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 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Missing Girl”
Much of the eventual violence that would take place in Forsyth occurred as a direct result of Mae Crow’s injuries. Mae “went to school only a few months each year” (30), and often helped “her mother manage a household that included eight other children” (30). The last record of Mae’s life is her name recorded in the 1910 census. Mae’s family came from a line of farmers; her grandfather, Isaac, had owned “two hundred acres” (31), but after serving in the Civil War, he ended his life nearly “destitute” (31). Due to other economic and political circumstances of the time, like many other families, “in only a single generation, the Crows went from working fields their ancestors had owned…to being tenants and sharecroppers” (33).
After Mae’s body was found, there was quite a large crowd—including reporters, law officers, and “hundreds of whites from both sides of the river” (37). Very quickly the attention turned to a “group of black boys who sat watching all the excitement” (37). One of these, Ernest “Ern” Knox, an orphaned teenager, responded affirmatively to having owned a mirror that “had been found in the woods near Mae Crow’s body” (38). This was “seen by many whites as the smoking gun of the case” (38), even though it seemed strange that Ernest had “made no attempt to conceal” (38) that it was his, as a guilty person might have done. When the man questioning about the mirror heard “that the mirror belonged to Ernest Knox, he decided to continue their conversation in private” (38), where he threatened to hang Ernest in what is known as a “mock lynching” (38) if Ernest didn’t confess. This man is most likely to have been Marvin Bell, “cousin to the famed Hiram Parks Bell” (42).
Bell transported Knox into Gainesville, the seat of Hall County, in order to keep Ernest from being lynched in Forsyth. Yet once Knox arrived in Gainesville, a mob of Hall County men surrounded the jail, so a judge ordered that the “prisoner be moved for his own safety…to Atlanta” (43). Knox was imprisoned in the Fulton County Jail.
Chapter 4 Summary: “And the Mob Came On”
Tensions in Forsyth ran high after Ernest Knox's move to Atlanta. In particular, Sheriff Reid was upset that he had been “upstaged” (45) and was “under pressure to make more arrests…after a rumor circulated that Ernest Knox was not alone” (45) in the attack. Reid and Lummus found that a group of white men captured Big Rob Edwards; they immediately removed Edwards from the hands of the group, who had been planning to “lynch and burn him right there” (46). As Reid and Lummus escorted Edwards to the jail, they had to pass through a large assembled mob of people “demanding that officials hand over an accused black man” (47).
It was at this juncture that Bill Reid “committed the most incriminating act of his entire tenure…to simply disappear” (47). Later, he would lie about this disappearance, but in the moment, he left Lummus to deal with the mob. This was most likely a “careful calculation” (47): As a “future Klansman” (47), Reid made the choice that would most likely support the crowd in getting what they wanted. Despite his position as the sole person remaining at the jail trying to protect Edwards, Lummus stood his ground. Eventually the crowd was able to get past him, though, and Edwards was dragged out into the square.
The brutal lynching of Edwards was well-documented. Phillips notes that “there is no way to know whether Edwards died from a gunshot wound, a crowbar to the skull, or strangulation” (51). He was shot multiple times once his body was raised “into view high over the crowd” (51) in the town square. When Sheriff Reid reappeared, it was nightfall, and he ordered Lummus to cut Edwards’ body down and leave it on the lawn of the courthouse. In the morning, the town coroner reported that Edwards died “at the hands of ‘parties unknown’” (54).
Chapter 5 Summary: “A Straw in the Whirlwind”
As Forsyth became markedly more dangerous for its black residents, they began fleeing “south toward Atlanta, East toward Gainesville, and west toward Canton” (55). Matters grew worse when a white man’s storehouse caught fire overnight, prompting white citizens to believe that “Cumming was now on the brink of a black insurrection” (55). Yet despite the white community’s fears about this insurrection, black residents were far “too busy trying to protect their families to think about retaliation” (56).
