Blood at the Root

Last updated
Blood at the Root
Blood at the Root.jpg
Author Patrick Phillips
Country United States
LanguageEnglish
Genre Non-fiction, history, race and ethnicity in the United States
Published2016
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Pages302 [1]
ISBN 978-0-393-29301-2

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America is a 2016 non-fiction book written by Patrick Phillips investigating the 1912 racial conflict in Forsyth County, Georgia, the ensuing racial cleansing of the county, and later developments including the 1987 Forsyth County protests. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Overview

In September 1912 in Forsyth County, Georgia, a young white girl was assaulted, raped, and later died. Following the coerced confession of a young black man, an alleged accomplice was lynched. What then followed was bands of white "night riders" [lower-alpha 1] that drove the black citizens out of the county, via arson and terror. The title Blood at the Root comes from the song Strange Fruit about the lynchings of African Americans in the South. [4]

Summary

Reviews

Carol Anderson, reviewing the book for The New York Times , said it "meticulously and elegantly reveals the power of white supremacy in its many guises." [4] Anderson commented that some of the book was "weighed down by supposition and tangents", noting that the author "is hampered by the scarce records, biased contemporary newspaper reporting, traumatized family memories and oral histories that are few and far between." [4]

Notes

  1. The Ku Klux Klan had disbanded in the early 1870s and did not re-form until 1915.

Related Research Articles

In the broader context of racism against Black Americans and racism in the United States, mass racial violence in the United States consists of ethnic conflicts and race riots, along with such events as:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forsyth County, Georgia</span> County in Georgia, United States

Forsyth County is a county in the northeast portion of the U.S. state of Georgia. Suburban and exurban in character, Forsyth County lies within the Atlanta Metropolitan Area. The county's only incorporated city and county seat is Cumming. At the 2020 census, the population was 251,283. Forsyth was the fastest-growing county in Georgia and the 15th fastest-growing county in the United States between 2010 and 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cumming, Georgia</span> City in Georgia, United States

Cumming is a city in Forsyth County, Georgia, United States, and the sole incorporated area in the county. It is a suburban city, and part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. In the 2020 census, the population is 7,318, up from 5,430 in 2010. Surrounding unincorporated areas with a Cumming mailing address have a population of approximately 100,000. Cumming is the county seat of Forsyth County.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emmett Till</span> African-American lynching victim (1941–1955)

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Strange Fruit</span> 1939 song made famous by Billie Holiday

"Strange Fruit" is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Meeropol published in 1937. The song protests the lynching of Black Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century and the great majority of victims were black. The song has been called "a declaration" and "the beginning of the civil rights movement".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugene Talmadge</span> American politician (1884–1946)

Eugene Talmadge was an attorney and American politician who served three terms as the 67th governor of Georgia, from 1933 to 1937, and then again from 1941 to 1943. Elected to a fourth term in November 1946, he died before his inauguration, scheduled for January 1947. Only Talmadge and Joe Brown, in the mid-19th century, have been elected four times as governor of Georgia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sundown town</span> All-white municipalities that practice a form of racial segregation

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">John R. Lynch</span> American politician

John Roy Lynch was an American writer, attorney, military officer, author, and Republican politician who served as Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives and represented Mississippi in the United States House of Representatives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynching in the United States</span> Extrajudicial killings in the United States by mobs or vigilante groups

Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimised ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South because the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">May 1918 lynchings</span> Violence following a murder in Georgia

On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among those killed were Hayes and Mary Turner. Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day, his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil then set on fire. Mary's unborn child was cut from her abdomen and stomped to death. Her body was then repeatedly shot. No one was ever convicted of her lynching.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moore's Ford lynchings</span> 1946 mob lynchings in Georgia, United States

The Moore's Ford Lynchings, also known as the 1946 Georgia lynching, refers to the July 25, 1946, murders of four young African Americans by a mob of white men. Tradition says that the murders were committed on Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton and Oconee counties between Monroe and Watkinsville, but the four victims, two married couples, were shot and killed on a nearby dirt road.

Patrick Phillips is an American poet, writer, and professor. He teaches writing and literature at Stanford University, and is a Carnegie Foundation Fellow and a fellow of the Cullman Center for Writers at the New York Public Library. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen, and previously taught writing and literature at Drew University. He grew up in Georgia and now lives in San Francisco.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">1912 racial conflict in Forsyth County, Georgia</span> Racially motivated violence and subsequent racial cleansing in Forysth County in 1912

In Forsyth County, Georgia, in September 1912, two separate alleged attacks on white women in the Cumming area resulted in black men being accused as suspects. First, a white woman reportedly awoke to find a black man in her bedroom; then days later, a teenage white woman was beaten and raped, later dying of her injuries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perry massacre</span> Racially motivated conflict in Florida, USA

The Perry massacre was a racially motivated conflict in Perry, Florida, in December 1922. Whites killed four black men, including Charles Wright, who was lynched by being burned at the stake, and they also destroyed several buildings in the black community of Perry after the murder of Ruby Hendry, a white female schoolteacher.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynching of Jake Davis</span>

Jake "Shake" Davis was a 62-year-old African-American man who was lynched in Miller County, Georgia by a white mob on July 14, 1922. According to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary it was the 38th of 61 lynchings during 1922 in the United States.

The 1987Forsyth County protests were a series of civil rights demonstrations held in Forsyth County, Georgia, in the United States. The protests consisted of two marches, held one week apart from each other on January 17 and January 24, 1987. The marches and accompanying counterdemonstrations by white supremacists drew national attention to the county. The second march was attended by many prominent civil rights activists and politicians, including both of Georgia's U.S. senators, and attracted about 20,000 marchers, making it one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in United States history.

References

  1. 1 2 Fresh Air transcript (September 15, 2016). "The 'Racial Cleansing' That Drove 1,100 Black Residents Out Of Forsyth County, Ga". npr.org. NPR.
  2. Phillips, Patrick (August 26, 2016). "Blood at the Root (book excerpt)". MyAJC . Retrieved 2018-09-16.
  3. "Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved 2018-09-16.
  4. 1 2 3 Anderson, Carol (September 28, 2016). "American Apartheid: A Georgia County Drove Out All Its Black Citizens in 1912". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved December 8, 2017.

Further reading