49 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick PhillipsBlood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “When They Were Slaves”
Though many of Forsyth’s black residents were “poor, illiterate field hands and hired men” (141), a large number managed to “thrive” (141) and were the most likely to have tried to stay in Forsyth through the violence because “they had more than anyone else to lose” (142).
Joseph Kellogg, for instance, was the “largest black property owner in the county” (142). Kellogg was born, like many black children, to parents who had only recently been freed from enslavement and were trying to build new lives through sharecropping for the man who had owned them.
Though white people continued to exploit black people, for the first time, the latter had “the right to protest the injustices whites committed against them” (144). In large part, Abraham Lincoln’s Freedmen’s Bureau enforced these rights, although many of the agents were corrupt. Eventually, a good agent, William Bryan, took over Forsyth, and began to enforce fair wages and treatment: “[I]n case after case, Bryan found in favor of black plaintiffs” (146).
Yet there were still many ways for black residents to be poorly treated. White residents continued to terrorize black people by committing acts of violence after dark. In addition, former slave owners practiced binding young black people into service—making them “prisoners…still enslaved long after emancipation” (148). When Agent Bryan was eventually removed from office, Forsyth lost an agent for justice. Despite all this, Joseph Kellogg managed to build on his parents’ success and, by 1910, presided “over a two-hundred-acre farm” (152).
Chapter 13 Summary: “Driven to the Cook Stoves”
After the double hanging, there was much conversation in Forsyth about what had happened. Many people were congratulatory, while some of the press critiqued Sheriff Reid for making such a “spectacle” (153). Worse, only a few days after the hangings, a white man was found attacked in precisely the same way as Mae Crow, meaning that there “was still a murderer lurking somewhere in the woods of Oscarville” (155).
As the public continued to talk in Forsyth, Buck Daniel’s family made their way to establishing a new life in Gainesville, where Jane—Daniel's daughter—“eventually rejoined” (157) them in 1913. Jane married in 1914 to a young man named Will Butler, and they “set up house in the heart of Gainesville’s black community” (158).
White residents in Forsyth, especially those living in poverty, meanwhile, found themselves with a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” (159). The foothills had become more useful territory, so the land previously occupied by black residents was “highly attractive” (159). Eventually, even Joseph Kellogg offered a trade for someone to be able to allow him to profit, even marginally, from his huge property in Forsyth, since the county “was no place for a black man” (160).
Wealthier white residents “continued to speak out against the violence” (160) in Forsyth, primarily for their personal, economic reasons. In 1913, Governor Brown expressed his distaste for the idea that “the white women of this State should be driven to the cook stoves” (161). Yet despite the common argument that “forced labor was essential to farming in Georgia” (162), new strategies and technologies began to emerge for both household work and farming. In one example of this, Strickland—the host of the hangings—publicly committed to doing all of the laundry in his household to spare his wife and daughters the task.
As Forsyth moved closer and closer to being entirely white, the government of the United States shifted when President Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913, implemented “Jim Crow codes in Washington” (168), and contributed heavily to the spread of white supremacist values and actions. When, in the years after 1912, black people showed their face “inside the ‘whites only zone’” (170), there were swift, violent reactions, helping to “cement Forsyth’s reputation as…Georgia’s most racist county” (172).
Chapters 12-13 Analysis
Phillips exposes the myriad causes of Forsyth’s black exile, leaving no faction of white residents exempt. Poor and working-class white farmers jumped at the opportunity to exploit the misfortune of black landowners, offering unreasonably low prices or simply taking over abandoned farms. Meanwhile, wealthier whites, though they protested, were truly only concerned with the economic repercussions of losing such a large portion of the labor force. With new inventions like the tractor and washing machines, these same citizens soon abandoned their outcry for technological replacements for the black labor they once relied on. Phillips emphasizes that many conversations happened privately, rather than publicly, so that on the surface Forsyth remained a bastion of white supremacy in turn of the century Georgia.
Through parallels to the larger political circumstances at play in 1912, Phillips explores the ways that the situation in Forsyth reflected wider values and decisions happening at the state and national level. In particular, Phillips highlights the two presidential terms of Woodrow Wilson, who enacted extremely racist policies in Washington and made decisions allowing white supremacy to flourish across the country. Though the white citizens of Forsyth County should be held accountable for their violent actions, Phillips continues to examine other aspects of the historical narrative to ensure that Forsyth’s situation is viewed in the context of the larger landscape of United States history. Perhaps Forsyth was the only county to manage to exile all of its black residents, but the spirit that caused those actions was present in hundreds, if not thousands, of other counties across the nation—in both visible and invisible ways.
