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. And, at the same time, my parents are fairly progressive and were activists. PHILLIPS: You know, I was horrified by it and sort of frightened by it. So that's really the first version of the story that I heard. 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 in their, 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 refer 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? TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Patrick Phillips, welcome to FRESH AIR. Terry Gross spoke with Patrick Phillips in 2016. It's based on his archival research, as well as his interviews with town's residents and descendants of the black people who fled in 1912. His book titled "Blood At The Root" is now out in paperback. ![]() His parents were among the civil rights protesters who, in the 1980s, protested against the county's continuing segregation. 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. And two teenagers, following a short trial, were hanged in public executions. A lynch mob attacked and hanged one black suspect. That 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. Little more than a century ago, in Georgia in the year 1912, the white residents of Forsyth County terrorized and drove out the entire black population, about 1,100 people. Our guest today is Patrick Phillips, author of a book about a nightmarish and racist chapter in American history. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross.
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