Excerpt from Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Generation after generation, Forsyth County remained "all white," even as the Great War, the Spanish influenza, World War II, and the civil rights movement came and went, and as kudzu crept over the remnants of black Forsyth. The people of the county, many descended from the lynchers and night riders, shook their heads as the South changed around them. They read about the clashes in Montgomery, and Savannah, and Selma, and felt proud of their county's old-fashioned ways, its unspoiled beauty, and a peacefulness that they saw as a direct result of having "run the niggers out." But now and again throughout the century, whenever someone intentionally or unwittingly violated the racial ban, white men could be counted on to rise up like they always had and drive the intruders away. Years might pass between such episodes, but each time it happened, Georgians were reminded that while the racial cleansing of 1912 seemed like ancient history, in truth, it had never really ended. In truth, many in Forsyth believed that "racial purity" was their inheritance and birthright. And like their fathers' fathers' fathers, they saw even a single black face as a threat to their entire way of life.


I know because I was raised in Forsyth, just a few miles from Pleasant Grove Church, where Mae Crow's casket was lowered into the ground. My family moved there in 1977, when I was in the second grade, and I spent my boyhood and teenage years living inside the bubble of Georgia's notorious "white county." At first, I was too young to understand that Forsyth was different from the rest of America. But as I grew older, I realized that many people there lived as if much of the twentieth century never happened—as if there had been no Montgomery Bus Boycott, no Brown v. Board of Education, no Civil Rights Act of 1964. Instead, whites in Forsyth carried on as if the racial integration of the South somehow did not apply to them. Nearly everyone I knew, adults and children, referred to black people as "niggers," and for the entire time I lived there in the 1970s and '80s, "whites only" was still the law of the land. Only in hindsight, and from a great distance, did I come to see that I'd grown up not in the America most white people imagine, but something closer to the fearful, isolated world of apartheid South Africa.

In 1987, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the expulsions, a group of activists organized a peace march to protest the ongoing segregation of the county. The Brotherhood Marchers, as they were called, boarded a chartered bus at the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, in Atlanta, then drove up Highway 400 toward Forsyth. When they reached the outskirts of Cumming, the county seat, blacks and whites climbed down off the bus, lined up on a two-lane country road, and began the first civil rights demonstration anyone in Forsyth County had ever seen. Almost immediately they were attacked by hundreds of locals who had gathered in a nearby pasture, then flooded toward the road, waving Confederate flags and carrying signs that said, "FORSYTH STAYS WHITE!" Men, women, and children joined in a chant of "Go home, niggers! Go home, niggers!" and pelted the peace marchers with rocks, bottles, bricks, and whatever else they could find in the weeds beside the road.

When he discovered that many of the "counterprotesters" had come heavily armed, county sheriff Wesley Walraven warned the Brotherhood Marchers that he could no longer guarantee anyone's safety and urged them to abandon the demonstration. The main group of activists reluctantly climbed back onto the bus, and as they rolled down the on-ramp and headed back to Atlanta, local whites cheered in triumph. Even march organizers like Hosea Williams, among the most hardened veterans of the civil rights movement, were shocked by the scene. Williams had led the first Selma march in 1965, and had survived the attacks of billy-club-wielding Alabama state troopers. Yet there he was, decades later, facing another mob of violent white supremacists. Twenty-seven years had passed since "Bloody Sunday" on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but Williams knew what he was looking at in 1987: segregation was alive and well in Forsyth County, Georgia.

Excerpted from Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips. Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Phillips. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.