Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“Blood at the Root is an attempt to understand how the people of my home place arrived at that moment, and to trace the origins of the ‘whites only’ world they fought so desperately to preserve.”

Patrick Phillips’ intention in writing this book was to critically examine the place where he grew up in order to understand a period of history almost completely erased from record. Forsyth County’s legacy of being all white in the 1900s had a profound impact on its social, economic, and political landscape; Phillips traces these in order to understand exactly how it came to be that way. One of the most important thematic elements of the text becomes the determination with which white citizens were “desperate” to preserve their racist systems.

“I set myself the task of finding out what really happened—not because the truth is an adequate remedy for the past, and not because it can undo what was done. Instead, I wanted to honor the dead by leaving a fuller account of what they endured and all that they and their descendants lost.”

Though much of the book is a detailed narrative of the events of 1912, Phillips’ purpose overall is to begin specifically documenting the depth of the tragedy of Forsyth’s expulsion of its black residents. In the final pages of the text, Phillips quotes the archived, recorded interviews of several black people who directly experienced exile from Forsyth. Thus, the book ends in the same way it begins: honoring the people who lost their livelihoods and lives because of the white violence in Forsyth.