Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

Despite the fact that the majority of the violence in Forsyth was committed by white residents, “during the century that followed, generations of whites have continued to blame Forsyth’s recurring episodes of racial violence on ‘outsiders” (70). Further, “the further one gets from 1912, the more frequently whites have tried to deflect attention…to a specific group: the Ku Klux Klan” (70-71). Phillips notes the importance of the Ku Klux Klan’s development, and then explains that, “it is simply impossible that the black people of Forsyth were ‘run out’ by…Ku Kluxers” (72), since the Klan had not yet been created. Instead, the black people of Forsyth were driven out by “ordinary people” (73).

Phillips traces the geographic origins of Forsyth County, originally home to Cherokee people. As “white settlers pushed farther and farther west during the late eighteenth century” (73), Cherokee natives were forced to retreat; by the “early nineteenth century, the native people of Georgia were confined to an area in the north-west corner of the state” (73). Eventually, the Cherokee people were “disenfranchised in the courts” (74) and eventually completely removed from the territory. Phillips explains how this legacy of forced removal was, in part, responsible for the fact that “whenever someone first suggested that blacks in the county…[be] driven out of the county forever, the white people of Forsyth knew in their bones that such a thing was possible” (77).