Jane Daniel, Ernest Knox’s cousin, knew that to “raise her voice in lament…could have deadly consequences” (57). Her silence, sadly, did not protect her, and Jane, “her brother, and their neighbor Ed Collins [were] arrested in connection with the Crow assault” (58). Mayor Harris had prepared more thoughtfully for these arrests, mitigating the risk of mob violence by swiftly securing the prisoners' transport to Atlanta, where they joined Knox in the Fulton County Jail.
Sheriff Reid managed to spin the story to the press in a way that “now seems not just distorted but downright delusional…a white population in terror of an impending ‘uprising’” (59) despite the fact that black residents were the only people with any legitimate fears about their safety. Reid managed to also lie that it was “he who had bravely tried to thwart the lynchers” (59) who killed Rob Edwards. Through this concealment of the truth, Reid upheld his reputation as a dutiful sheriff and undermined Lummus’ narrative of actually having protected the prisoner from the mob.
With the prisoners safely in Atlanta, white people in Forsyth resumed their daily lives. Atlanta judge, Newt Morris, scheduled the next session of the court for October. As white residents waited, a new kind of “nighttime ritual began to unfold, as each evening at dusk groups of white men gathered at the crossroads of the county” (62). These night riders, almost entirely made up of local men (and sometimes children), terrorized the black community of Forsyth with violence—including shooting and burning. The night riders did not just attack homes; they also burned down five of the black community’s churches.
All of the white violence in Forsyth stemmed from the attacks on Ellen Grice, who was alive and healthy, and Mae Crow, still nursing her injuries. Yet by mid-September, many newspapers “felt compelled” (66) to falsely report Crow as deceased. Later that month, when Crow did die, the white community was outraged: she had served as a symbol of pure, white, feminine innocence, and the sight of seeing her buried was “almost more than the white people of Oscarville could bear” (67). That night and in the following weeks, the attacks on black residents were more extreme than usual, until almost no black family was left in Forsyth.
Chapters 3-5 Analysis
As Phillips traces the increasing white violence in Forsyth County, he carefully articulates the ways that violence was initiated as a response to a perceived slight or injury. In most of the cases outlined in Blood at the Root, white violence occurs after the white community experiences a collective anxiety, sadness, or outrage. In other words, white violence is a direct result of white discomfort. This is a critical thread of the text as it relates more clearly to modern conflicts caused by white supremacy. Though many readers—especially those not from Georgia or the South—might be quick to distinguish the kind of violence present in the 21st century from that taking place in Forsyth County in 1912, the same patterns are present in many examples of current racially motivated violence. In almost all cases in which a white person has murdered an innocent black person in the 21st century, the white person indicated that they were the one who felt afraid or angry. Phillips raises this important mirror for readers to connect their own lives and understandings to the lessons that the past can teach.
There are several ironies in these early chapters of Blood at the Root. Phillips frequently points to the complex relationship between poverty, landownership, and race in turn-of-the-century Georgia. White people like the Crow family might have experienced complete destitution as a result of the Civil War, while black families, after exiting slavery, might have been able to build some modest wealth through sharecropping and eventually purchasing land. Ironically, poverty-stricken white and black people who lived near one another would become violent enemies when white people began to attack their black neighbors with the subconscious motivation of being able to earn back things viewed as theirs: land and money. This perceived competition later allowed the same white people to lay claim to the land and wealth of the black neighbors they exiled.
A second irony concerns those living in 1912 Forsyth: who was and was not permitted to speak up for themselves. Black people in the county frequently experienced violence as a reaction to their ideas or thoughts; white residents were free to speak (and lie) as they pleased. Grant Smith, a black reverend murdered by the mob after he spoke the truth, is one example of this, while Jane Daniels’ arrest is an example of how silence, also, did not protect a black person. Meanwhile, a figure like Sheriff Bill Reid is able to say and do whatever he pleases—including misreporting facts and quietly allowing mob violence. Though more subtle, this is a critical incongruity in the social interactions and beliefs of Forsyth at the time: No matter what black people did or said, they were viewed as guilty, and no matter what white people did or said, they were innocent and powerful. Much of the narrative created by the press supported and likely perpetuated this skewed perspective.
