Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

Phillips, Patrick

ISBN 10: 0393354733 / ISBN 13: 9780393354737

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2017

About this Item

The item shows wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and works perfectly. All pages and cover are intact including the dust cover, if applicable . Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. May NOT include discs, access code or other supplemental materials.

Seller Inventory # BVV.0393354733.G

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393354733
• ISBN 13: 9780393354737
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

"[A] vital investigation of Forsyth’s history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America." ―U.S. Congressman John Lewis

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.

National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s. In precise, vivid prose, Blood at the Root delivers a "vital investigation of Forsyth’s history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America" (Congressman John Lewis).

36 illustrations

About the Author

Patrick Phillips is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor. A Guggenheim and NEA Fellow, his poetry collection, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Phillips teaches at Stanford University.