![]() And eventually it was taken up by Hosea Williams who was one of Martin Luther King's sort of right-hand man during the civil rights battles of the '50s and '60s. There was - it was the second Martin Luther King national holiday, and a couple of white residents of Forsyth decided to finally protest publicly the ongoing segregation of the county, and they launched a march that was called the Brotherhood March to end intimidation and fear in Forsyth.Īnd this kind of led to a real outpouring of, you know, anger among the white community, and there were death threats made to the organizers. That was really the first time that the situation in Forsyth gained national attention. Would you describe the march and your family's participation in it? It was a civil rights march basically challenging the whiteness of the community. GROSS: Then you kind of witnessed some of the aftermath of this story in January of 1987 when there was what was called a Brotherhood March. And I thought about these vanished black people, this whole community of black people and had always wondered, you know - as a child, I wondered where did they go? You know, how did this happen? What did they leave behind? Which of these, you know, places that I know in the county might have once belonged to them? So, you know, it was really a kind of long fascination, but it always seemed mythic and really unknowable to me when I was a kid. And, you know - so I was a little bit horrified by it, but I was also really fascinated by the story because it suggested this vanished world.Īnd so I always had the feeling that the place itself was kind of haunted. They're both from Birmingham, Ala., so they were the rare liberal and progressive white southerners at the time. PHILLIPS: You know, I was horrified by it and sort of frightened by it, and, at the same time, my parents are fairly progressive and were activists. So that's really the first version of the story that I heard and that would have been in about 1977. And it just went that a long, long time ago, there was a white girl who was attacked by black men and all the white people in Forsyth banded together and ran out all the black people. And, you know, they told me this story and in there, you know - in the kids version, it was very mythic and kind of legendary. And when I asked kids on the bus why that was, and, you know, I had heard lots of racist jokes and people referred to black folks with the N-word almost entirely.Īnd so I asked, you know, other kids on the bus how this - why this was. ![]() You know, I had noticed that there were no black people in the county compared to my old neighborhood in Atlanta. And so I was a new kid in a very rural county, and it was something that I heard on the school bus riding to school. My parents moved from suburban Atlanta to Forsyth County which is about 30 miles north. ![]() PATRICK PHILLIPS: That's a story that I first heard when I was 7 years old. When did you realize that you lived in a town that had driven out all the black people in an act that you now describe as racial cleansing? Phillips' new book "Blood At The Root" is based on his archival research as well as his interviews with townspeople and with descendants of the black people who fled in 1912. His parents were among the civil rights protesters who in the 1980s protested against the county's continuing segregation. My guest Patrick Phillips is one of the white people who grew up in this county when it was still all white, and people of color were definitely not welcome. Two teenagers were hanged in public executions following a short trial. A lynch mob attacked and hanged one black suspect. This was the white response to two incidents - the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man and the rape and beating of a young white woman who died of her injuries. It's about what happened in Forsyth County, Ga., in 1912 when white mobs terrorized and drove out the entire black population, about 1,100 people. One of the nightmarish racist chapters of American history is documented in a new book by my guest Patrick Phillips.
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