The New York Times Book Review - Carol Anderson
Patrick Phillips's book, at its core, is about the lies told over and over again until they become the truth. Lies crafted to exonerate white residents, who deployed terror, lynching and the law to racially cleanse all black people from Forsyth County, Ga. Lies proffered to explain why, despite the civil rights movement and the area's proximity to Atlanta, the county remained virtually all-white into the 1990s. Blood at the Root…is no redemption tale. By the end, it is clear that the white supremacy responsible for killing black bodies and stealing land and property remains, to this day, unbowed and unrepentant…Blood at the Root…meticulously and elegantly reveals the power of white supremacy in its many guises—be it active, complicit or complacent; rural or suburban—to distort and destroy, not only lives and accomplishments, but historical memory, the law and basic human civility.
The New York Times - Jennifer Senior
…an astonishing and thoroughgoing account of the event, its context and its thunderous reverberations…Blood at the Root is a compendium of horrors and a catalog of shame…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.
From the Publisher
"[M]eticulously and elegantly reveals the power of white supremacy…to distort and destroy, not only lives and accomplishments, but historical memory, the law, and basic human civility."— Carol Anderson New York Times
"Deeply researched and crisply written, Blood at the Root is an impressive and timely case study of the racial violence and historical amnesia that characterize much of American history. Phillips…is a gifted storyteller."— Matthew Delmont Boston Globe
"[P]rovides a fascinating glimpse into how Forsyth County…managed to stave off racial progress despite being only about 40 miles away from Atlanta, the base of operations for civil rights warrior Martin Luther King Jr.…Phillips’ book feels timely, unapologetically discussing the way fear, panic, ignorance and timing may have kept Forsyth County trapped in the past."— William Lee Chicago Tribune
"[H]umanizes its subjects and brims with detail….[G]raphic, unflinching, important."— Jennifer Senior New York Times
"So timely and necessary—a powerful reckoning with the past."— Natasha Tretheway, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Native Guard and recent U.S. Poet Laureate
"Nothing undermines social justice more than our collective ignorance about the racial terrorism that haunts too many places in America. Blood at the Root is a must-read, thorough, detailed, and powerful. It’s a story we need to know and never forget."— Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy
"This extraordinary book lays bare a telling paradox of historical amnesia and unforgettable terror. Behind the fearsome legend of Forsyth County, Georgia, Patrick Phillips finds more of America than we would like."— Taylor Branch, author of Parting the Waters
"The burden of Southern history lies not in what we know about the past but what we do not know. Patrick Phillips uncovers an important untold piece of history in Blood at the Root: racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia. What he reveals in this important book does not make this chilling piece of the past any easier to bear, but he does bring it into sharper focus, which is long overdue."— W. Ralph Eubanks, author of Ever is a Long Time
"Some would say that Patrick Phillips should leave well enough alone and keep quiet…But [his] voice is too honest, too brave, and too brilliant to be silenced. With a poet’s gift for music, and with a detective’s dedication to the facts, Blood at the Root faces the specter of a bloody history without turning its back on the hope that the present has brought us. If the truth set us free, this book will give you wings."— Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-06-08
A history of white supremacy's endurance in a Georgia county.In 1977, Phillips (English/Drew Univ.; Elegy for a Broken Machine: Poems, 2015, etc.) moved with his family from Atlanta to a small town in Forsyth County, Georgia, hoping to enjoy the simple pleasures of a quieter life. What the young boy discovered was "a world where nobody liked outsiders," most especially, and vehemently, blacks. The color line was drawn "between all that was good and cherished and beloved and everything they thought evil, and dirty, and despised." In an effort to understand the world in which he grew up, the author has uncovered a shocking story as heartbreaking as it is infuriating. Although in the minority, blacks had long co-existed with whites in Forsyth County, some as slaves, many as landowners and small-business owners. But in September 1912, after a white woman was found beaten and raped, virulent racism erupted, resulting in the lynching of one of three black suspects and, in the weeks that followed, the purging of all blacks—more than 1,000—who lived in the county. Night riders fired shots into doors, threw rocks through windows, demolished homes with dynamite, and burned churches. By the end of October, the black population was gone, and any who ever appeared in the county—through temerity or mistake—were violently run off. "Racial purity is Forsyth's security," whites proclaimed. Some black landowners managed to sell their property to whites before they left, but most abandoned their homes, knowing that their land would be taken over by whites claiming it for themselves. Throughout the book, Phillips successfully contextualizes Forsyth in American racism's long history. After Woodrow Wilson was elected on promises of "fair dealing" for blacks, he unapologetically enforced segregation. Decades later, in 1987, when civil rights groups staged a march through Forsyth, they were met with violence—an episode the author recounts with moving intimacy. An impressive reckoning with a shameful piece of the past that "most natives of Forsyth would prefer to leave…scattered in the state's dusty archives or safely hidden in plain sight."
2017 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, Short-listed
2017 ALA Carnegie Medal, Short-listed
