine was among five finalists for the poetry prize, including Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude from Ross Gay, a former professor at Drew’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies. Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus won the prize.

Patrick Phillips
Born: July 30, 1970 in Gainesville, Georgia, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: Poet
Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2015. From Literature Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2016 Gale, Cengage Learning
Updated:Nov. 16, 2015

Table of Contents

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PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born July 30, 1970, in Atlanta, GA; married Ellen Brazier; children: Sidney, Cameron. Education: Tufts University, B.A.; University of Maryland, M.F.A.; New York University, Ph.D. Addresses: Home: Brooklyn, NY. E-mail: pphillip@drew.edu.

CAREER:
Drew University, Madison, NJ, associate professor of English.

AWARDS:
Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2005, for Chattahoochee; "Discovery"/Nation award; Sjoberg Translation Prize; Fulbright Scholarship, University of Copenhagen; MacCracken fellow in Renaissance Literature, New York University; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 2009; Guggenheim fellowship, 2010; National Book Award finalist, 2015, for Elegy for a Broken Machine.

WORKS:

WRITINGS:

POETRY:

Chattahoochee, University of Arkansas Press (Fayetteville, AR), 2004.
Boy, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2008.
Elegy for a Broken Machine, Knopf (New York, NY), 2015.
Work has appeared in periodicals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Sidelights

Poet Patrick Phillips has won accolades for his two collections that focus on the dynamics of family. His first book, Chattahoochee, draws on his rural Georgia childhood with a domineering father. Floyd Skloot, writing in the Harvard Review, described the book as an "almost Southern Gothic mix of intimate family violence braced by passionate interconnection. ... Blood and blades, flame and surging river water, vultures and snakes appeared throughout the book, along with tears and sudden moments of tenderness." The book won the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Boy, Phillips's second collection, earned equally admiring reviews. As Skloot pointed out, this book also looks to the author's boyhood, but from the fresh perspective of new fatherhood. While in some ways, the poems of Chattahoochee are "about the way the past and present collide," observed the reviewer, in Boy "'the future and the past collide.'"

Writing in the Antioch Review, Benjamin S. Grossberg hailed Boy as a work of "depth and intelligence." Its poems, wrote the reviewer, "are economical, direct, and use conversational language to create immediate impact--often of surprisingly lyrical beauty." Among the book's striking images, for example, is one that occurs in the poem "Revelation." The speaker, horrified to witness a childhood friend's accidental death in a fire, looks up to see "the perfect sky / still perfect as he burned." In "Kitchen," the poet writes about how the house he lives in with his young family will become, to his son, the site of childhood identity. Skloot also expressed enthusiasm for the book's imagery, noting that it conveys an admirable maturity of feeling and thought. In Boy, commented Skloot, the author achieves a more adult distance from the raw material of his childhood, the boyhood "hurts, fears, and angers that remain part of his experience." From this new perspective, Phillips appreciates the human imperfections of his parents and all parents, and writes about forgiveness instead of blame. Yet this detachment, observed Skloot, "carries risk for a poet writing from so deeply within his emotions and his lushly dramatic experience." As a result, some poems, such as "Piano, Everything," and "Nathaniel" "feel forced, their emotion willed, grafted onto the poem rather than discovered within it." Despite this criticism, however, Skloot assessed Boy quite favorably, concluding that in this second book Phillips surpasses his achievement in his impressive debut.

In 2015, Phillips's third collection of poetry, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was a National Book Award finalist. The poems, noteworthy for their spare simplicity and directness, are about a friend whose father died and who appears at a soccer field. In one poem, a seamstress alters her husband's clothing and sleeps in them; in another, a father drops his son off at kindergarten, which for the son becomes the start of death.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer, praising the author's wielding of language with a "surgeon's precision," commented that "the figures of father and son, brother and husband, all play out here--often simultaneously--and Phillips's careful language consciously breaks down these distinctions, fusing the roles men play throughout their lives, and connecting past to present." Julia McMichael, in a contribution to the San Francisco Book Review, wrote that "these intense poems take us through a close up of a parent's dying process. The language is deceptively simple, but the feelings are complex." McMichael went on to observe that the author's "command of language and the resonance of words is totally engaging."

In an interview with Daniel Cross Turner on the storySouth Web site, Phillips was asked about the future of poetry. He replied: "I think, and believe, that the future of poetry as an art is to go on as it always has, person to person, writer to reader, from whispering voice to listening ear. And that's the part of poetry I love the most: its elusive, subversive, trickster resilience, always defying the predictions of its demise, and calling out in a human voice to the few, as ever, who care to listen."

Phillips, formerly a MacCracken fellow in Renaissance Literature at New York University, is also the recipient of a "Discovery"/Nation award and the Sjoberg Translation Prize. In addition, he attended the University of Copenhagen on a Fulbright Scholarship.

FURTHER READINGS:

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

Phillips, Patrick, Chattahoochee, University of Arkansas Press (Fayetteville, AR), 2004.
Phillips, Patrick, Boy, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2008.
PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, September 22, 2008, Benjamin S. Grossberg, review of Boy, p. 793.
Harvard Review, December 1, 2008, Floyd Skloot, review of Boy, p. 230.
Publishers Weekly, February 16, 2015, review of Elegy for a Broken Machine, p. 158.
ONLINE

Cortland Review Online, http://www.cortlandreview.com/ (October 27, 2009), Phillips profile.
National Book Foundation, http://www.nationalbook.org/ (October 22, 2015), brief author profile.
New York Times Online, http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/ (October 27, 2009), Gregory Cowles, "Stray Questions for: Patrick Phillips."
Patrick Phillips Website, http://patrickthemighty.com/ (October 22, 2015).
Ploughshares Online, http://wwwlpshares.org/ (October 27, 2009), "Philip Levine Recommends Boy, poems by Patrick Phillips."
Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (October 22, 2015), brief author profile.
San Francisco Book Review, http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/ (July 24, 2015), Julia McMichael, review of Elegy for a Broken Machine.
Southern Spaces, http://www.southernspaces.org/ (October 27, 2009), Phillips profile.
storySouth, http://www.storysouth.com/ (November 4, 2015), Daniel Cross Turner, "This Strangest of All Strange Things: An Interview with Patrick Phillips."*

QUOTED: "My parents moved from suburban Atlanta to Forsyth County which is about 30 miles north. And so I was a new kid in a very rural county, and it was something that I heard on the school bus riding to school. You know, I had noticed that there were no black people in the county compared to my old neighborhood in Atlanta. And when I asked kids on the bus why that was, and, you know, I had heard lots of racist jokes and people referred to black folks with the N-word almost entirely."
"And so I asked, you know, other kids on the bus how this - why this was. And, you know, they told me this story and in there, you know - in the kids version, it was very mythic and kind of legendary. And it just went that a long, long time ago, there was a white girl who was attacked by black men and all the white people in Forsyth banded together and ran out all the black people. So that's really the first version of the story that I heard and that would have been in about 1977."

The 'Racial Cleansing' That Drove 1,100 Black Residents Out Of Forsyth County, Ga
Fresh Air. 2016. From Literature Resource Center.
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HOST: TERRY GROSS

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. One of the nightmarish racist chapters of American history is documented in a new book by my guest Patrick Phillips. It's about what happened in Forsyth County, Ga., in 1912 when white mobs terrorized and drove out the entire black population, about 1,100 people. This was the white response to two incidents - the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man and the rape and beating of a young white woman who died of her injuries. A lynch mob attacked and hanged one black suspect. Two teenagers were hanged in public executions following a short trial.

My guest Patrick Phillips is one of the white people who grew up in this county when it was still all white, and people of color were definitely not welcome. His parents were among the civil rights protesters who in the 1980s protested against the county's continuing segregation. Phillips' new book "Blood At The Root" is based on his archival research as well as his interviews with townspeople and with descendants of the black people who fled in 1912.

Patrick Phillips, welcome to FRESH AIR. When did you realize that you lived in a town that had driven out all the black people in an act that you now describe as racial cleansing?

That's a story that I first heard when I was 7 years old. My parents moved from suburban Atlanta to Forsyth County which is about 30 miles north. And so I was a new kid in a very rural county, and it was something that I heard on the school bus riding to school. You know, I had noticed that there were no black people in the county compared to my old neighborhood in Atlanta. And when I asked kids on the bus why that was, and, you know, I had heard lots of racist jokes and people referred to black folks with the N-word almost entirely.

And so I asked, you know, other kids on the bus how this - why this was. And, you know, they told me this story and in there, you know - in the kids version, it was very mythic and kind of legendary. And it just went that a long, long time ago, there was a white girl who was attacked by black men and all the white people in Forsyth banded together and ran out all the black people. So that's really the first version of the story that I heard and that would have been in about 1977.

And what did you make of that?

You know, I was horrified by it and sort of frightened by it, and, at the same time, my parents are fairly progressive and were activists. They're both from Birmingham, Ala., so they were the rare liberal and progressive white southerners at the time. And, you know - so I was a little bit horrified by it, but I was also really fascinated by the story because it suggested this vanished world.

And so I always had the feeling that the place itself was kind of haunted. And I thought about these vanished black people, this whole community of black people and had always wondered, you know - as a child, I wondered where did they go? You know, how did this happen? What did they leave behind? Which of these, you know, places that I know in the county might have once belonged to them? So, you know, it was really a kind of long fascination, but it always seemed mythic and really unknowable to me when I was a kid.

Then you kind of witnessed some of the aftermath of this story in January of 1987 when there was what was called a Brotherhood March. It was a civil rights march basically challenging the whiteness of the community. Would you describe the march and your family's participation in it?

Yeah. That was really the first time that the situation in Forsyth gained national attention. There was - it was the second Martin Luther King national holiday, and a couple of white residents of Forsyth decided to finally protest publicly the ongoing segregation of the county, and they launched a march that was called the Brotherhood March to end intimidation and fear in Forsyth.

And this kind of led to a real outpouring of, you know, anger among the white community, and there were death threats made to the organizers. And eventually it was taken up by Hosea Williams who was one of Martin Luther King's sort of right-hand man during the civil rights battles of the '50s and '60s. And so a group of about 75 activists, including mostly African-American activists from the King Center in Atlanta and a handful of local white people, including my mother, my father and my sister, really had a kind of modest plan which was a short march into the town the county seat of Cumming and the goal was simply to speak out against fear and intimidation and to celebrate the King holiday. And they were met by a real mob of rock throwing, bottle throwing, cursing, you know, kind of racist slurs spewing white people from the county and eventually the Georgia Bureau of Investigation started to arrest people in the crowd who they figured out were armed.

And it really kind of escalated into this violent scene, really ugly scene that was then broadcast all over the country. And at that same moment when they were on the march, I had actually arrived late. You know, I was 16, and I arrived - as I did often when I was 16 - I arrived late to meet my parents. And so I ended up on the town square and - at what I thought was the peace march.

And then at a certain point, you know, I heard a PA click on, and somebody screamed into a megaphone, you know, raise your hand if you love white power. And all of these young men around me, you know, raised their fist and started screaming white power. And I saw a guy go by with a noose on his, you know - on his shoulder, and, you know, it was this kind of horrifying moment where it - what had always been present in the county, but kind of suppressed was suddenly very visible. And those images went all over the country, really all over the world.

Did you see neighbors who you recognized as part of this angry, violent, racist mob?

We did not see any of our close friends from there, but I certainly knew faces. I saw faces that I recognized, people who went to the Forsyth County High School where my brother went. So a lot of a lot of familiar faces, yes.

In your acknowledgments, you think the poet Natasha Trethewey the way who urged you to write this book. She's a woman of color and has written about blackness, but you - a white man from one of the most racist places in the country - never said a word about whiteness. So how did that inspire you to write the book?

That was the other really pivotal moment, I think, when I look back because I had had this fascination and this interest in the story. But, you know, I had always felt reluctant to really wade into the subject of race. And I'm not proud of that at this point, but I had been kind of on the fence about all of this and resistant to taking that risk. And, luckily, I have an old friendship with Natasha. She went to University of Georgia which is just, you know, down the road from Forsyth County, so she - unlike most of the people I know in the writing world and most of the people I know in my life now in New York, Natasha actually knows a little bit of the legend. So she had heard it, and she knew and as a woman of color, she had heard about Forsyth County.

So in about 2006, I believe it was, Natasha, you know, just turned to me kind of out of the blue. We were having a discussion about writing and what - you know, what really the mission was and what we could do as writers. And she just turned to me out of the blue and said, you know, I know about Forsyth County. I know about where you come from. And I was really taken aback, and she said why do you never write about that? Why have you been silent on this? And she said, you know, do you think you're not involved?

And you know Natasha had this wonderful way of both giving me a challenge to write about it, and also, I think, really an invitation and gave me - helped me feel that I had permission to write about it. So, you know, so that's why I thank her in the back of the book because I don't know how much she remembers that moment, but for me it was really pivotal.

Would you describe the incidents that led to the night rides driving out all the black people from Forsyth County?

Yeah. It's a story that you can find in a lot. You know, this is - was not unique to Forsyth that there was an attempt at racial cleansing. What's really unique to Forsyth is that it's a place where it succeeded and that effort was successful for, you know, almost 100 years. It was still a, quote, unquote, "white county" when I was growing up there in the '70s and '80s. And it really in some ways - I mean, in the book, there's a flashpoint in 1912.

But then in other ways, I find the origins of what happened in 1912 much, much earlier in the county going all the way back to the Cherokee removals in the 1830s because that also occurred in Forsyth County. But in 1912, a young, white woman, 18-year-old white woman named Mae Crow who lived really just a few miles from the house where I grew up in a little town called - a little village really called Oscarville was found in the woods. I believe it was September 9, 1912 and she was beaten and - she had been beaten over the head. And she was bloody and unconscious. And, you know, at least the newspaper accounts were that she had been raped. And she was taken to her house and, you know, was in a coma for two weeks. And after two weeks she died of the injury.

And the day of her funeral, in fact, there was - that night was the first reported night riding and bands of white men gather together and they started trying to punish the entire black community for what they believed was - it was reported as a kind of black insurrection was the phrase in the papers and they believe was this - a spree of rapes that was largely just a hysteria and borne out of fear. But their methods were arson. They burned black churches. They set fire to black-owned homes. They fired into cabins.

They posted notices, you know, warning people that they had 24 hours, sometimes a few days to get out. And over the course of September and October of 1912, this movement spread and ultimately succeeded. And 1,098 black residents are in the census of 1910, and virtually all of them were forced out of the county during that two-month period.

You said that there was this belief that there was a spree of rapes of black people raping white women. Was there a spree of rapes?

This was another thing that I did not know about until the research. I had heard about Mae Crow. It turned out the week before, there was another woman - another young woman named Ellen Grice, who the papers said, quote, "awakened and found a negro man in her bed."

And so this actually led to the whipping on the town square and the near lynching of a man named Grant Smith, who was an African-American minister and, you know, a prominent preacher in the black churches of the county. And he was nearly lynched the week before Mae Crow was found in the woods. So there's no way to know exactly what happened with the Ellen Grice case, but I quote Ida B. Wells back in the 19th century, pointing out - she calls it "the old threadbare lie," the idea that black men rape white women in the South. And she posits that, you know, often this was a case of white women having affairs with black men and being discovered and then there's a rape accusation.

So there's no way to know that for certain, but essentially there was a story from Ellen Grice that she had been attacked. And then a week later, Mae Crow is found. And all of that led to this kind of widespread belief that the whites of the town were in the midst of a black rebellion.

There was this fear of a race war.

That's right, yeah. That's the phrase that's used a lot. And only a few months earlier in a town called Plainville, Ga., there had been a shootout, again, stemming from really trivial stuff where two - a black boy and a white girl were picking peaches, you know, in the same peach orchard. And apparently there was some kind of dispute. And before you know it, there was an attempt to lynch some black men in Plainville.

And when they fought back and fired back, it led to a posse kind of cornering them. And there was a real shootout. And the sheriff of that town, the white sheriff, was killed in the gunfight. So all of this was, you know, part of this environment of fear and hysteria and a certainty among the white community that if they didn't do something, then the black people of the county were going to rise up.

