I suppose we are. Good evening. Im the president for the Atlanta History Center and its my pleasure to welcome you all tonight professor, author and po et patrick phillips. Patrick phillips received ph. D from nyu. He was a fullbright scholar and a National Endowment for arts fellow and recipient from the translation prize for translation of the works of danish poet. His 2015 poetry collection was a finalist for the book award. Even though we are in the presence of a distinguished poet, tonight phillips will be discussing his first work of nonfiction, blood at the root. A racial cleansing in america. This work tells the disturbing story, by tracing the broader historical phenomena that led to similar violent around our nation, phillips tells a story thats tragically much larger than foresight county. It is a significant work in so much that begins to tell a story about a bunch of people throughout the country who can effectively erase from the historical record. Im excited to welcome a georgia native home, also after tonight and after this book the second most famous figure after Junior Samples [laughter] please join me in welcoming patrick phillips. [applause] hey, everybody. Thank you for coming and thanks for that introduction. I also want to thank Program Director for inviting me. All of you specially for coming. Im going to talk about my book which is called blood at the root which tells the story about the racial cleansing of county georgia and the place where i was raised in the 1970s, 80s. Its a pleasure to be invited at the Atlanta University center. It was a researchheavy project and in the Centers Archives i made a number of discoveries. I had a few eureka moments and theres lots of dead ends and false turns and i was here a year ago and found a couple of letters that really changed my sense of the story, so i felt a deep debt to the history center. Before anything else let me say heartfelt thanks to the librarians and staff and all the donors who support this work. You are truly preserving history for all of us and books like mine would not be possible without institutions like the Atlanta History Center. So the plan for tonight is im going to talk briefly, im hoping that this would turn into something of a conversation because there are a number of people in the room who have a personal connection to the story. I live in brooklyn and its a little bit different to do this in atlanta than it is to do it in new york in that there are number of people who have personal involvement in the story and we are going to open it up for questions later on. But before that, theres some things that i want to tell you about what a racial cleansing looks like in 1912 in north georgia and the way it uncoiledded and how i came to write the book, thousand whole project came to be. And i want to show you some pictures of some of the people involved. So im really a poet but ive taken a little vacation. A little vacation into nonfiction, but natasha challenged me about ten years ago to finally tell this story. Some people may know, natasha went to the university of georgia and so among my friends in the poetry world shes one of the rare people who when i said i was from the county, it actually registered. Natasha is an africanamerican woman. She was also head cheerleader at the university of georgia. I always like to mention that. [laughter] shes decided the only poet who had cheerleader. Shes a dear friend of mine. Natasha, her father was white and her mother was a black woman and when she was born in mississippi in 1964 her parents marriage was illegal in the state of mississippi. Natasha has written about this in great deal. I see people nodding that know about her work. The project started with a latenight conversation at a conference, at a professional writing conference in new york and natasha and i were riding in a cab and she really surprised me by asking the startling question that i didnt see coming, she said, why was it that she a southern woman of color wrote so often about blackens, yet i a white man from one to have most racist places in country and natasha was the rare person who actually knew that when she found out where i was from, why from one of the racist places in the country never said a word about whitens. Why natasha asked, did you think race is only a subject for black writers, she said, why do you think youre not involved . And i remember that vividly. A moment that really changed my life and it started me on the search for the truth about an old ghost story that i had always heard growing up in county. When i was 7 my family moved in 1977. Affluent suburb of atlanta. Ive been back to write this book and i didnt know where i was. I was constantly getting lost because i didnt recognize any of it. Back in those days 1977. There are people who remember. It felt a lot from atlanta. There were cow pastors and it felt much more of the appalichian foothills than sa bush bean saburban atlanta. There were no black people anywhere. Kids tole me what they heard from their parents and grandparents. A long time ago they said, this white girl got raped and killed by a black man and her body was found in the woods just a few miles from the house where i grew up. This why it was all white and according to my classmates, it always would be. Is that up to me . Hey. Yes, you may. The world learned that there was a place in north georgia where segregation was alive and well and white people lived like if there had been in brown versus education, no selma march, no montgomery busboy cot. Boycott. It kept all country all white from 1912 to 1987. Easy to forget now that the king day was actually rather controversial and a guy name Chuck Blackburn who had moved to the county from california and been shocked that none of his friends from north could visit him came up with a modest plan was to march 2 miles along bethelview road. The brotherhood march. The idea was to speak out against all intimidation fear that had reined. Africanamerican activists, a lot of them from the king center that were led by Jose Williams, one of the street generals and they were joined by a small hand of locals that included my mother, father