Patrick Phillips reflects on Blood at the Root's lasting Forsyth impact

Patrick Phillips’ Blood at the Root turned Forsyth County’s 1912 racial cleansing into a national reckoning, and 10 years after its September 2016 publication, the book still frames how the county understands what was done in its name. Published by W. W. Norton, the book was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Smithsonian, and it won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

The history Phillips wrote about is stark. In 1912, an alleged rape and murder accusation against three young Black laborers sparked a racial purge in Forsyth County. Rob Edwards was lynched soon after his arrest, and the other two teenagers were publicly hanged after a one-day trial. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, white night riders then harassed and intimidated Black residents for nearly a month until most were driven out, leaving the county effectively all-white for decades. More than 1,000 Black residents were expelled.

What changed most after Blood at the Root was not the underlying history, but the visibility of it. Phillips has said he grew up in Forsyth County in the 1970s and 1980s and only heard legends about the lost Black community that once included ministers, teachers, farmers, field hands, tradesmen, servants and children. The book pushed that erased community into the open, giving the county’s past a documented place in national conversation rather than a whispered one. In a 2017 PBS interview, Phillips described the shock of revisiting that silence, saying, “First time anyone, including myself, had seen black faces in Forsyth County.”

What has not changed is the force of the backlash that helped define the county’s racial memory. Forsyth’s history re-entered national attention during the 1987 civil rights protests, when demonstrators were met by white residents carrying “Keep Forsyth White” signs and chanting racial slurs. That protest remains a grim marker of how fiercely the county resisted outside scrutiny long after the 1912 purge.

Phillips’ decade-long reflection shows a county still living with both versions of its story: the one that was suppressed for generations and the one that can no longer be denied. Blood at the Root did not close the book on Forsyth County’s past. It made that past harder to avoid.