How many black people were arrested for the rape and beating of Mae Crow?

So there were waves of arrests. And the way that the newspapers referred to it was very telling. They talked about the sheriff and his deputy going out and, quote, "rounding up suspects."

And that's really - when you follow the newspaper articles and trace this sort of hour by hour, day by day, which is what I tried to do, you just see that it's a little bit haphazard in that they go out to Big Creek, the place where Ellen Grice lived, and simply arrest the first young black men they find. And then a similar thing happens after Mae Crow's body is discovered. Eventually, really four people were arrested, a man named Rob Edwards, his wife Jane Daniel, her brother Oscar Daniel and their cousin, a 16-year-old boy named Ernest Knox.

And eventually, after he's arrested, Rob Edwards is dragged from the county jail by a mob of whites. The deputy, a guy named Gaye Lummus (ph) tries very hard to stop it. It seems very clear that the sheriff really enabled this abduction from the jail. He went home at the key moment and said he had no idea that it was going on. But eventually Rob Edwards was dragged from the county jail. He was beaten with crowbars. Somebody put a noose around his neck.

The mob dragged him around the town square. And this is a town square, you know, where I marched in the Little League parade and where I, you know, bought my first baseball glove and stuff. They dragged him around the town square. And eventually he was hoisted up on - you know, to the yard arm of a telephone pole. And hundreds of people joined in and fired into his corpse.

So this was - you know, this lynching was really almost the immediate reaction to the jailing of Rob Edwards. And he was known as, quote, "Big Rob." He was a very large man and, you know, seems to have been targeted because he lived out in Oscarville, where Mae Crow was from, and had been, you know, seen in the area on the day. It's about as, you know, definitive as the evidence was. So he was lynched by a mob.

And then the two boys, Ernest Knox, 16, and Oscar Daniel, 18, were arrested and eventually tried in a one-day trial. Both trials happened on a single day. And then they were hung just outside of town at a hanging that became a kind of - almost like a country fair. It became a big celebration day. And 5,000 people came out and watched the execution of these two boys.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Patrick Phillips. He's the author of the new book "Blood At The Root: A Racial Cleansing In America." We'll talk more about what happened in Forsyth County, Ga., after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

This is FRESH AIR. My guest Patrick Phillips is the author of the new book "Blood At The Root: A Racial Cleansing In America." It's about how the people of his hometown, Forsyth County, drove out the entire black population in 1912 after a young white woman was raped and beaten to death. All of the suspects arrested were black. Two were convicted and executed by hanging. Another suspect, Rob Edwards, was abducted from the jail beaten to death by a white mob then lynched.

Was anybody prosecuted for the lynching of Rob Edwards who was not tried?

Yeah. There's no evidence of any arrest indictment, prosecution of any of the crimes committed in the entire, you know - entire history of this racial cleansing from the Lynch - from the whipping of Grant Smith the week earlier to the lynching of Rob Edwards to eventually the burning of churches, burning of sharecropper's cabins. I found no records of any arrests or prosecution the entire time, and another of the myths that I grew up with was the notion that, well, that was just those days. That was just the way it was back then. It was the Jim Crow South. It was a racist time, and that was often - I was often told that as a way of kind of excusing the whole thing.

But then I did some research on the neighboring county, Hall County, which was just across the Chattahoochee River and at the same period they had similar waves of white terrorism and similar attempts to drive out the black community. But there was a key difference which is in the first week of the violence, arrests were made. The newspapers printed the names of the night riders, and those, you know - group of about six men were tried, convicted and sentenced to jail time in Hall County.

And later the sheriff said, you know, we managed to, quote, "crush this thing in its infancy." So for me it became a very interesting experiment in that on one side of the river you had a county where white terrorism went unpunished and then spread and lasted almost 100 years. On the other side of the river in the very earliest days, you know, the enforcement of existing laws managed to stop it.

You describe a festival-like atmosphere at this public execution, but public executions were illegal at the time in Forsyth County. They were supposed to be doing these hangings in an enclosed space, so that the public wouldn't see. So what happened there?

So yeah, that was the judge's order. When the judge - the judge's name was Newt Morris, and he's also an interesting figure in that he later emerges in 1915 leading a lynch mob himself in the lynching of a guy named Leo Frank in Atlanta. That's another story told in the book. But, yeah, the judge ordered that the hanging happen behind a blind that there should be a 30-foot high fence - or no, 15-foot high fence raised around the gallows to shield them from view and to keep any spectators from seeing what was going on.

And, you know, the short version is that the night before the hanging, a group of whites came to the area where that had been erected and burned the fence down. But very tellingly they left the gallows completely untouched, so there was a real conspiracy to - for everyone to see this. And, you know, in a lot of ways, it had the atmosphere of a lynching as well. People took souvenirs after the hanging.

They took pieces of the noose, and, in fact, the - one of the pieces of the noose ended up in the minute book of the court records that were in the county courthouse, and it vanished not long after Forsyth got a lot of attention in '87. But up until the mid-1980s when you went to look at the minute book for the records of these two trials of Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel, the page was marked with a piece of the rope from the hanging.

We were able to find photographs of the hangings or of the crowds witnessing the execution?

You know, I did not find any photographs. I found lots of descriptions. You know, my search for photographs was interesting in that one of the places where I think I might have found such a photograph was in the Forsyth County newspaper. I relied on a lot of newspapers from Atlanta, from places as far away as The New York Times and especially Gainesville, the town next door.

But one of the really gaping holes in the record is the Forsyth County News which was publishing Incoming, the closest newspaper, you know, right in the middle of all of this, and the issues from the relevant months are nowhere to be found. There - I actually went to the University of Georgia library and where there's a place called the Georgia Newspaper Project and they have microfilms of all of these.

And literally I opened the drawer and the two boxes that would contain September and October of the Forsyth County news from 1912 there's just a space there. You know, hard to say exactly what to make of that, but it certainly seems there's been some effort to deflect attention away from all of this.

My guest is Patrick Phillips, author of the new book "Blood At The Root." The title is taken from the lyric of a song about lynching that Billie Holiday made famous called "Strange Fruit." After a break, we'll talk more about the racial cleansing of Forsyth County and Phillips, who is also a poet and English professor, will read a poem about his father in the ICU after heart bypass surgery. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRANGE FRUIT")

(Singing) Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, the bulging eyes...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross with my guest Patrick Phillips, author of the new book "Blood At The Root: A Racial Cleansing In America." It's a nonfiction book about how white people of Forsyth County, Ga., drove out the entire black population in 1912 after a young, white woman was raped and another was raped and beaten to death. Phillips grew up in Forsyth County.

So we're talking about 1,100 African-Americans who were driven out of Forsyth County, Ga., right?

That's right. That's right.

So what happened to the things they left behind which included homes, belongings, animals, crops?

Yeah, and especially land. You know, there are a lot of reports of people's belongings just simply being burned. You know, there's a guy named A.J. Julian (ph) who was a good friend - a personal friend of the governor and lived in north Georgia, and he wrote a letter to the governor describing how the mobs visited one family. And they first went up to the house, made sure there were no young men present. And when they figured out it was only the women and children, they went up and drove them out, apparently into a rainstorm. And A.J. Julian's letter says that after they were gone, they burned their household, quote, "dogs and all." You know, they shot the dogs. They've dragged all the furniture out into the yard and set fire to it. So I think that was very common.

There's another report in the crisis which was the magazine that W.E.B. Du Bois edited for the NAACP, and they sent a reporter down who was one of the only - really one of the only points of view on all of this from outside the South, a guy named Royal Freeman Nash, and he also reported on them burning everyone's belongings afterwards. You know, the more complicated issue is the land. And, you know, it seems that there were people who managed to sell their land.

I think, you know, according to Royal Freeman Nash, a lot of times at very depressed prices given their situation, you know, they were completely vulnerable to very low-ball offers and often just would get whatever they possibly could for their land. And there are few people who who sold for a third of what they had paid for the land just a few months before.

