A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth

County, Georgia, and a harrowing testament to

the deep roots of racial violence in the us.

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn from the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. Many black residents had been poor sharecroppers, but others possessed their very own farms and the land which they’d founded the state’s thriving black churches..Read More about Blood in the main: A Racial Cleaning in America

But in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One guy was dragged from a prison cell and lynched out square, two teens had been hung after a one-day trial, and quickly bands of white “night time riders” launched a coordinated marketing campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens from the region. In the wake of the expulsions, whites gathered the crops and overran the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid state to “empty” land. The charred ruins of homes and churches vanished in to the weeds, before people and places of black Forsyth were overlooked.

National Book Honor finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in stunning detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back again to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light around the communal offences of his hometown as well as the violent means where locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s.

Blood at the main is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals from the 1830s, the wish and guarantee 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 is constantly on the form America in the twenty-first century.