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A Racial Cleansing in America
by Patrick Phillips
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My mother, father, and sister were among a handful of Forsyth residents who'd marched in solidarity with the protesters that day, and when the buses left, they found themselves face-to-face with hundreds of men who, in the blink of an eye, had turned from a crowd of good ol' boys and rednecks into a violent mob. Unlike nearly everyone else on the march, my family lived in Forsyth, and when Sheriff Walraven recognized their situation, he hurried my parents and my sister into the back of a police cruiser, where they hunkered down below the windows as men swarmed around the car, screaming, "White niggers!"
I was sixteen that year and had arrived late to meet my parents for the march. When I finally got to the Cumming square and began searching for them, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other young men walking toward the county courthouse. Only when one of them held up a piece of rope tied
into a thick noose did I realize that I was not at a peace rally but had somehow stumbled into the heart of the Ku Klux Klan's victory celebration. As I ducked my head and struggled to make my way out of the crowd, I heard the buzz of a microphone switching on. "Raise your hands if you love White Power!" a shrill voice screamed into the P.A., as the people of my hometown surged all around me and howled in unison: "White Power!"
That night, news stations all over the country showed footage of hoarse-throated men yelling, "Go home, niggers!"—followed by shots of Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and Coretta Scott King standing at podiums, condemning the violence and bigotry. How, they asked, nearly two decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and only forty miles from his birthplace, could the fires of racial hatred still be burning so fiercely in the north Georgia mountains? The next day's New York Times featured the story on page 1, with a quote from Frank Shirley—head of the Forsyth County Defense League—that made it sound as if, in Forsyth County, Georgia, no time had passed at all since 1912. "We white people won," he told reporters, "and the niggers are on the run."
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. To do that, we will need to go all the way back to the beginning of the racial cleansing, in the violent months of September and October 1912. That was the autumn when white men first loaded their saddlebags with shotgun shells, coils of rope, cans of kerosene, and sticks of dynamite—and used them to send the black people of Forsyth County running for their lives.
I FIRST HEARD the story in the back seat of a yellow school bus as it lumbered past the cow pastures and chicken houses out on Browns Bridge Road. My parents bought land there in the mid-1970s, hoping to escape Atlanta's vast suburban sprawl and to rediscover some of the joys of small-town life they had known growing up in Wylam, Alabama, just west of Birmingham. The first "lake people" had come north after the damming of the Chattahoochee River formed Lake Lanier in the 1950s, and by the early '70s young professionals like my parents were just beginning to transform the county into a bedroom community of Atlanta.
When we moved in the summer of 1977, I was a typical suburban kid. But as soon as I started school in September, I realized that to everyone at Cumming Elementary, I was a city slicker from Atlanta. I'd grown up playing soccer instead of football. I could ride
a bike but not a motorcycle. And one day when I pointed excitedly at a herd of muddy Holsteins, the farm boys all burst out laughing, then just shook their heads in pity.
I had entered a world where nobody liked outsiders. Everyone on the bus seemed to be sitting next to a cousin, or a nephew, or an aunt, and I noticed that a lot of them had the same last names as the roads they lived on. The Pirkles got off at Pirkle's Ferry, the Cains at Cain's Cove. And in the mornings, a boy named John Bramblett was always standing with his lunch box next to a sign that said "Doctor Bramblett Road." Their families had lived in Forsyth for so long that now you could navigate by them like landmarks—all those clusters of Stricklands and Castleberrys and Martins. I still remember my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Holtzclaw, who lived out on Holtzclaw Road, saying at the end of my first day, "G'won now'n' fetch yer satchel, child." It was as if, having moved forty miles north of Atlanta, my parents had transported us a century back in time.
Excerpted from Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips. Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Phillips. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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