And then even more troubling is this issue of adverse possession which was - is common law in a lot of places in America and in Georgia, adverse possession states - it's a law meant to make - help people make use of abandoned land. And so over the years that followed, a lot of white citizens simply went down to the county courthouse, started paying taxes on a lot that abutted their own which had previously been owned by a black property owner. And after seven years, they could apply for title to the land. So yeah...

So the white people not only drove out the black people, they also took the land that the black people owned.

You know, this is something that was hotly disputed in 1987. So after the marches, there was a commission created by the governor Joe Frank Harris. And, you know, the state's attorney general at the time, a guy named Michael Bowers looked into this land question, and, you know, he concluded at a time that there was not enough evidence to support the theft of land.

In the years since, there's a journalist named Elliot Jaspin who's also looked into this, and I looked into all of the same records that Jaspin looked at. And, you know, I think there's plenty of evidence that there were black property owners who never sold and whose land eventually just appears in another transaction.

So in a way, the - I had always imagined that the land thefts happened at gunpoint. You know, in a kind of Hollywood way. In reality, it looks like it happened with a wink and a nod, you know, with a county clerk who probably noticed a gap in the title history and simply approved the sale anyway. So it was something that happened very, very, you know - I say in the book - it happened very quietly and one fencepost at a time, and one transaction across a counter at the county courthouse at a time.

Your parents moved to Forsyth County when you were in grade school, and they moved there to escape the suburbs and suburban sprawl and got to like small town life which seemed very appealing to them. They apparently didn't know how racist this county was, but after marching against the racism in 1987 and seeing these, you know, racist mobs screaming white power, did your family stay in Forsyth County?

You know, our move there is complicated, and I think that it's not that my parents didn't know that Forsyth County was racist. It was that it was so common in 1977 in Georgia, and I think an important part of their background is my parents are both from Birmingham. And they were, you know, my father graduated from high school in 1955. So they were young people on one side of a real generational split in their families. And they, you know, my father was in seminary at Emory and had met Martin Luther King in the really, you know, sort of vital early days of the Civil Rights movement.

And so coming from Birmingham, they had grown up in the Birmingham of Bull Connor. And I think what we found in Forsyth was no shocker to them. I think it was less that they were taken aback or surprised by it and more that they felt this was everywhere. This was all around us. And so you couldn't actually choose a place to live where it wouldn't be a part of living in Georgia. Both my father my mother were really fearless about this stuff, so they moved there exactly as I say in the book because they were commuting to Atlanta. Forsyth County was just becoming a kind of bedroom community of Atlanta because the expansion of the interstate system.

And so they wanted to live there for all sorts of just personal reasons. But I think the racism of the county was something they knew about, and then certainly it turned out to be more virulent than we could have known when the marches happened in 1987.

How did you feel continuing to live in Forsyth County after you witnessed mobs of angry, racist, white people screaming white power?

You know, there was a lot of fear in the week - maybe the month after the march in '87. Oprah Winfrey came to Georgia, came to Forsyth County and she was in, I think, her sixth month as a talk show. She had this new "Oprah Winfrey Show," brand new show at the time. And, you know, she cites her visit to Forsyth as one of her, you know, proudest moments of the entire history of the show. She came to Forsyth, filmed an episode on the town square at which she invited white residents of Forsyth to come and talk to her about what had happened. And when she left, you know, she gave an interview, and one of her takeaways where she said there are a lot of white people in this community who are very afraid.

And I really thought she had put her finger on it because that was my overwhelming experience both before and after was it was a place where if you disagreed with the status quo, you had to keep quiet. And there was, you know, the notion of getting burned out that somebody might set fire to your house, somebody might shoot your dogs, you know, that there would be some kind of violent retaliation for crossing these people. And so we were afraid a fair amount, and after the march, the first march, especially, my parents were among the very small handful of people - and my sister was on the march - the very small handful of people who actually lived in the county.

So when that - when the march was disbanded, the vast majority of the marchers got on these chartered buses and drove down the freeway back to Atlanta and my parents had marched a long way from their car so their car was back up the road and between them and the car were the members of the mob whose violence had stopped the march. So, you know, they ended up being kind of bundled into the back of a police cruiser, and, you know, the sheriff of the county Wesley Walraven helped, you know - he and his men helped get them to safety, but then, you know, there was no choice but to drive home and we lived down a quiet country road kind of in the middle of nowhere.

So I think, you know, I'm sure we - I'm sure my parents double checked the locks that night. And, you know, we had a certain amount of fear nothing - we never faced any overt retaliation or anything. So - but that was the overwhelming experience was fear.

What's the racial and ethnic makeup of Forsyth County now?

So today, Forsyth has seen unbelievable changes. The population is over 200,000 now. It has swelled incredibly. I think it's about 10 percent Latino, 8 percent Asian. And I think the African-American population is approaching 4 percent now. So the place changed incredibly. And really the old guard of the county were eventually outnumbered.

You know, I tried to get to the bottom of how things changed and how this ban was lifted. And I found a sociologist at the University of Georgia, a guy named Doug Bachtel, wrote a piece saying that he thought it had died a natural death, that eventually the demographic change and Forsyth being kind of enveloped by the suburban sprawl of Atlanta had just led so many newcomers to enter the county that some of these old ways just kind of faded away as the old folks were outnumbered.

You know, right now, there's an African-American candidate for the state Senate from Forsyth, a guy named Daniel Blackman, who - you know, his run and the very idea that he's, you know, on the ballot for an elected seat from Forsyth County really kind of amazes me. And there's no question that's a sign of incredible progress.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Patrick Phillips. His new book is called "Blood At The Root: A Racial Cleansing In America." We're going to take a short break, then we'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Patrick Phillips, author of "Blood At The Root: A Racial Cleansing In America." You know, after reading your book and reading what you had to say about your parents and about how they - although they lived in this white county, Forsyth County, they were active in the civil rights movement. And then I started reading some of your poetry. And one of your poems is about your father right after having open heart surgery.

And I feel like I made this jump in, like, you know, five minutes between your parents, you know, in the 1980s being active in the civil rights movement and him being, you know, an older man having older - having open heart surgery and you visiting him in the hospital. So I'm going to jump ahead to that poem because it's a beautiful poem. It's called "Elegy Outside The ICU" and it's from your collection of poems "Elegy For A Broken Machine." Would you tell us about what you had witnessed that led to the poem?

Sure. You know, this is a poem that I wrote in the wake of my father having open heart surgery, bypass surgery. And I guess what I was grappling with that led me to write the poem was this disconnect between what I had always imagined when you hear that phrase because it - of course, a lot of people undergo this. And open heart surgery, you know, sounds like any other procedure. And then what I actually witnessed was my father looking like someone who was struggling to come back from the dead. When I saw him in the hospital, I was astonished at how weak he was and how changed he was and, you know, realized that that phrase that I'd heard, you know, so many times and probably dismissed, you know, when it was someone I didn't know just how much was packed into that and what a harrowing experience it was.

Would you read the poem for us?

Sure. "Elegy Outside The ICU." (Reading) They came into this cold white room and shaved his chest, then made a little purple line of dashes down his sternum, which the surgeon, when she came in, cut along as students took turns cranking a shiny metal jig that split his ribs just enough for them to fish the heart out - lungs inflating and the dark blood circulating through these hulking beige machines. As for the second time since dawn they skirted the ruined arteries with a long blue length of vein that someone had unlaced from his leg so that by almost every definition, my father died there on the table and came back in the body of his own father or his mother at the end. Or whoever it was the morphine summoned up out of the grave into his dreams. Like that figure in the floor-length mirror he kept talking to as we inched a fluid-hung telemetry pole past the endless open doors, until he was finally close enough to recognize a flicker in those bloodshot eyes and a quiver in the mumbling lips. So slack and thin, he leaned a little closer to catch their ghostly whisper before he even realized it was him.

Is that a reference to you actually walking with your father in the hospital while he was beginning to recover and he didn't recognize...

Yeah, they...

...Himself in the mirror?

Yeah, they have you do this - the nurses called it laps. You know, they have you get up, which is a shocker when someone is that unwell. You know, my dad described the feeling as having a - you know, an axe planted in your chest. And yet the nurses are really eager in order to get your circulation going. And I think they found that it helps with recovery to get the patient up and moving as soon as possible.

