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.
Chapter 17-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “The Brotherhood March, 1987”
In 1987, a local of Forsyth, Chuck Blackburn, proposed a short march “opposed to ‘fear and intimidation’” (207). This “brotherhood walk” (208) was both intended to mark the 75th anniversary of 1912 and “to coincide with the second annual—and still highly controversial—Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday” (208). Within days, Blackburn received a number of vicious threats from callers old and young. Blackburn “canceled the protest” (209) and a friend, Dean Carter, took up the cause.
Despite receiving multiple threats to their home, Carter and his wife Tammy were “[d]etermined to go ahead” (210), and merged forces with Atlanta activist Hosea Williams. As the newspapers and civic leaders responded with “annoyance” (210) and denial, a larger group of citizens began preparing “by loading pistols, tying lengths of rope into nooses, and planning a ‘White Power Rally’ for the day of the march” (211). The leaders of the rally “played on whites’ fears of [Atlanta]” (212), selling the march as the only way to keep Forsyth safe, secure, and pure.
On the morning of the march, January 17th, 1987, more than “twenty-five hundred whites” (212) gathered for the White Power Rally. Among the crowd was “notorious white supremacist” (213) J.B. Stoner. When a chartered bus of marchers finally arrived, including Hosea Williams, “an attack came to seem almost inevitable” (218). The marchers were acting in accordance to principles of non-violence, but the counter-protesters were “hurling anything and everything they could find” (218). The sheriff was at a loss for how to respond. Cops arrested many of the counter-protesters; a significant number carried guns.
As the Brotherhood March began to garner media attention, Forsyth was forced into “damage-control mode” (221), with many citizens still clinging “to the idea that the integration of the county was only a matter of time and patience” (222). A vast number of Forsyth's residents believed that not only was the “‘trouble’ the work of outsiders” (223) but that “there was no place more peaceful” (223). Due to the complete “erasure of Forsyth’s violent past” (223), residents felt that it was a natural thing to continue having an all-white county.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Silence Is Consent”
After the First Brotherhood March, Forsyth received a significant amount of public attention and outcry. Within a week, Hosea Williams helped plan a second march, with a much larger structure for support, including the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Georgia National Guard. The “Second Brotherhood March is the best-known part of Forsyth’s story” (225) because it received wide national and international press showing “more than 20,000 peace marchers to Georgia’s notorious ‘white county’” (225). In addition to a number of celebrities and public officials, Miguel Marcelli also returned to Forsyth to march.
Despite all of the positive press and public outcry, after the Second Brotherhood March, social life in Forsyth resumed with many residents continuing to deny that there was any problem whatsoever in the county. This was broadcast on the popular Oprah Winfrey Show as Winfrey interviewed a number of white people in Forsyth and one by one, they expressed a desire to “‘keep Forsyth white’” (229).
Williams and a committee began drafting a list of demands for Forsyth County to begin reckoning with its past. A biracial committee formed, yet when they submitted their final report at the end of 1987, there was “not one set of findings but two” (233). The committee was not able to come to any sort of compromise or decision, especially regarding “reparations for the victims of 1912” (233).
Though none of the demands of Williams’ committee were ever passed, “time has wrought many of the changes” (237) that they fought “so hard, and so unsuccessfully, to achieve” (237). By 1990, the Forsyth census counted 14 African Americans in Forsyth; by 1997, there were 39. But as “time, money, and economic growth slowly but steadily changed Forsyth” (239), more and more people began to move there; by the “early 2000s, Forsyth was among the fastest-growing counties in the entire nation” (239). At the time of Blood at the Root's publication in 2016, approximately 21% of Forsyth County’s population was people of color.
Epilogue Summary: “A Pack of Wild Dogs”
In the Epilogue, Phillips describes modern Cumming, where there are “more than a few black and brown faces among all the white ones” (241). Although Forsyth has now diversified, there is not a “single trace of 1912, or any acknowledgement of the racial cleansing that defined the county” (241). There are no memorials or historical sites of what happened in Forsyth’s most recent century to share with newer residents. Phillips argues that “if history is written by the victors, a hundred years after the expulsions the victorious white people of Forsyth have successfully written the racial cleansing completely out of mind” (243). There have been no reparations.
Phillips closes the book with a short description of the “Forsyth County Box” (243) at the Atlanta King Center archives. In the box are the tapes of “people who were…only little children in the fall of 1912” (244). These archives contain just a few stories of families who had been forced to leave Forsyth—one of the only documentations of the terror of 1912.
Chapter 17-Epilogue Analysis
Phillips consistently addresses the narrative of denial that pervaded Forsyth’s white community throughout the 20th century. By detailing the events leading up to the marches in 1987, Phillips illustrates just how deeply rooted the white community’s beliefs about white supremacy and white racial purity were. Two common outcries from Forsyth’s white residents were that the protests weren’t necessary and that the protests were outsiders causing trouble. Nevertheless, as Phillips shows, neither of these claims was true. Not only were the protests necessary as the impetus for a slower social shift, they happened through the efforts of outsiders and supported by local members of the community. Though Phillips points out that Forsyth still exists in almost complete denial of what happened in 1912, it is important that due to national exposure in 1987, the county and residents were forced to reckon, even slightly, with the legacy of their racial violence.
In the closing chapters, Phillips highlights one of the most critical arguments of Blood at the Root: The silence and complicity of white people is just as dangerous as their active violence. In the 1980s, Forsyth again faces racial tensions as the result of active violence; Phillips discusses, in addition to this, the ways that white people who were not active supremacists contributed to the ongoing strife by not saying anything or staying home. Just like in 1912, the silence and indifference of the majority of white Forsyth residents meant that people of color would encounter danger. Phillips again points to this in the Epilogue as he describes the astonishing lack of monuments or acknowledgement of any of the racial terror of the 20th century in modern day Forsyth. Without a public reckoning, it seems too possible that the same kinds of events could be recreated in Forsyth.
In addition to pointing out some of the complex issues facing Forsyth in the 21st century, Blood at the Root also describes ways that time and economic growth have finally shifted the county out of its all-white fixation. By referencing this towards the end of the book, Phillips seems to be referring back to earlier motivation of leading white citizens like Charlie Harris, who hoped to economically put Forsyth on the map. As Forsyth eventually became a more popular suburban area of Atlanta, the county was finally able to become more diverse—in part simply because the population increased. This leads to the question: Would Forsyth’s history have been different if Charlie Harris had managed to connect the county with the larger rail system? Could anything have stopped the white residents of Forsyth from so hatefully and violently acting towards their black peers? Though Phillips doesn’t directly address these questions, the bustling Forsyth he describes in the Epilogue is certainly a different place than the county in 1912—or even 1987.
