Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780393293012)

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they'd founded the county's thriving black churches.

But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white "night riders" launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to "abandoned" land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.

National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth's tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and '80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth "all white" well into the 1990s.

Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century.

Author: Patrick Phillips
ISBN-10: 0393293017
ISBN-13: 9780393293012
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 09/20/2016
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.50w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/01/2016 pg. 95
Publishers Weekly 07/04/2016
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2016
Booklist 07/01/2016 pg. 5
Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview 08/15/2016 pg. 35
BookPage 10/01/2016
Shelf Awareness 09/30/2016
Choice 04/01/2017