A review by audaciaray
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips

5.0

This is what a white person reckoning with his local history looks like. Wow. Phillips writes about Forsyth, the Georgia county he grew up in, and the racial cleansing (lynchings, forcing 1000+ blacks out of their homes, theft of black property) that white people did in 1912 and led to the county being maintained as all white for almost the next century. The research is impressive, as is his analysis of the erasure and denial of the violence that the community participated in during the latter half of the 20th century. This book didn’t exactly give me hope for white people as a whole confronting our history of violence, but it gave me hope for the possibilities of individual writings that do that work.