Nearly fifteen years ago, the poets Natasha Trethewey and Patrick Phillips were sharing a taxi in New York City when they began talking about their shared Southern origins. She was born and raised in Mississippi; he grew up in Georgia. Midway through their conversation, Trethewey said to Phillips, “I know about Forsyth County. I know about where you are from.”
Only those who know the history of Forsyth County, Georgia, can imagine how exposed Phillips must have felt in that moment. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented sixty-four hundred lynchings of Black men, women, and children between 1865 and 1950, and, although every one of those was a horrific act, only one is known to have inaugurated a decades-long reign of terror. That terror is what Trethewey was referencing when she said she knew about Forsyth County. “Why have you been silent on this?” Phillips remembers Trethewey asking him. “Do you think you’re not involved?”
Trethewey challenged her friend to write about his whiteness, as she had written about her Blackness, and it prompted him to spend years investigating the lynching of a man named Robert Edwards, in 1912, and all the violence that followed: church burnings, house bombings, and night raids that forced out the nearly eleven hundred African-Americans who lived in Forsyth County at the time. For seventy-five years, almost none returned. Phillips published his painful survey of that history, “Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America,” in 2016, and I have thought about it often in the weeks since the murder of George Floyd, especially while watching the wave of protests—in large cities and small towns and everywhere in between—that have followed. Phillips’s book provides a model for the kind of reckoning that other Americans should undertake, wherever they call home.
When Mae Crow’s friends finally found her, on September 9, 1912, she was barely alive. The eighteen-year-old had been raped and beaten and left in a patch of pine trees along the banks of the Chattahoochee River. The young white woman was only a mile from where she lived with her parents and eight siblings, and not quite twenty miles from where, a few days before, another young white woman said that a Black man had tried to rape her. The fear and fury provoked by that first alleged attack animated the community’s reaction to the second. Crow had gone missing on a Sunday, and was found early on Monday morning. By Tuesday, with no evidence and no witnesses, two African-Americans had been arrested: Ernest Knox, who was sixteen years old, and Robert Edwards, who was twenty-four.
Edwards did not live to see Wednesday. Knox was arrested first, but, after being threatened with a mock lynching, he professed guilt, and was turned over to the sheriff in a neighboring county. Edwards, who was known as Big Rob, was arrested later, on Tuesday morning, and taken directly to the county seat of Cumming, where a mob of two thousand locals awaited him. Unable to attack Knox, who was protected in a fortified jail, in Fulton County, known as the Tower, the vigilantes fixated on Edwards. It is not known whether he died from the blows of a crowbar to his head or from the bullets and buckshot that were fired at him, but Edwards’s bruised and bloodied body was dragged from the jail and then hanged from a telephone pole in the town square.
Edwards was kidnapped in the light of day, but, after that, the violence in Forsyth County took place almost entirely in darkness. This was not out of necessity but convenience: by day, the men who terrorized the county’s African-American residents were busy farming their fields and trading their crops, picnicking with their families and worshipping in their churches. At night, without fear of private retaliation or legal punishment, they waged their race war, gathering up torches, kerosene, gasoline, bullets, shotgun shells, rocks, and sticks of dynamite, then setting off for the cabins where African-Americans lived along the Chattahoochee River, at the base of the Sawnee Mountain, and down around Big Creek.
The lynching of Robert Edwards did not appease them; it only made them more audacious. They attacked whole African-American families, and, eventually, the few white landowners who dared to protect them. Within weeks, all but a handful of the African-Americans listed on the 1910 census of Forsyth County had fled. These refugees were mostly field hands and sharecroppers, who took what they could in their wagons, but some were landowners, who hurriedly tried to sell their property for a fraction of what it was worth. One second-generation farmer, Joseph Kellogg, offered his two hundred acres in Forsyth County anonymously for cash or trade in an Atlanta newspaper. Thirty-four African-American landowners who appeared in the tax records for 1912 disappear thereafter without recording a sale. Teachers walked away from their schoolhouses, and churches were left empty. White neighbors harvested abandoned crops without apology or compensation, stole what horses, cows, and hogs were left unattended, and plundered property for fence posts, house timbers, and barn boards with impunity. Even the dead were run out of town: headstones from Black cemeteries were taken and made into flagstones for white property owners, their inscriptions erased with every step.