and my sister. My sister was home from college and noticed a little ad in the local paper and brought this to my parents attention. The mob tells demonstrators with rocks, bottles and bricks and the first brotherhood had to be arrested. A lot of them were armed. The county police convinced the williams to abandon the march and they all got back on the bus and got back on 400 and got back to atlanta. A lot of very angry white people between them and the car and they were eventually load intoed a Police Cruiser and ridden back to the car and they drove home. I think my dad probably doublechecked the locks quite a few times that night. This is Jose Williams. Thats Jose Williams and john lewis leading the marchers in 1965. I found the photo moving in that theres josea22 years later. I was 16 that year. Like a typical teenager i was late to meet my parents and so i got there and i couldnt figure out where the march was and when i finally got to the coming square i started looking for my parents and i knew that the march was going to conclude at the courthouse so i went there expect to go hear hosea williams, finally we live in a county for ten years finally speaking about all of this. But i feel with a bunch of other young men and only when one of them held up, that i realized that i was not in the middle of a peace march but had stumbled my way in the middle of the ku kluz klans victory celebration. I thought i had imagined this guy, i remember this vaguely but there were blurry memorieses from that day. She sent me a batch of photographs that werent ever published and when i clicked on this one, i couldnt believe it. I remember this guy, i was close to where this photo was taken at the moment. There was a lot of racial slurs and a lot what we would consider bad behavior and there was a moment that i realized there was something unusual. That seemed out there to me. A week later people came to versailles. John lewis, gary hart was running for president came and versailles county was on the national news. Oprah winfrey came to town and filmed episode. She filmed an episode of her show, shes only six months in her show and filmed on Forsyth County. Once the media picked up the story forsyth my hometown became one of the racial places in the country. Fastforward two decades. We are going to fastforward two decades and i was a long way from my childhood in georgia. I was living in new york and after that conversation with natasha, i decided to finally see if i could learn the truth about that old ghost story. I call it ghost story because it was always told in the vague and mythic terms and it was hard to believe any of this was really real. It was a story about a murdered girl and a rampage by what image as Knight Riders. I wonder if the whole thing was a racist fantasy. Something kids like to talk about in the backseat of the bus when forsyth in 1912, an 18yearold woman who was raped and killed near the banks of the chatahochee river and her name was may crow. She lived where my hands lived, oscarville. A little village. This was me playing hooky. I was doing graduate work on the 17th century. I was bored and tired of writing and i was playing hooky but i was sitting in the computer terminal that had all of this information and a lot of things were coming online. It was about 2005. A lot of things were coming online for the first time and archives like the Atlanta History Center libraries were scanning all of this information and digitizing it and so a long with that was newspapers and the story that i had always imagined as mirky suddenly started to come into view. A link of the old issue of the atlanta constitutional and this is the picture that came up. I didnt know who these people were but jane daniel, the prisoners in front, jane daniel, her brother oscar daniel, young 18yearold man tony howel. Ed colins and this is ernst knox. Oscar daniel and we arest knox would eventually be hang for the murder. It was something i couldnt escape. These were the first faces of black forsythi had ever seen. I knew that it raised more questions than it answered. If two of those faces belonged to the teenage boys that would swing for their crime, which two and if they were accused of raping and killing may crow, who are all the others, all my life i questioned whether black people ever really lived in forsyth but now i was face to face with the truth or at least something much closer to it than i thought i would get. The image was with lies and bigotry and heart was no myth, it was a terrible reality. These were real people being led to real deaths at the start of the season of violence. They would lead to expulsion of 1,098 residents of forsythi began to understand how the tale had made racial cleansing only a legend. Like something that we never fully understand rather than what it was a deliberate and sustained campaign of terror. This is another photograph that i came on, that i came upon very early. That is jane and oscar being led to streets of atlanta where they got on the train and went to forsyth for a trail. October 2nd, 1912. But first look at the photographs which gave me hope that it might be possible to learn at last who the african refugees of forsyth really were and what happened to them in fall of 1912. I now spent years searching for every scrap about the ex interviewed descendants of many the black families adding their stories to a mountain of evidence showing not just that the expulsions happened but when, where to whom and by whom and in this case the devil truly was in the details and thats what i was after. This is a photograph of the children of jeremiah and nancy brown expelled in 1912. The book aims to tell the true story behind the legend i heard so many times and it speaks of a murdered girl, a public lynching on the town square and execution of two teenage boys an months of terrorism and arson that succeeded in closing borders for nonwhite for nearly a century. The book included county sheriff. Even if i didnt tell you, you can guess who the villain and who is the good guy, can you tell . I have been thinking about these two and when i look at the picture, oh, yeah, thats definitely thats