So we had this really difficult and unexpected task of walking with him. That is drawn from life that when we were doing that, at one point there was a mirror somewhere. And I remember my father, you know, in his Johnny - you know, looking very, very frail seeing his own reflection and not realizing that it was him. He was also, you know, doped up on morphine and in a very altered state. But there was this crazy thing of him not recognizing his own face in the mirror.

Are your parents still alive?

Yeah, they are. They are.

What does your father think of the poem?

You know, I think my father - I think my father liked it. My joke is always that my dad likes anything in which he's the star.

(LAUGHTER)

And for him no press is bad press. So, you know, I think he liked it. You know, it's - people are often a little bit uncomfortable having someone else tell their own story. But I think the people - I've been writing about my family now for a long time, so I'm afraid that people in my family are used to to me trying to tell parts of their story.

There's another poem I'd like you to read that's called "Heaven." Would you introduce it for us?

Sure. Yeah. This is a poem. It's very short. So when I read it at a podium, I always say, you know, get ready because it'll go by really fast.

(Laughter).

You'll miss it if you blink. It's a short poem, and, you know, this - I was - my father's a Methodist minister and so I was raised going to church and among my early memories are seeing my father in a robe at the front of a congregation, you know, and doing that kind of really powerful call-and-response thing between a minister and the people in the pews.

So that was one of my earliest memories and one of my earliest senses of the power of language was kind of having the hair on the back of my neck stand up when - and I think the fact that it was my father who was leading it made a real impression. I don't go to church anymore, and I don't have faith, so I miss it in some ways. So this is a poem that I wrote in the wake of my father-in-law's death who was someone who I loved very much and losing him made me very aware of what a solace faith is. And so I wanted to recover some of that. And I have realized that maybe the thing I miss the most was the idea of heaven and the notion of a reunion.

(Reading) Heaven it will be the past, and we'll live there together, not as it was to live but as it is remembered. It will be the past. We'll all go back together. Everyone we ever loved and lost and must remember. It will be the past, and it will last forever.

It's a beautiful poem, and it makes me wonder if you think of the afterlife now as living in other people's memory?

Yeah. I think that's really well-put. Yeah, I think that's certainly the idea I was trying to articulate. You know, and I - this poem also grew a little bit out of my study of 17th-century poetry at people like Ben Johnson and George Herbert. And those poems come out of a culture where everyone believed this, I think, where the idea of a Christian resurrection was so universal that it's kind of mind-boggling to think of walking around - at least to me - I know there are still people who have this, but to walk around with the certainty that you would see the people you've lost again. And that struck me as a really beautiful idea and maybe the only consolation left at least to me.

Which you don't have anymore.

No, not really (laughter) so yeah it's wishful praying, I guess.

But if the afterlife is living in other people's memory is that one of the reasons why you want to write elegies?

Yeah, and I think the older you get, the more people you lose. And so - and I don't think this is unrelated to "Blood At The Root" in a nonfiction. You know, I had as a primary goal to try to honor some of those people who were gone and try to speak - since they can't speak for themselves, I felt in a position to maybe try to help bring them back into memory.

When you stopped going to church and decided you no longer had faith, what was your father's reaction since he's a minister?

You know, that's a complicated one because my father began as a Methodist minister but he's now a Universalist Unitarian. He's no longer in a church, but for a long time in his 60s and 70s, he led a Unitarian congregation. And the central tenet of the Unitarian group that he led was social justice, and it included people who were kind of refugees from the - you know, gay people who were from the Catholic Church and non-observant Jews who had stopped going to temple and a whole range of different people who came together under this idea that maybe the most holy thing they could do was to work for social justice. So in some ways, my father also had a rift with the organized church, and I think that is not unrelated to the Civil Rights movement and some real disappointment and disillusionment about the response of white churches during some of those darkest days.

Patrick Phillips, I really enjoyed talking with you. Thank you so much, and thank you for writing this book.

I enjoyed it so much, Terry. Thank you.

Patrick Phillips is the author of the new book "Blood At The Root: A Racial Cleansing In America." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

QUOTED: "It's a powerful research piece and offers many startling insights."

Blood at the Root
California Bookwatch.
(Nov. 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Blood at the Root
Patrick Phillips
W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
9780393293012, $26.95, www.wwnorton.com
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America documents a story that began in Forsyth County, Georgia in 1912
when mobs of night riders drove blacks from their homes and declared the town a whites­only area. While one might
think this event par for its times, author Patrick Phillips's family moved there in the 1970s only to find the sentiment
alive and active in a town that still prided itself on keeping blacks out. This focus on the town's history and racial strife
should be in every civil rights collection. It's a powerful research piece and offers many startling insights into the
history and lingering contemporary impact of racial strife in modern America.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Blood at the Root." California Bookwatch, Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472474686&it=r&asid=f675a711ec136509ba871e34876cb35d.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472474686
2/12/2017 General OneFile ­ Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486952709448 2/6
Blood at the Root
Priscilla Kipp
BookPage.
(Oct. 2016): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2016 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
BLOOD AT THE ROOT
By Patrick Phillips
Norton
$26.95, 320 pages
ISBN 9780393293012
Audio, eBook available
HISTORY
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Even given the many racially tainted chapters in U.S. history, the story of Georgia's Forsyth County still shocks.
Patrick Phillips grew up "living inside the bubble of Georgia's notorious 'white county' " where there were few blacks­­
and, once, there had been none. Something happened in 1912, and after that, Forsyth County was all­white and proud
of it. Its citizens would go to horrific lengths for another 75 years to keep it that way. Phillips, grown and living far
away, found himself "ashamed to recall how I defended my silence." Blood at the Root is the result, an account as
riveting in its historical detail as it is troubling in its foreshadowing of racial tensions today.
In 1912, after the rape and murder of young, white Mae Crow and the so­called confession by black teenager Ernest
Knox, white "night riders" took matters into their own hands. After one of the three suspects was beaten, lynched and
shot by a vengeful mob, blacks fled as their homes and families became targets for shooters and arsonists. Their
property, crops and livestock soon fell into eager white hands. In the days and years that followed, long after the
teenagers had been convicted and hanged, any black person entering the county was promptly terrorized into leaving.
Attempts at racial cleansing began long before the Jim Crow era, from the federal Indian Removal Act of 1830 through
the systemic failures of Reconstruction. In For syth County, barring blacks altogether was the answer to any "race
troubles." This injustice would persist well beyond the reach of civil rights for decades, an ugly history kept silent­­
until now.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kipp, Priscilla. "Blood at the Root." BookPage, Oct. 2016, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755876&it=r&asid=dee92e767cd859bfe2398eca58949c63.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463755876

QUOTED: "This is a gripping, timely, and important examination of American racism, and Phillips tells it with rare clarity and power."

2/12/2017 General OneFile ­ Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486952709448 3/6
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in
America
Publishers Weekly.
263.27 (July 4, 2016): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
Patrick Phillips. Norton, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978­0­393­29301­2
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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 African­American 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 expose 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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America." Publishers Weekly, 4 July 2016, p. 53. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302916&it=r&asid=eafcffb1909435d5da4ac30db2fbc039.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457302916

QUOTED: "Phillips brings a journalist's crisp perspective to this precise and disquieting account."

2/12/2017 General OneFile ­ Saved Articles
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Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in
America
Carol Haggas
Booklist.
112.21 (July 1, 2016): p5.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America. By Patrick Phillips. Sept. 2016. 320p. illus. Norton, $26.95
(9780393293012). 305.8.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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 all­too 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; night­riding
arsonists burned and bombed black families out of their homes, turning Forsyth County into a whites­only 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 cover­up. Although he is an award­winning 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.­­Carol Haggas
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Haggas, Carol. "Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America." Booklist, 1 July 2016, p. 5+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459888836&it=r&asid=89164c06cc3a4065f675490edf03de1d.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459888836
2/12/2017 General OneFile ­ Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486952709448 5/6
Phillips, Patrick. Blood at the Root: A Racial
Cleansing in America
Randall M. Miller
Library Journal.
141.12 (July 1, 2016): p95.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Phillips, Patrick. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America. Norton. Sept. 2016.304p. photos, notes, index.
ISBN 9780393293012. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393293029. HIST
* 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 mans 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
Miller, Randall M.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Miller, Randall M. "Phillips, Patrick. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America." Library Journal, 1 July 2016,
p. 95. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302754&it=r&asid=fb850d4f77882ffbfd64f29d99f1f65a.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457302754

QUOTED: "Sometimes, Mr. Phillips gets a bit too granular in his research, bombarding readers with a great many names and places all at once. ... But this rookie mistake does not, ultimately, detract from the moral force of ''Blood at the Root'' or even how involving it is. The subject is too urgent, the characters too memorable. Some were depraved, showboating politicians. But others were remarkable men and women, who were violently uprooted. At least here, they begin to get their due."