This was not the first racial cleansing in Forsyth County. Two centuries before, the Cherokee Nation had been pushed by European settlers into the northwestern corner of Georgia, compressed into a tiny territory in which, improbably, they were thriving. Thousands of Cherokees had built houses and schools, shops and sawmills, a council house and court building, and even a print shop for the first indigenous newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. Their precarious peace ended in 1828, when gold was found in the proverbial hills. (The phrase “them thar hills” is a corruption of a local assayer’s claim that there were “millions” in Georgia’s Crown Mountain.) The resulting gold rush was the motivation for another forced relocation—one that ended eight hundred miles west, in Oklahoma.
The end point of the Trail of Tears is well known, but its origins in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains goes mostly unmarked. Were there more memorials to the event, some of them would stand in Forsyth County. The grandfathers of the men who would lynch Robert Edwards often stole the livestock of Cherokees, who were so disenfranchised that they could bring no charges against the thieves. When the tribe sought redress with the federal government, the Supreme Court ruled, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, that they lacked standing to bring such a suit. The state itself stole Cherokee farms for land lotteries, after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and following the Treaty of New Echota, in 1835, the remaining indigenous families were forced out of the state entirely and hunted down if they tried to remain on tribal land.
Whites used vigilante violence to assert their supremacy, and then used the law and the criminal-justice system to augment it. History can be falsely imagined as a clash of villains and heroes, with virtue concentrated in just a few people, and vice in even fewer, but what happened in Forsyth County was more than a story of individual malice. Many witnessed the deprivation of rights, plenty benefitted from the theft of property, and institutions themselves became complicit in the crimes. Narrating the events of 1912 in Forsyth County as an inventory of nightly violence ignores the daily actions and inactions of elected city, county, and state officials, who failed to enforce the laws that should have punished the perpetrators and protected the victims. Even after Robert Edwards was lynched for assaulting Mae Crow, the county sheriff continued to interrogate suspects and arrest others for her assault. Two of those arrested—Knox and his eighteen-year-old cousin Oscar Daniel—were found guilty after a jury spent a collective hour and nineteen minutes reviewing their cases. Their executions were ordered to be private, but, the night before the hangings, a mob burned down the fence around the gallows. Five thousand people watched as the teen-agers were hanged.
While lynchings were not rare, the violence in Forsyth County was unusual for its thoroughness. By contrast, at the same time that the county was conducting its purge, a neighboring county was demonstrating how such terrorism could be quelled. Hall County received many of the refugees who fled Forsyth County, and it seemed briefly as though the persecution they had faced might follow them across the Chattahoochee River. But eleven arrests were made almost immediately, after an attack on a sharecropping family in Hall County, and those arrests were followed by convictions, which signalled that the violence that would continue for decades west of the river would not be tolerated east of it.
That local example did nothing to change life in Forsyth County, nor did other examples of addressing racial injustice that would eventually follow. Montgomery and Selma were only a state away, but Forsyth County’s extremism persisted for three-quarters of a century. Black maids who tried moving into the county with their employers were run off, and Black chauffeurs driving through it were attacked, over the protestations of their passengers. Meanwhile, the land stolen from African-Americans became more and more valuable, as professionals fled Atlanta for the suburbs along Lake Lanier, after it was formed by the construction of a dam, in 1957. The segregation fought by activists around the United States was so extreme in Forsyth County that there was no need for separate drinking fountains or schools; there were almost no African-Americans there to use them. In May, 1968, a month after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, white residents threatened violence against a visiting church group that included ten Black children, forcing them from a campsite; in the summer of 1980, a Black couple attending a corporate picnic was surveilled by locals all afternoon and later shot at while trying to leave a public park. Miguel Marcelli’s girlfriend watched as he bled from a gunshot wound, then listened as the white assailants laughed while she ran for help.
Marcelli, a firefighter who lived nearby, in Atlanta, didn’t return to Forsyth County until 1987, when the civil-rights movement finally made headway there. A local man planned a unity march for the federal holiday honoring King, which was to be led by the civil-rights activist Hosea Williams, who, twenty-two years earlier, had been at the front of the line on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma. But two citizens groups, the Committee to Keep Forsyth White and the Forsyth County Defense League, rallied thousands of counterprotesters, who, in white sheets and camouflage, carried rope nooses, Confederate flags, and signs that read “FORSYTH STAYS WHITE” and “RACIAL PURITY IS FORSYTH’S SECURITY.” Williams sang verse after verse of “We Shall Overcome” into a megaphone, batting away the sticks, clods of dirt, bits of bottle glass, and rocks that were thrown at him along the route, as fifty people marched behind him. He said that the mob in Forsyth County was worse than anything he had seen in his thirty years with the movement. “We’ve got a South Africa in the back yard of Atlanta,” he told a reporter for the Times, who heard one of the counterprotesters brag, “We white people won and the niggers are on the run.”