definitely reed on the left. To me he he looks overmatched already. The books clakers included county sheriff who just a few years later found the local chapter to have ku kluz klan as well as a number of unexpected heros including a deputy who try today desperately to stop the violence and a major who held a lynch mobs on the steps of the county courthouse. The real protag onist are the African American farmers, field hands, ministers, merchants and servants who were forced out by the mobs. All of my life the people had been in absence. I come to know how heroic they carried on. He helped found the color Methodist Church and was a real leader in the community. One of the lives that i had kind of picked up that it was a monolithic very poor marginal sharecroppers and there were many people of like but they were also educated and propertyowning africanamericans citizens who were inmesh with the cultural of the elite white people in the county. This was a surprise to me. It complicated the sense of the White Community and the black community. Im hopeful that the focused story which is a kind of historical core sample drilling down through 200 years in the life of a single place night suggest way that is we can begin coming to grips with our nations history of racial violence and injustice. As i was working on the book, the truth and reconciliation hearings in south africa were never far from my mind with insight about effects of denial and healing power of the truth. Ive sometimes been confronted by whites in forsyth that i was, quoting dredging up what was called ancient history. I made the mistake of scrolling that far down. [laughter] but this is still there. Such people seem to want the reward of revolutionary Peace Process that rewards reconciliation without first paying the prize of actually turning and facing the truth. When i started searching in the surviving primary sources like the documents house and archives, i found again and again that the myth of racial cleansing contained omissions, distortions and often outright lies. Many of them designed to shield white tbrs the guilt and pain of what really happened and facing ancestors involvement in a terrible communal crime. I had always been told, for example, that the klan did this, but i learned that the original ku kluz klan was prosecuted out of existence in 1870s and not reconstituted until 1915. There are people who probably know the story, right. In the wake of the lynching, youll hear the mounting, Knight Riders i envisioned as a kid were the invention of film maker. It was the new quote, unquote, the new klan, modern kla, in that imitated the film and not the other way around. And the red crosses and all of that. But that rebirth of the ku kluz klan was three years in the future of in 1912. It is simply impossible that it was the work of whiteklansmen. I found a letter written by jordan, another one of those eureka moment after a lot of searching when suddenly theres something significant. Ruth was a 14yearold in 1912 and had been a classmate of may crow and after recalling of how all broke loose, it werent the klan done this, it was just ordinary people of the county. And how exactly did those ordinary people of the county managed to drive out more than a thousand of their black neighbors, i realized i had left my book back there. Hold one second. [laughter] im back. All right. And how exactly did they manage to drive out black neighbors, i found one startling example that a forsyth wrote to a governor of georgia and this is from a document that i found in the Atlanta History Center collection. Resident of forsyth was an old friend and after hearing reports of lawlessness. He wrote directly to the governor to make sure brown understood that the convictions of ernst knox and oscar daniel had not brought an end to mob violence. My dear gov, julian began, a very important matter i recall to tall your attention to is the protection of the citizens of georgia and specially of forsyth theres a gang that have run off about all of the negroes and they are bold in their operations. It seems the sheriffs are cowards and fearful. Julian told of one raid on a group of young women and infant children that were visited by Knight Riders only after whites maid sure that the adult men were away. They sent a young man up to see if the men were gone and asked if the women had any gun, when they found no pistols ordered the women to leave one with baby in arms and with pouring rain. They shot the dogs, taking all the furniture and piled it out in the yard and set fired and burned it, dogs and all. Julian clearly meant to shock the governor with the image of a young mother bathed in arms driven out in the storm as her familys whole household was burned dogs and all. He also knew that the governor would be troubled. Hundreds of acres of land will not be cultivated this year, julian wrote to the governor which will be a lost in taxes to both state and counties. Labor now cannot be found to hire or rent. Is this state of affairs to go on, it will end in race war if some check isnt put in outrages. The check julian proposed was simple. Pursue and arrest the offenders and prosecute them vigorously in the courts. While bound shared julians anxiety about financial consequences the governor was steadfast in view that this was a problem to be solved by local people themselves whenever possible not state or federal authorities, quote, the law abiding element browns reply to julian, will have to by concerted efforts run down these people and bring them to justice. That letter from julian helped me see for the first time that support for erm pulingses was not unanimous in the White Community as i had always been told and people like julian who recognized what was happening around them and sent desperate pleas to stop the attacks. Knox and daniels were guilty of killing may crow. I heard the explanation and people often claim that ancestors had no choice but to defend the white women of the county from a rampage by three murderist black rapists. 24yearold roberts was never tried at all. He was beaten with crowbars and i should say this, this is the same square where i use