The County That Chased Out All Its Black Citizens
Jennifer Senior
The New York Times. (Sept. 15, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC4(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Full Text:
Early one morning in September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl named Mae Crow was discovered in the Georgia woods, badly beaten and barely alive. It took only a day for the Forsyth County sheriff to arrest three young black male suspects. Two were hanged by the state within two months; the other was hanged by a mob within 48 hours.

There was barely a difference. The trial of the two accused young men was merely for show, predicated on confessions made under extreme duress. After the sentencing, one of the boys, all of 16, asked for permission to ''make a run for it,'' preferring an immediate bullet in the back to three terror-filled weeks of waiting for the noose.

Stories of savage racism and judicial burlesque were unremarkable in the Jim Crow South. What distinguished this case from most others was what happened in the aftermath: Almost every single one of Forsyth's 1,098 African-Americans -- prosperous and poor, literate and unlettered -- was driven out of the county. It took only a few weeks. Marauding residents wielded guns, sticks of dynamite, bottles of kerosene. Then they stole everything, from farmland to tombstones.

Forsyth County remained white right through the 20th century. A black man or woman couldn't so much as drive through without being run out. In 1997, African-Americans numbered just 39 in a population of 75,739.

''Many in Forsyth believed that 'racial purity' was their inheritance and birthright,'' Patrick Phillips writes in ''Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America,'' an astonishing and thoroughgoing account of the event, its context and its thunderous reverberations. ''And like their fathers' fathers' fathers, they saw even a single black face as a threat to their entire way of life.''

To give an idea of just how dedicated residents of Forsyth County were to the notion of racial purity: During the 1950s and '60s, there were no ''colored'' water fountains in the courthouse or ''whites only'' diners in the county seat, Cumming; there was no black population to segregate. In 1987, an intrepid local citizen and several national civil rights leaders organized a Brotherhood March -- made up largely of people who lived outside the county, obviously. They were almost immediately overpowered by rock-throwing hordes screaming hate-filled invective.

''We white people won,'' crowed the head of the Forsyth County Defense League to The New York Times, ''and the niggers are on the run.''

Oprah Winfrey did a special from Forsyth County that same year. On YouTube, you can watch her patiently listening to her all-white audience use the same language, her composure a marvel and a reproach.

''Blood at the Root'' is a compendium of horrors and a catalog of shame. (The title comes from the Billie Holiday song ''Strange Fruit,'' originally a poem by Abel Meeropol.) As he was doing his research, Mr. Phillips, who grew up in Forsyth County, realized how uncomfortably abstract this purge had become, even to him. Misinformation and distortions about it were part of the soundtrack of his childhood. They masked prodigious bigotry and made a whitewash of history.

''The tale,'' he writes, ''stripped of names and dates and places, made the expulsion of the county's black community seem like only a legend -- like something too far back in the mists of time to ever truly understand -- rather than a deliberate and sustained campaign of terror.''

The observation reminded me of the moment in ''Between the World and Me,'' when Ta-Nehisi Coates implores his son to remember that ''slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific slave woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own.''

Because so many African-Americans in Forsyth did not know how to read or write, and because the victims from that era are long gone, Mr. Phillips was not able to give us a series of psychologically intimate portraits. But he did a heroic amount of archival spelunking to tell this story, one that still humanizes its subjects and brims with detail. He also explains the larger historical forces and phobias that set the stage for mass expulsions in Forsyth County, including the downward mobility of whites in the antebellum South; the irrational panic over black male sexuality; and the paranoia over the possibility of a black uprising to avenge slavery, which allowed whites to see themselves as victims, rather than aggressors.

This last anxiety suggests that white people's fear of African-Americans was, and may well be, a fear of their own conscience and sins.

Mr. Phillips carefully documents, too, the brutal origins of Forsyth. Before its citizens drove away African-Americans, they drove away Native Americans. They resisted Emancipation with consistency and brazen creativity. ''It was a place where powerful whites rejected black citizenship on principle,'' he writes, ''and resented the very idea of paying for black labor.''

Mr. Phillips's descriptions of lynchings are graphic, unflinching, important -- a clear reminder that a century (or less, even) is hardly enough time to recover from the sentiments that made them possible; hate is in the groundwater. After a second Brotherhood March in 1987, one that was far more successful, the civil rights leader Hosea Williams drew up a list of demands from Forsyth leaders, including financial reparations, enforcement of federal laws and programs to train black police officers. They might as well have been issued yesterday.

''Twenty-nine years later,'' Mr. Phillips writes, ''Hosea's letter looks like a blueprint for confronting deeply ingrained bigotry and for combating the kind of institutional racism that persists in so many American communities in the 21st century -- from Ferguson to Charleston, Baltimore to Staten Island.''

Sometimes, Mr. Phillips gets a bit too granular in his research, bombarding readers with a great many names and places all at once. (This is his first work of nonfiction. Before this, he wrote three books of poetry; ''Elegy for a Broken Machine'' was a National Book Award finalist in 2015.)

But this rookie mistake does not, ultimately, detract from the moral force of ''Blood at the Root'' or even how involving it is. The subject is too urgent, the characters too memorable. Some were depraved, showboating politicians. But others were remarkable men and women, who were violently uprooted. At least here, they begin to get their due.

Blood at the Root

A Racial Cleansing in America

By Patrick Phillips

302 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARION ETTLINGER)

"Patrick Phillips." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2015. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1000193891&it=r&asid=3102ebe1d5a77610df524fcca3f5222b. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "The 'Racial Cleansing' That Drove 1,100 Black Residents Out Of Forsyth County, Ga." Fresh Air, 15 Sept. 2016. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463978374&it=r&asid=ec2f3bb80fe5fce494b2da6011d6e736. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "Blood at the Root." California Bookwatch, Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472474686&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Kipp, Priscilla. "Blood at the Root." BookPage, Oct. 2016, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755876&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. "Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America." Publishers Weekly, 4 July 2016, p. 53. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302916&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Haggas, Carol. "Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America." Booklist, 1 July 2016, p. 5+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459888836&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Miller, Randall M. "Phillips, Patrick. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America." Library Journal, 1 July 2016, p. 95. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302754&it=r. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Senior, Jennifer. "The County That Chased Out All Its Black Citizens." New York Times, 15 Sept. 2016, p. C4(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463489128&it=r&asid=1cc1d2324b0217ea5edc5f10c4f9e727. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.

• Daily Kos
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  Word count: 1216

  A review of Patrick Phillips' 'Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America'

  By Susan Grigsby
  2017/01/29 · 20:40
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  In February 1987, Oprah Winfrey took her popular television show to Forsyth, Georgia, a place most Americans had never heard of. She was there, she said, to “ask why Forsyth County has not allowed black people to live here in 75 years.”

  Winfrey looked from face to face and asked, “What is it you are afraid black people are going to do?” A tall, bearded man in his mid-twenties stood up and said that more than anything he was afraid “of them coming to Forsyth.” “I lived down in Atlanta,” the man said, but now “it’s nothing but a rat infested slum!” As people around him clapped and nodded their heads in agreement, he said, “They don’t care. They just don’t care!”

  Asked if he meant “the entire black race,” the man said no, “just the niggers.” When Winfrey raised an eyebrow and asked, “What is the difference to you?” the man offered to help her understand the distinction.

  “You have blacks and you have niggers,” he said. “Black people? They don’t want to come up here. They don’t wanna cause any trouble. That’s a black person. A nigger wants to come up here and cause trouble all the time. That’s the difference.” Many in the crowd applauded as Winfrey lowered the mike to her side and simply stared into the camera.
  Blood at the Root is the story of Forsyth County, Georgia, written by a poet and author of fiction who has turned his hand, very successfully, to writing non-fiction. Patrick Phillips’ white family moved to Forsyth County in the late 1970s, when it was all-white. But it wasn’t always that way. At one point, Forsyth County had a thriving black population.

  Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

  by Patrick Phillips

  Published by WW Norton & Company

  September 20, 2016

  A young white girl, Mae Crow, disappeared into the woods on a September day in 1912. She was later found, still clinging to life but badly beaten. She would live on for the next few weeks before finally dying of her wounds. Suspicion immediately fell on three young African-American boys. A mock lynching resulted in a confession that was used to convict two of the boys of Mae Crow’s murder. The other, Rob Edwards, was lynched within 48 hours of the discovery of the body.

  Lynchings were not uncommon in the early days of the 20th century, when Jim Crow laws were at their height. What was unusual was the racial cleansing of the entire county, with the forced expulsion of the remaining 1,098 African Americans from within its boundaries. Beginning on the night of Mae Crow’s funeral, white men would visit the homes and farms of black residents of the county:

  Using posted notices, scrawled letters, rifles, torches, and sticks of dynamite, they delivered a message to their black neighbors— including many they had known and worked with all their lives. The black people of Forsyth could either load up and get across the county line before the next sundown, or stay and die like Rob Edwards.
  By the end of October, most of the blacks had fled the county, leaving behind homes, farms, and businesses, many taking only what they could carry.

  Long before it became an all-white county, Forsyth was home to one of the largest of the Cherokee removal camps, Fort Campbell, which is where the original settlers of the land were gathered prior to their march to the Oklahoma Territory in 1838. Patrick Phillips takes us back to that time, when the state of Georgia refused to comply with Supreme Court rulings protecting the Cherokee and allowed its citizens to hunt them down and steal their land.

  The murder of Mae Crow and the expulsion of African Americans had become the stuff of legends when the author was growing up in the Forsyth town of Cumming. HIs parents, early supporters of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, moved to Cumming (which is within easy commuting distance to Atlanta) in 1977, providing their son with an opportunity to witness history.

  In 1987 Hosea Williams, who crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge with John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr., led a march into Forsyth County—which was still all white and had every intention of remaining that way. Pelted with rocks and bottles and shouts of “Go home, n****r,” they managed a few blocks before law enforcement officers advised them that they would not be able to protect them from the angry mob of several hundred racists, some of whom were armed. The author’s parents and sister were among the handful of white residents of the county who marched in solidarity with Williams and were left to face the angry mob when the bus carrying the protestors left. They were quickly ushered into a patrol car to avoid the counter protesters who surrounded the vehicle and shouted racist insults at them.

  The author spent four years researching the events of 1912 and has presented those findings in a compulsively engrossing tale of racism and hate. Reading this book, I felt constantly reminded of how history repeats—not in exact detail perhaps, but in attitudes that feel remarkably similar to what we see today. What is truly frightening is the arrival of these same racist attitudes in the White House.

  It is important to realize that although the author paints a powerful portrait of a single county of white supremacists that happens to be in Georgia, they are now all over the nation, in cities, suburbs, and rural townships. We now have a federal government that supports voter restrictions and the registration of people of a single faith. There is nothing to stop today’s racists from translating their anger and fear into terrorizing those whose skin is a different shade, or whose religion is conducted in a different house of worship.

  Except us. Especially those of us wearing white skin. In his author’s note, Patrick Phillips writes of a question asked him by a friend and fellow writer, Natasha Trethewey, who:

  … asked why it was that she, a southern woman of color, wrote about “blackness,” yet I, a white man from one of the most racist places in the country, never said a word about “whiteness.” “Why,” Natasha asked, “do you think you’re not involved?”
  We’re involved, people. We have to be because it is whites who created the problem, and we have an obligation to find a resolution. It won’t be found in punching a white supremacist in the jaw (though the impulse is understandable), but rather in recognizing that we must be part of the solution to the hatred and fear that is described so well in Blood at the Root.

• Chicago Tribune
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-books-blood-at-the-root-patrick-phillips-20160921-story.html
  Word count: 1376

  QUOTED: "Blood at the Root" does an admirable job of piecing together its history based on research and with too few surviving figures. Phillips can be forgiven if some of the narration and character development, in the absence of firsthand accounts, is gathered largely from newspaper reports of the day."

  Patrick Phillips' 'Blood at the Root' examines the lasting effects of racial cleansing
  Patrick Phillips
  Patrick Phillips (Marion Ettlinger)
  William Lee William LeeContact Reporter
  Chicago Tribune

  In many ways, Patrick Phillips has a perfect perch from which to observe and document the ghosts of old racial divisions in his Georgia home that culminated in white citizens of the county hanging and beating several black men and expelling nearly all of its black citizens after the rape of two young white women in 1912.

  Phillips walks a fine line in his fourth book, "Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America," as both an outsider whose family moved into Georgia's notoriously all-white Forsyth County when he was a young boy in the late 1970s and as an average suburban kid trying to understand his new environment.

  RELATED: TRENDING LIFE & STYLE NEWS THIS HOUR

  In fact, the origins of Phillips' new world as a boy — one where any mention of African-Americans was met with open rage from residents, despite few blacks having lived there in generations — was due to a nasty period when Forsyth earned its reputation as one of the most virulent of "sundown towns," municipalities where blacks were told in no uncertain terms not to stay after dusk.

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  But Phillips' 302-page "Root" isn't merely a piling-on to white Southern aggression, but a close examination of how tradition, indignation and the racial politics of the era easily allowed the county and its towns to become a land that time (and progress) forgot.

  "Blood at the Root," Phillips writes in the book's introduction, is his attempt to explain how Forsyth County — and Cumming, the county seat — had emerged as a hard-bitten white bastion that somehow persisted into the late 20th century, even as the civil rights movement had altered the nation's landscape.

  At the root of Forsyth's 75-year-old color line — and Phillips' narrative — were two sexual assaults in September 1912. The rapes of Ellen Grice and Mae Crow were laid at the feet of black attackers, (though evidence against the accused men is called into question repeatedly by Phillips).

  In these early days of the 1900s, when race riots to beat back black progress were common across the country and when the image of marauding black rapists had captured the white popular imagination (most famously in D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" in 1915), the mere mention of an assault involving a white woman and a black man often began with search parties and bloodhounds and ended with public lynchings or burnings.

  In this case, the two attacks brought the "mob spirit" in rural Georgia to a boil. The assaults of Grice and Crow spurred beatings and intimidation of black citizens, at least one extrajudicial killing of a black suspect, two fast trials that resulted in the hanging of two black teenagers and finally, the expulsion of more than 1,000 black citizens from Forsyth by Ku Klux Klan night riders. Their lands, livestock and property were quickly seized by their former white neighbors.

  Using old newspaper clips, census records and archival photos, Phillips retraces his home county's path to becoming a sort of fiery, white promised land that made it either celebrated or vilified by neighboring communities for decades.

  'Blood at the Root'
  "Blood at the Root" by Patrick Phillips.
  Those public records help Phillips breathe life into the back stories of notable citizens, black and white, who were at the center of the confrontation, as well as events in the intervening 75 years.

  "Blood at the Root" provides a fascinating glimpse into how Forsyth County, a farming region in the red clay of the northern Georgia mountains, managed to stave off racial progress despite being only about 40 miles away from Atlanta, the base of operations for civil rights warrior Martin Luther King Jr.

  As Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts remade the nation and King's South, Forsyth residents, Phillips writes, were proud that their old-fashioned ways and views persevered. The good ol' boys of Forsyth could always be counted on to run any unfamiliar black faces out of town well into the 1980s.

  In January 1987, on the 75th anniversary of the 1912 expulsion, activists hoping to march through Cumming were famously met by 2,500 angry whites waving Confederate flags, holding signs that read "Keep Forsyth White" and chanting "Go home, n------!"

  "Nearly everyone I knew, adults and children, referred to black people as 'n-----,'" Phillips writes, "and for the entire time I lived there in the 1970s and '80s, 'white only' was still the law of the land."

