49 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick PhillipsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Blood at the Root opens with a concise summary of the events leading up to the lynching of Rob Edwards in 1912 Forsyth County, Georgia, which was “nothing unusual” (xii) in that time or place. Yet in the nights that followed this particular lynching, “night riders…forced out all but a handful of the 1,098 members of the African American community” (xii). For “generation after generation” (xiii), Forsyth County was all white.
In order to explain his own relationship with these historical events, Phillips notes that he was “raised in Forsyth” (xiv) in the 1970s and 80s, yet “only in hindsight… did [he] come to see that [he’d] grown up not in the America most white people imagine, but something closer to the fearful, isolated world of apartheid South Africa” (xiv). Phillips’ parents were activists during the Civil Rights Movement and raised him to resist Forsyth’s racist leanings.
In this text, Phillips intends to “understand how the people of [his home place]” (xvi) could have built and supported their all white county for so long. As a younger man, Phillips began looking at the ways the “stories [he’d] heard were riddled with lies and distorted by bigotry” (xxii) and eventually, decided to reverse Forsyth County’s “communal act of erasure by learning as much as [he] could” (xxii).
In order to understand the severe reactions of Forsyth County residents, Phillips begins by tracing the initial events that led to unrest in the county.
On a Thursday in the September of 1912, a white woman named Ellen Grice “let out a terrifying scream” (1). It is impossible, now, to discern whether she screamed because of a “black rapist” or because her husband came home to find her in bed with a black man. Yet by the next morning, “all of white Forsyth was in an uproar” (1). In the county seat of Cumming, a “posse of white men were deputized on the spot” (1), with a man who “would play a central role in the bloody ‘race troubles’ to come: Sheriff William Reid” (1).
Sheriff Bill Reid eventually became a member of the not-yet-formed Sawnee Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1912, he was serving his second term as sheriff of Forsyth County. Reid served with his rival, Mitchell Gay Lummus, who lost the election. Within two days of Ellen Grice’s scream, Reid and Lummus “had arrested and jailed a teenager named Toney Howell, along with four other men held as accomplices” (4).
The five arrested were all “unmarried, illiterate black men who happened to live near the scene” (4); Toney Howell, in particular, was not from Forsyth, making him “conspicuous” (4). The evidence against Howell was “entirely circumstantial, and in 1912 the very definitions of words like ‘assault’ and ‘rape’ were kept deliberately vague and used to describe almost any incident involving black men and white women” (4). As soon as Howell was accused, most of the locals considered him guilty.
As the town square began to fill with “a group of whites… around the little brick jailhouse” (6), a black reverend, Grant Smith, found himself in the middle of it. Smith was someone who “white Georgians feared almost as much as a black rapist" because he was "an outspoken, educated black man” (7). When Smith figured out what exactly was going on, he mentioned to someone in the crowd what a shame it was that “so much trouble was being caused on account of a ‘sorry white woman’” (7).
The white men around Smith “froze mid-sentence” (7). In their mob frustration of not being able to “reach the prisoners inside the jail” (7), they began attacking Smith, whom they could reach. After the mob severely beat him, but before they were able to burn his body, Sheriff Reid and Deputy Lummus rescued Smith.
As these events transpired, Mayor Charlie Harris, an ambitious 39-year-old, “realized he needed help” (8) to keep the lynch mob at bay and placed an urgent call to Governor Joseph Mackey Brown. Harris' motivation was to get “Cumming on the transportation map of the South” (10) by adding new rail stations and lines; thus, beyond the obvious reasons, the threat of mass violence was important for him to quickly address.
Black residents of Forsyth County, most of whom were “illiterate sharecroppers and field hands” (12), were leaving a large church picnic. As they headed into town, “hundreds of whites from outlying areas were loading their rifles and shotguns and heading toward Cumming” (13), drawn by a rumor about a group of black rebels with “explosives” (14). Previous events in a nearby town, Plainville, increased racial tensions that year, making it so that “whites became convinced that they were now the ones in terrible danger” (16).
As a group of black men headed from the church picnic into town, they were “stopped in their tracks by the scene on the square” (18), where many armed white men gathered. The black men retreated, but the mob followed, ordering them to scatter; after this, the mob returned to the Forsyth County Courthouse where they “refused to disperse even after repeated warnings from Sheriff Reid and Deputy Lummus” (19).
Mayor Harris tried to calm the crowd, rapidly growing “louder and bolder” (19). Harris retreated inside, calling Governor Brown yet again for protection from the state. Recent legislature had given “the governor unprecedented new powers to intervene in exactly the kind of crisis that was spinning out of control on the Cumming Square” (21-22). Governor Brown tested these new powers for the first time by ordering “two elite companies of the state militia” (22) to head to Cumming.
When the soldiers arrived in Cumming, they were “authorized to take any and all steps necessary” (23). The mob of white men “quickly realized that defying the governor’s army… might well end with a bullet to the head” (24) and began dispersing. The prisoners, who had anxiously waited all day, were taken out of the jailhouse, where it became clear “that the militia’s orders were not just to prevent a lynching but to escort the prisoners safely out of the county” (25). The prisoners “crouched in the floorboards” (25) until they arrived safely in the Marietta jail at the edge of Atlanta.
The next day, Mayor Harris was relieved, describing to reporters how “perfectly quiet” (27) the town was. Unfortunately, Forsyth' racial troubles were hardly over. Some miles east of Cumming, “a woman named Azzie Crow was just beginning to worry” (27) since her daughter Mae had still not come home. Hours passed as Azzie’s husband, Bud, began searching for their daughter. A night passed before Mae was found with “severe head wounds” (28)—among other significant injuries. Although she was still alive, news of Mae’s injuries rapidly spread, and “many concluded that the black rapists of the county, emboldened by the protection of government troops, had once again attacked a white girl” (29).
Patrick Phillips' introduction to Blood at the Root makes clear his intentions to explore and explain a complex series of events that occurred but were erased in Forsyth County, Georgia. As a child in Forsyth, Phillips felt relatively unaware of the extraordinary legacy of racial violence that had permeated (and still somewhat invisibly lived on) the place where he grew up. Yet until late in the 20th century, Forsyth County remained segregated, and many white people contributed to white supremacist causes like the Ku Klux Klan. Phillips carefully traces the initial events leading to the flight of all of Forsyth’s black residents; rather than focusing only on the largest or most public incidents, Phillips notes other consequential political and social happenings that influenced the ways that Forsyth whites behaved.
Beginning in 1912, many of the early events in Forsyth were caused by white people’s fear, and the propagation of different racialized myths. The primary of these myths was one of the most commonly used justifications for lynchings in the 19th and 20th centuries: the rape of a white woman by a black man. Yet as Phillips helpfully notes, the impetus for much of the violence in Forsyth (as in other similar places during the time) came from encounters where there was little real evidence that such an act had taken place. Further, the person—or people—most likely targeted for the crime were poor, illiterate black men, as one of the most famous examples: Emmett Till.
The secondary myth that caused racialized violence was a larger fear that black people would rise up and take revenge on their former masters. Though by 1912 most black residents of Forsyth County would not have experienced slavery firsthand, most of them would have been directly descended from enslaved peoples. Despite this, many of the black residents of Forsyth and the surrounding areas simply wanted to work hard and build lives and wealth for themselves. These two myths were perpetuated by white people who were afraid though they were not in any real danger.
Plus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: