New Books In African American Studies

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. In 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to abandoned land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016)in America is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Recons