By: Jennifer Senior
Date: September 14, 2016
Early one morning in September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl named Mae Crow was discovered in the Georgia woods, badly beaten and barely alive. It took only a day for the Forsyth County sheriff to arrest three young black male suspects. Two were hanged by the state within two months; the other was hanged by a mob within 48 hours.
There was barely a difference. The trial of the two accused young men was merely for show, predicated on confessions made under extreme duress. After the sentencing, one of the boys, all of 16, asked for permission to “make a run for it,” preferring an immediate bullet in the back to three terror-filled weeks of waiting for the noose.
Stories of savage racism and judicial burlesque were unremarkable in the Jim Crow South. What distinguished this case from most others was what happened in the aftermath: Almost every single one of Forsyth’s 1,098 African-Americans — prosperous and poor, literate and unlettered — was driven out of the county. It took only a few weeks. Marauding residents wielded guns, sticks of dynamite, bottles of kerosene. Then they stole everything, from farmland to tombstones.
Forsyth County remained white right through the 20th century. A black man or woman couldn’t so much as drive through without being run out. In 1997, African-Americans numbered just 39 in a population of 75,739.
“Many in Forsyth believed that ‘racial purity’ was their inheritance and birthright,” Patrick Phillips writes in “Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America,” an astonishing and thoroughgoing account of the event, its context and its thunderous reverberations. “And like their fathers’ fathers’ fathers, they saw even a single black face as a threat to their entire way of life."
To give an idea of just how dedicated residents of Forsyth County were to the notion of racial purity: During the 1950s and ’60s, there were no “colored” water fountains in the courthouse or “whites only” diners in the county seat, Cumming; there was no black population to segregate. In 1987, an intrepid local citizen and several national civil rights leaders organized a Brotherhood March — made up largely of people who lived outside the county, obviously. They were almost immediately overpowered by rock-throwing hordes screaming hate-filled invective.
“We white people won,” crowed the head of the Forsyth County Defense League to The New York Times, “and the niggers are on the run.”
Oprah Winfrey did a special from Forsyth County that same year. On YouTube, you can watch her patiently listening to her all-white audience use the same language, her composure a marvel and a reproach.
“Blood at the Root” is a compendium of horrors and a catalog of shame. (The title comes from the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit,” originally a poem by Abel Meeropol.) As he was doing his research, Mr. Phillips, who grew up in Forsyth County, realized how uncomfortably abstract this purge had become, even to him. Misinformation and distortions about it were part of the soundtrack of his childhood. They masked prodigious bigotry and made a whitewash of history.
“The tale,” he writes, “stripped of names and dates and places, made the expulsion of the county’s black community seem like only a legend — like something too far back in the mists of time to ever truly understand — rather than a deliberate and sustained campaign of terror.”
The observation reminded me of the moment in “Between the World and Me,” when Ta-Nehisi Coates implores his son to remember that “slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific slave woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own.”
Because so many African-Americans in Forsyth did not know how to read or write, and because the victims from that era are long gone, Mr. Phillips was not able to give us a series of psychologically intimate portraits. But he did a heroic amount of archival spelunking to tell this story, one that still humanizes its subjects and brims with detail. He also explains the larger historical forces and phobias that set the stage for mass expulsions in Forsyth County, including the downward mobility of whites in the antebellum South; the irrational panic over black male sexuality; and the paranoia over the possibility of a black uprising to avenge slavery, which allowed whites to see themselves as victims, rather than aggressors.
This last anxiety suggests that white people’s fear of African-Americans was, and may well be, a fear of their own conscience and sins.
Mr. Phillips carefully documents, too, the brutal origins of Forsyth. Before its citizens drove away African-Americans, they drove away Native Americans. They resisted Emancipation with consistency and brazen creativity. “It was a place where powerful whites rejected black citizenship on principle,” he writes, “and resented the very idea of paying for black labor.”
Mr. Phillips’s descriptions of lynchings are graphic, unflinching, important — a clear reminder that a century (or less, even) is hardly enough time to recover from the sentiments that made them possible; hate is in the groundwater. After a second Brotherhood March in 1987, one that was far more successful, the civil rights leader Hosea Williams drew up a list of demands from Forsyth leaders, including financial reparations, enforcement of federal laws and programs to train black police officers. They might as well have been issued yesterday.
“Twenty-nine years later,” Mr. Phillips writes, “Hosea’s letter looks like a blueprint for confronting deeply ingrained bigotry and for combating the kind of institutional racism that persists in so many American communities in the 21st century — from Ferguson to Charleston, Baltimore to Staten Island.”
Sometimes, Mr. Phillips gets a bit too granular in his research, bombarding readers with a great many names and places all at once. (This is his first work of nonfiction. Before this, he wrote three books of poetry; “Elegy for a Broken Machine” was a National Book Award finalist in 2015.)
But this rookie mistake does not, ultimately, detract from the moral force of “Blood at the Root” or even how involving it is. The subject is too urgent, the characters too memorable. Some were depraved, showboating politicians. But others were remarkable men and women, who were violently uprooted. At least here, they begin to get their due.
