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A Racial Cleansing in America
by Patrick Phillips
Book Reviewed by:A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia, and a harrowing testament to the deep roots of racial violence 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. 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.
An engaging portrait of the South’s haunting legacy, the lessons of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America will stick with readers long after they have completed the book. Regrettably, they are lessons Americans still need to learn, for many black Americans today continue to experience racial injustice. Incidents like Trayvon Martin’s murder and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri are modern reminders of how much work Americans need to do to eradicate racial intolerance. The plight for equality in the United States continues...continued
Full Review
(858 words)
(Reviewed by Mollie Smith Waters).
Patrick Phillips' non-fiction book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America examines a specific rape and murder of a white girl that occurred in 1912, in Forsyth County, Georgia. It also examines, more broadly, the South during that time. Following the end of the Civil War and the passage of Constitutional Amendments Thirteen through Fifteen between 1865-1870, former slaves gained civil liberties and basic human rights they could have only dreamed of just a few years earlier.
In the 1870s, African Americans held political positions for the first time in history at both the local and state levels – and in late 1872, Pinckney Pinchback became America's first African American governor (Louisiana). His time in the position ...
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