Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America Audiobook (Free)

A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth

County, Georgia, and a harrowing testament to

the deep roots of racial violence in America.

Forsyth Region, Georgia, on the turn from the twentieth century was house to a big African American community that included ministers and educators, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. Many black occupants had been poor sharecroppers, but others owned their very own farms as well as the land on which they’d founded the county’s thriving dark churches..LEARNING MUCH MORE about Blood at the main: A Racial Cleansing in America

But in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white gal. One guy was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teens had been hung after a one-day trial, and soon rings of white “night riders” released a coordinated marketing campaign of arson and terror, generating all 1,098 black citizens out of the region. In the wake from the expulsions, whites harvested the vegetation and took over the livestock of their previous neighbors, and silently laid state to “abandoned” property. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared in to the weeds, until the people and locations of black Forsyth were forgotten.

National Book Honor finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in stunning detail and traces its long history of racial violence completely back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his very own child years in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light over the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means where locals held Forsyth “all white” well in to the 1990s.

Blood at the Root is a sweeping American story that spans the Cherokee removals from the 1830s, the wish and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleaning. With vibrant storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century.