Blood at the Root Quotes

“By the end of October, the night riders had forced out all but a handful of the 1,098 members of the African American community - who left in their wake abandoned homes and schools, stores and livestock, and harvest-ready crops standing in the fields. Overnight, their churches stood empty, the rooms where they used to sing 'River of Jordan' and 'Go Down Moses' now suddenly, eerily quiet.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“Faint traces of other black churches are tucked away in handwritten ledgers at the state archives at Morrow; in the collections at the University of Georgia in Athens; even in the basement of the Forsyth courthouse, where a cardboard box atop a metal filing cabinet still holds deeds for the land on which black residents once founded Mt. Fair, Shakerag, and Stoney Point - about which nothing is known but names and approximate locations. All that can be said for certain is that, again and again in the fall of 1912, white men sloshed gasoline and kerosene onto the benches and wooden floors of such rooms, then backed out into the dark, tossing lit matches as they went. All over the county, beneath the ground on which black churches stood, the soil is rich with ashes.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“The civil rights clashes of the 1950s and '60s came and went without changing much in the lives of Forsyth's quiet country people, who in the decades after World War II had been busy erecting chicken houses in their old corn and cotton fields, as America's expanding poultry industry brought new prosperity to north Georgia. The county seat may have been just a short drive from Ebenezer Baptist - the home church of Martin Luther King Jr. and one of the epicenters of the American civil rights movement - but with no blacks residents to segregate from whites, there were no 'colored' drinking fountains in the Cumming courthouse, and no 'whites only' signs in the windows of Cumming's diners and roadside motels. Instead, as segregationists all over the South faced off against freedom riders, civil rights marches, and lunch-counter sit-ins, Forsyth was a bastion of white supremacy that went almost totally unnoticed.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“Of that former time, all that was left were fleeting glimpses, visible only to someone who paid very close attention. Not long before she moved out of the county, Lewis remembered, she was walking up to a friend's front door and noticed faint inscriptions in the stepping-stones that led up to the house. It was only when she knelt down for a closer look that Lewis realized the path she'd been walking on was paved with remnants of black Forsyth. 'They [were] gravestones,' she said, 'from a black cemetery. Someone had dug them up and took them home, and used them for flagstones.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“Of that former time, all that was left were fleeting glimpses, visible only to someone who paid very close attention. Not long before she moved out of the county, Lewis remembered, she was walking up to a friend's front door and noticed faint inscriptions in the stepping-stones that led up to the house. It was only when she knelt down for a closer look that Lewis realized the path she'd been walking on was paved with remnants of black Forsyth. 'They [were] graveestones,' she said, 'from a black cemetery. Someone had dug them up and took them home, and used them for flagstones.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“When a new kind of 'race trouble' broke out in 1912, Forsyth was a place that had already witnessed the rapid expulsion of an entire people, and many residents, like Charlie Harris, had heard firsthand accounts from relatives who'd taken part in the Cherokee removals. So whenever someone first suggested that blacks in the county should not only be punished for the murder of Mae Crow but driven out of the county forever, the white people of Forsyth knew in their bones that such a thing was possible. After all, many families owed their land and their livelihoods to exactly such a racial cleansing in the 1830s.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“If the mobs were not made up of masked Klansmen, just well-known local men 'with their horrible faces,' it is natural to wonder how those ordinary people first coalesced into gangs of night riders. How, that is, did a bunch of farmers decide to set fire to churches led by respected men like Levi Greenlee Jr. and Boyd Oliver, and to train the beads of their shotguns on the houses of peaceful landowners like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg? How did they summon the nerve to threaten the cooks and maids of even the wealthiest, most powerful whites in Cumming? Given that it required an organized efforts, kept up not just over months but years, and given just how much will it took to sustain the racial ban generations - from what source did all that energy come, and in what epic drama did these people think they were at last taking part?”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“The further one gets from 1912, the more frequently whites have tried to deflect attention away from the county's long history of bigotry by pointing to a specific group: the Ku Klux Klan. It's easy to understand the appeal of such an argument, since it exonerates the ordinary 'people of the county' from wrongdoing during the expulsions and implies that they themselves were the victims of an invasion by hooded, cross-burning white supremacists. The only trouble is that in the America of 1912, there was no such thing as the KKK.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“These earlier lynchings and near lynchings suggest that rather than yielding to a sudden, irresistible passion - as lynchings were usually portrayed - the men pounding on the door of the Cumming jail on Tuesday, September 10th, 1912, were taking part in a time-honored ritual. Many would have heard tales of past lynchings from their fathers and grandfathers, and when Rob Edwards was arrested on suspicion of rape, they saw their chance to finally join that grand tradition: to show that they, too, were men of honor, and no less committed to the defense of white womanhood.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“Having lived my entire life in the wake of Forsyth's racial cleansing. I wanted to begin reversing its communal act of erasure by learning as much as I could about the lost people and places of black Forsyth. I was determined to document more than just that the expulsions occurred: I wanted to know where, when, how, and to whom.

It was then 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.”
― Patrick Phillips, 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. 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.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

“Generation after generation, Forsyth County remained 'all white,' even as the Great War, the Spanish influenza, World War II, and the civil rights movement came and went, and as kudzu crept over the remnants of black Forsyth. The people of the country, many descended from the lynchers and night riders, shook their heads as the South changed around them. They read about the clashes in Montgomery, and Savannah, and Selma, and felt proud of their county's old-fashioned ways, its unspoiled beauty, and a peacefulness that they saw as a direct result of having 'run the n*****s out.' But now and again throughout the century, whenever someone intentionally or unwittingly violated the racial ban, white men could be counted on to rise up like they always had and drive the intruders away. Years might pass between such episodes, but each time it happened, Georgians were reminded that while the racial cleansing of 1912 seemed like ancient history, in truth, it had never really ended. In truth, many in Forsyth believed that 'racial purity' was their inheritance and birthright. And like their fathers' fathers' fathers, they saw even a single black face as a threat to their entire way of life.”
― Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America