A week later, Williams returned with two hundred charter buses carrying twenty thousand more marchers, including state senators, Presidential candidates, celebrities, and even more of the country’s civil-rights heroes: Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, and Andrew Young. Not long after, Oprah Winfrey, whose national television show was less than a year old, taped an episode in Cumming, almost the entirety of which consisted of the host interviewing local residents—all of them white, of course—about why they opposed integration. The marches and the media coverage that followed inaugurated a slow but steady accretion of African-American residents: fourteen in 1990, almost forty in 1997, more than four thousand in 2010.
Patrick Phillips was a teen-ager when he participated in the second of these marches. His parents had moved to the county from Atlanta, with a wave of fellow urban professionals who left the city’s suburbs for more rural areas like Forsyth County. Phillips doesn’t use the phrase “white flight” in the book; he says his parents were seeking to “return to some of the joys of small-town life” from their Alabama childhoods. Ironically, a similar migration is what ultimately diversified Forsyth County, where, today, more than fourteen per cent of residents are Asian and nearly ten per cent are Hispanic. Still, in a state that is almost a third Black, just four per cent of the residents of Forsyth County are.
Whatever criticism Phillips spares his parents about their choice of where to live, he is outspoken about the context in which they found themselves. He has thought carefully about how his story intersects the long arc of racial justice in America. Like Willie Morris in his memoir of Mississippi, “North Toward Home,” Phillips renders without apology the racism of his peers, recalling how his schoolmates were all white and not embarrassed to brag that Blacks were not allowed in their county. It was only later, as an adult aided by newly digitized newspapers, that Phillips realized the extent to which brutality wrote and then was edited out of Forsyth County’s history. “I set myself the task of finding out what really happened,” he writes, “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.”
A poet by training, Phillips may seem an unlikely author for this encyclopedic account. But his three books of poetry are all full of elegies, and his facility with that form is one reason that he writes Southern history so well. He is also an adept researcher, tracking down newspaper articles, census records, oral histories, and photographs from this appalling period. But no amount of research can uncover what does not exist, and the absence of certain voices in the archives is reflected in “Blood at the Root.” Racism did not just inspire the lynching of Robert Edwards; it shaped the way that newspapers reported the story of Mae Crow’s assault, and swayed the jury that sentenced Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel to death. It even consigned the broken bodies of those men to students at a local medical college. It is hard to restore fullness to a story that was so cruelly and consistently winnowed out of it, and Phillips struggles to reconstruct the three lives lost and track the hundreds of refugees who were displaced. But absence can also be a kind of evidence, and in this case it establishes the efficacy of the erasure of Black lives.
Phillips earns his provocative subtitle, offering page after probative page of how this one county viciously and proudly institutionalized white supremacy. But he does more than dig up the bones of Forsyth County; he asks what to do after the digging is done. His book notes that there are no memorials on the town square for the lynched men, no portraits of Black leaders at city hall, and no markers for the Black churches that were burned. Public history like that is being undertaken around the country now. It was only earlier this year that Forsyth County collected soil from the spot where Edwards was lynched to donate to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, where it will be displayed in a jar labelled “Robert Edwards / Cumming, Georgia / September 10, 1912.”
Phillips also cites the list of demands that Hosea Williams left in Forsyth County after the marches: financial reparations for those whose land had been seized, an investigation into employment and housing discrimination, improved racial diversity in local law enforcement, and an exchange program for community leaders and teachers. “Twenty-nine years later,” Phillips writes, “Hosea’s letter looks like a blueprint for confronting deeply ingrained bigotry and for combating the kind of institutional racism that persists in so many American communities in the twenty-first century—from Ferguson to Charleston, Baltimore to Staten Island.”
“Blood at the Root” likewise reads like an archetype: not only of how a memoir can transcend the personal to become a study of politics and place but also how a scrupulous account of the past might prepare us to look more honestly at the present. A national reckoning cannot only involve looking elsewhere, any more than it can only involve looking at others. It must necessarily include looking at where we live, especially for those of us who are white, and considering more carefully the question that Natasha Trethewey asked Patrick Phillips more than a decade ago: “Do you think you’re not involved?”
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests
- The death of George Floyd, in context.
- The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
- Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest?
- A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
- The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments, and what comes next.
- The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
