Dunstable Free Public Library

Blood at the root, a racial cleansing in America, Patrick Phillips

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Blood at the root

bibliography

1005227580

Patrick Phillips

a racial cleansing in America

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten. National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s

Introduction: Law of the land -- The scream -- Riot, rout, tumult -- The missing girl -- And the mob came on -- A straw in the whirlwind -- The devil's own horses -- The majesty of the law -- Fastening the noose -- We condemn this conduct -- Crush the thing in its infancy -- The scaffold -- When they were slaves -- Driven to the cook stoves -- Exile, 1913/1920 -- Erasure, 1920/1970 -- The attempted murder of Miguel Marcelli -- The brotherhood march, 1987 -- Silence is consent -- Epilogue: A pack of wild dogs