In February 1987, Oprah Winfrey took her popular television show to Forsyth, Georgia, a place most Americans had never heard of. She was there, she said, to “ask why Forsyth County has not allowed black people to live here in 75 years.”
Winfrey looked from face to face and asked, “What is it you are afraid black people are going to do?” A tall, bearded man in his mid-twenties stood up and said that more than anything he was afraid “of them coming to Forsyth.” “I lived down in Atlanta,” the man said, but now “it’s nothing but a rat infested slum!” As people around him clapped and nodded their heads in agreement, he said, “They don’t care. They just don’t care!”
Asked if he meant “the entire black race,” the man said no, “just the niggers.” When Winfrey raised an eyebrow and asked, “What is the difference to you?” the man offered to help her understand the distinction.
“You have blacks and you have niggers,” he said. “Black people? They don’t want to come up here. They don’t wanna cause any trouble. That’s a black person. A nigger wants to come up here and cause trouble all the time. That’s the difference.” Many in the crowd applauded as Winfrey lowered the mike to her side and simply stared into the camera.
Blood at the Root is the story of Forsyth County, Georgia, written by a poet and author of fiction who has turned his hand, very successfully, to writing non-fiction. Patrick Phillips’ white family moved to Forsyth County in the late 1970s, when it was all-white. But it wasn’t always that way. At one point, Forsyth County had a thriving black population.
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
by Patrick Phillips
Published by WW Norton & Company
September 20, 2016
A young white girl, Mae Crow, disappeared into the woods on a September day in 1912. She was later found, still clinging to life but badly beaten. She would live on for the next few weeks before finally dying of her wounds. Suspicion immediately fell on three young African-American boys. A mock lynching resulted in a confession that was used to convict two of the boys of Mae Crow’s murder. The other, Rob Edwards, was lynched within 48 hours of the discovery of the body.
Lynchings were not uncommon in the early days of the 20th century, when Jim Crow laws were at their height. What was unusual was the racial cleansing of the entire county, with the forced expulsion of the remaining 1,098 African Americans from within its boundaries. Beginning on the night of Mae Crow’s funeral, white men would visit the homes and farms of black residents of the county:
Using posted notices, scrawled letters, rifles, torches, and sticks of dynamite, they delivered a message to their black neighbors— including many they had known and worked with all their lives. The black people of Forsyth could either load up and get across the county line before the next sundown, or stay and die like Rob Edwards.
By the end of October, most of the blacks had fled the county, leaving behind homes, farms, and businesses, many taking only what they could carry.
Long before it became an all-white county, Forsyth was home to one of the largest of the Cherokee removal camps, Fort Campbell, which is where the original settlers of the land were gathered prior to their march to the Oklahoma Territory in 1838. Patrick Phillips takes us back to that time, when the state of Georgia refused to comply with Supreme Court rulings protecting the Cherokee and allowed its citizens to hunt them down and steal their land.
The murder of Mae Crow and the expulsion of African Americans had become the stuff of legends when the author was growing up in the Forsyth town of Cumming. HIs parents, early supporters of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, moved to Cumming (which is within easy commuting distance to Atlanta) in 1977, providing their son with an opportunity to witness history.
In 1987 Hosea Williams, who crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge with John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr., led a march into Forsyth County—which was still all white and had every intention of remaining that way. Pelted with rocks and bottles and shouts of “Go home, n****r,” they managed a few blocks before law enforcement officers advised them that they would not be able to protect them from the angry mob of several hundred racists, some of whom were armed. The author’s parents and sister were among the handful of white residents of the county who marched in solidarity with Williams and were left to face the angry mob when the bus carrying the protestors left. They were quickly ushered into a patrol car to avoid the counter protesters who surrounded the vehicle and shouted racist insults at them.
The author spent four years researching the events of 1912 and has presented those findings in a compulsively engrossing tale of racism and hate. Reading this book, I felt constantly reminded of how history repeats—not in exact detail perhaps, but in attitudes that feel remarkably similar to what we see today. What is truly frightening is the arrival of these same racist attitudes in the White House.
It is important to realize that although the author paints a powerful portrait of a single county of white supremacists that happens to be in Georgia, they are now all over the nation, in cities, suburbs, and rural townships. We now have a federal government that supports voter restrictions and the registration of people of a single faith. There is nothing to stop today’s racists from translating their anger and fear into terrorizing those whose skin is a different shade, or whose religion is conducted in a different house of worship.
Except us. Especially those of us wearing white skin. In his author’s note, Patrick Phillips writes of a question asked him by a friend and fellow writer, Natasha Trethewey, who:
… asked why it was that she, a southern woman of color, wrote about “blackness,” yet I, a white man from one of the most racist places in the country, never said a word about “whiteness.” “Why,” Natasha asked, “do you think you’re not involved?”
We’re involved, people. We have to be because it is whites who created the problem, and we have an obligation to find a resolution. It won’t be found in punching a white supremacist in the jaw (though the impulse is understandable), but rather in recognizing that we must be part of the solution to the hatred and fear that is described so well in Blood at the Root.