Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

The exile of black residents from Forsyth County was complete. In the years that followed, from time to time, an outsider would cross the county line and break this code, causing reactions that varied from mild to severe. For example, when a wealthy doctor came to do business at the courthouse and brought two black servants along, a crowd of “several hundred gathered around…threatening them” (174). Similarly, when a group of tourists came to visit Forsyth, despite Charlie Harris greeting them with a smile, locals pelted the motorcade with rocks because the chauffeurs were black.

These kinds of events were a tough blow to Forsyth’s potential railroad plans; by 1919, it was clear that the county would not host the railroad, and Mayor Harris moved away. This was the “beginning of the end of resistance to the purge, as moderate figures left one by one” (181). After both Harris and Deputy Lummus left, “the last open opposition to the racial cleansing fell silent” (182). What followed next was a slow, quiet erasure of the events of 1912.

Chapter 15 begins by describe the work of journalist Elliot Jaspin, who documented the land sales of Forsyth’s black population in 1912. Though some of these sales were made at “something close to a fair market value” (183), the majority were “sold at artificially low prices” (183) or abandoned.