Blood at the Root

A Racial Cleansing in America

Patrick Phillips (Stanford University)

$44.95

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Norton
21 October 2016

History; History of the Americas; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Social & cultural history; Black & Asian studies

"A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia, and a harrowing testament to the deep roots of racial violence in America.

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of 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 were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they’d founded the county's thriving black churches.

But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white ""night riders"" launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to ""abandoned"" land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.

National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and '80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth ""all white"" well into the 1990s.

Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century. 36 illustrations"

By: Patrick Phillips (Stanford University)
Imprint: Norton
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 244mm, Width: 165mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 627g
ISBN: 9780393293012
ISBN 10: 0393293017
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 21 October 2016
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Patrick Phillips is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor. A Guggenheim and NEA Fellow, his most recent book, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Phillips lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.

Reviews for Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

So timely and necessary-a powerful reckoning with the past. -- Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Native Guard and recent U.S. Poet Laureate The burden of Southern history lies not in what we know about the past but what we do not know. Patrick Phillips uncovers an important untold piece of history in Blood at the Root: racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia. What he reveals in this important book does not make this chilling piece of the past any easier to bear, but he does bring it into sharper focus, which is long overdue. -- W. Ralph Eubanks, former Librarian of Congress