  Of course, racial progress is easier to delay when the you have little diversity. Even in 2015, Forsyth County was still less than 4 percent African-American, according to U.S. Census information.

  Phillips talks in great detail about some of the black residents of Forsyth County, including Grant Smith, a black clergyman who was whipped and beaten by a white mob in the aftermath of the second sexual assault. Sadly, African-American narratives are relatively scarce, as records of blacks who lived in the area were not well-maintained.

  Some compelling white characters emerge, including Bill Reid, a dirt-poor corn and hog farmer and Ku Klux Klan member who became sheriff of Forsyth County. Reid would mysteriously disappear just as a mob of thousands rushed the county jail and seized and hanged a black prisoner.

  Charlie Harris, the young, ambitious mayor of Cumming at the time of the expulsion, represents one of "Blood at the Root's" more moderate white figures. Harris tried to raise the town from northern Georgia backwater to a destination spot.

  When a group of wealthy Georgia businessmen and investors embarked upon a driving tour of Georgia, Harris' guarantee of safety for the group's black chauffeurs and servants quickly crumbled when the sight of blacks waiting in fancy cars spurred confrontation, including rock throwing and threats of lynching. The incident killed Harris' dream of a thriving Cumming and any chance for reconciliation among the races.

  And even Reid's own deputy and political rival pushed against the county's racism, which is seen as strident and mean-spirited even in the Jim Crow South.

  "Blood at the Root" does an admirable job of piecing together its history based on research and with too few surviving figures. Phillips can be forgiven if some of the narration and character development, in the absence of firsthand accounts, is gathered largely from newspaper reports of the day.

  The Cumming of today, according to Phillips, shows few traces of its racist past, with black, white and brown now working and shopping in a revitalized town with its new courthouse, jailhouse and bank branches. Even the vice president at the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce was African-American, though he departed last year.

  Still, in the town square, there remains a statue of Confederate Army Col. and U.S. Rep. Hiram Parks Bell, who fought hard against black progress.

  As Cumming — and an entire nation — continue to deal with issues of race, social inequities, crime and safety, all deeply rooted in racial struggles of the last century, Phillips' book feels timely, unapologetically discussing the way fear, panic, ignorance and timing may have kept Forsyth County trapped in the past.

  wlee@chicagotribune.com

  Twitter @MidNoirCowboy

  Blood at the Root

  By Patrick Phillips, W.W. Norton, 302 pages, $26.95

• Salon
  http://www.salon.com/2016/10/31/review-blood-at-the-root-examines-1912-racial-turmoil/
  Word count: 720

  MONDAY, OCT 31, 2016 07:30 AM CDT
  Review: ‘Blood at the Root’ examines 1912 racial turmoil
  DON SCHANCHE JR., ASSOCIATED PRESS SKIP TO COMMENTS
  Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton & Co.), by Patrick Phillips

  In 1912, the black residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, were driven from their homes by violence and threats of violence from their white neighbors. More than 1,000 people fled the county, leaving it virtually all white for the next seven decades. This unwilling exodus forms the basis for “Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America” by Patrick Phillips.

  Raised in Forsyth County, now a suburban bedroom community about 40 miles northeast of Atlanta, the author heard his childhood acquaintances tell tales of the 1912 expulsions that sounded almost mythical. But as an adult, a published poet and a university professor, he felt compelled to take a closer look. The stories of human suffering that he reveals in this gripping and meticulously documented account make the horror of those boyhood stories seem pale by comparison.

  Like many episodes of Southern racial violence during that era, it began with an attack on a white woman.

  In a rural village called Oscarville, 18-year-old Mae Crow was found beaten, bloodied and unconscious, and her injuries proved fatal. Rumors circulated, filling in imagined details, and suspicion soon fell on three young black men.

  One of them, 24-year-old Rob Edwards, was quickly lynched.

  “When a rumor spread that ‘Big Rob’ had confessed to the crime, a group of white farmers stormed the county jail and, according to one witness, shot Edwards as he cowered in his cell, then bashed in his skull with crowbars,” Phillips writes. “Others say Edwards emerged alive, pleading for mercy, and died while being dragged from the back of a wagon, a noose cinched tight around his neck.”

  One of the other two suspects was also reported to have confessed — a confession Phillips says was almost certainly extracted via torture. As Phillips reports, the two were later tried and hanged in a huge public spectacle, witnessed by thousands, but not before widespread terrorism was inflicted on the local black community.

  “Some of the attacks later made headlines in Atlanta,” Phillips writes, “and it’s likely that similar raids had been happening since the discovery of Mae Crow’s body in early September. The night riders fired shots into front doors, threw rocks through windows and hollered warnings that it was time for black families to ‘get.’ But of all their methods, torches and kerosene worked best, since a fire created a blazing sign for all to see and left the victims no place to ever come back to.”

  While many local blacks were poor sharecroppers, some had managed to acquire houses and land in the few generations since slavery. After they fled in fear, their vacant property was later quietly appropriated by whites.

  “Today,” Phillips notes, “many of those same lots are home not to chicken houses, cow pastures, and hog pens but suburban housing developments, filled with multimillion-dollar homes. What was once stolen with a wink and a nod at the county courthouse has now become some of the most valuable real estate in all of metropolitan Atlanta …”

  For all but the locals and the displaced, the violence quickly receded from memory. Not until the late 1980s, when civil rights marchers from Atlanta descended on Forsyth County to protest its all-white status and faced a jeering, Confederate flag-waving crowd, did the world take note of the county’s peculiar history — which differed only by degrees from the racial violence that erupted for decades throughout the South.

  A study released in 2015 by the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documented 4,075 racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950.

  It was typical, in those cases, for a coroner’s jury to rule the victim died “at the hands of parties unknown.”

  In the case in Forsyth County, Phillips reminds readers of a massive crime — and names at least some of the killers.

  ___

  Don Schanche Jr. is an editor on the South Desk of The Associated Press in Atlanta.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/patrick-phillips/blood-at-the-root-racial-cleansing/
  Word count: 440

  BLOOD AT THE ROOT by Patrick PhillipsKirkus Star
  BLOOD AT THE ROOT
  A Racial Cleansing in America
  by Patrick Phillips
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  A history of white supremacy’s endurance in a Georgia county.

  In 1977, Phillips (English/Drew Univ.; Elegy for a Broken Machine: Poems, 2015, etc.) moved with his family from Atlanta to a small town in Forsyth County, Georgia, hoping to enjoy the simple pleasures of a quieter life. What the young boy discovered was “a world where nobody liked outsiders,” most especially, and vehemently, blacks. The color line was drawn “between all that was good and cherished and beloved and everything they thought evil, and dirty, and despised.” In an effort to understand the world in which he grew up, the author has uncovered a shocking story as heartbreaking as it is infuriating. Although in the minority, blacks had long co-existed with whites in Forsyth County, some as slaves, many as landowners and small-business owners. But in September 1912, after a white woman was found beaten and raped, virulent racism erupted, resulting in the lynching of one of three black suspects and, in the weeks that followed, the purging of all blacks—more than 1,000—who lived in the county. Night riders fired shots into doors, threw rocks through windows, demolished homes with dynamite, and burned churches. By the end of October, the black population was gone, and any who ever appeared in the county—through temerity or mistake—were violently run off. “Racial purity is Forsyth’s security,” whites proclaimed. Some black landowners managed to sell their property to whites before they left, but most abandoned their homes, knowing that their land would be taken over by whites claiming it for themselves. Throughout the book, Phillips successfully contextualizes Forsyth in American racism’s long history. After Woodrow Wilson was elected on promises of “fair dealing” for blacks, he unapologetically enforced segregation. Decades later, in 1987, when civil rights groups staged a march through Forsyth, they were met with violence—an episode the author recounts with moving intimacy.

  An impressive reckoning with a shameful piece of the past that “most natives of Forsyth would prefer to leave…scattered in the state’s dusty archives or safely hidden in plain sight.”

  Pub Date: Sept. 20th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-393-29301-2
  Page count: 304pp
  Publisher: Norton
  Review Posted Online: June 8th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016

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