Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America - Patrick Phillips
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America - Patrick Phillips
Non-Fiction
Pages: 320
I would imagine that author Patrick Phillips is probably none too popular in his old hometown of Cumming, Forsyth County, Georgia. A more damning and damnable portrait could not be imagined. It makes for shocking reading.
In 1912 a group of young black men were accused of gang-raping and murdering a young white girl. Whether they were innocent or guilty was irrelevant - they were black, she was white, and someone needed to pay. The county exploded in racial violence, and in the wake of the girl's funeral the entire African-American population of Forsyth County, some thousand-odd people, were run out of town, forced to abandon jobs, homes, land, everything they owned, for fear of violence at the hands of 'night-riders', proto-Klansmen. In a complete failure of law and order, this exile was allowed to happen by mayor, sheriff, governor, and then swept under the rug and forgotten.
For the better part of 75 years Forsyth County was a whites-only zone, patrolled and policed by virulent segregationists who considered just 'existing whilst black' in Forsyth County to be a crime - even to the extent of attacking black chauffeurs driving their rich white employers through town on a driving tour of Georgia in the 1920s. The events of the rest of the country passed Forsyth by - Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King Jr. - none had any impact on a town that prided itself on its 'peaceable' nature and the lack of racial tension and conflict searing the rest of the nation, largely because there were no African-Americans in Forsyth and they intended it to stay that way. Even as late as 1987 protest marches were held in Forsyth to protest not segregation but the complete whitewashing of an entire county - decades after the high-point of the Civil Rights movement. And today, in a Forsyth County swallowed up by Atlanta's urban sprawl, there is not a single remembrance, memorial or anything to indicate the existence of a thriving African-American community destroyed by hate a century ago.
The most damning thing about this book is that Forsyth County was probably not unique. It may have been the most extreme example of attitudes prevailing not just in 1912 but in all the years since, but perhaps only because of the perfect storm of rural isolation, police complicity and civil and state failures of leadership, coupled with entrenched racism and a violent crime to light the spark. The most damning thing about Forsyth County and this book is that it could have happened anywhere across the American South, and in many diluted ways it is still happening today.