The author of this important and timely book grew up in Forsyth County, Georgia, an island of white supremacy for almost a century that remained untouched by the civil rights movement. How that happened is a powerful, complicated, and horrifying story of racial cleansing that writer and poet Patrick Phillips tells as a white man seeking the truth about his own roots. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton, $26.95) examines in vivid and often lyrical detail the events that led to the forcible and violent expulsion of virtually all black people in the county in 1912—many of whom had lived and worked there for generations—and the decades of exclusion that followed. Change finally came to Forsyth with the 21st century, but even today the legacy of racial cleansing simmers beneath the surface. Courageous, beautifully written, and rich in its detailed reporting, Phillips records a genuine but depressing slice of American history whose repercussions continue to be felt in our country today.
