Up to the War Memorial Auditorium upstairs and the book signing, i encourage you to continue discussion with both authors once you get there so we will get started. Patrick phillips is an associate professor of english and a poet as well, previous book he produced, eulogy for a broken mechanic was a National Book award finalist. Todays book we are talking about is blood at the root a racial cleansing in america. Please welcome patrick phillips. Thank you so much. For the southern festival of books, thank you for coming. This will con turn into a conversation, questions and comments but a little bit about the book blood at the root a racial cleansing in america and how i came to write it and a little about the story. The book began with the conversation in a taxicab ten years ago when my friend who some people may know, poet laureate of the us but at the time she was not yet. Ten years ago we were at a professional conference and natosha and i were old friends but one night she decided to challenge me. I grew up in georgia, known all over the state as a white county. People in new york had no familiarity with it but natosha is an africanamerican woman going to the university of Georgia College a little ways down the road and this meant when she heard me offhandedly mention i came from this place she stopped, and turned to me and said we have to talk, when she knew the history and she said to me why have you never written about the complex racial history of this place you come from and the way she put it to me do you think race is only a subject for black writers . Do you think you are somehow not involved . That moment changed my life and started me on a search for the truth about the real history, and my parents moved from Northside Atlanta and as soon as we got there i knew something was strange, it is one of the 25 wealthiest counties in america, part of suburban atlanta. In 1977 when we moved there, a rural place of cow pastures and chicken houses but the thing i noticed even as a kid was there were no people of color anywhere in the county and couldnt help but notice my friends at school, many of my teachers, use for people of color was the nword and this open and overt bigotry and at a certain point i asked a friend on the bus what is going on here, why does everybody hate black people when none of them are around . That was the first time i ever heard the myth that started me on the journey of writing this book and i first heard it in the back of a school bus and what they told me was a long time ago a white woman had been raped and found beaten and bloodied in the woods and this was said to be not far from the house where i grew up, they ran out every last africanamerican in the county and kept it that way for generations and this is still true because in the 1970s it was notorious even a truck driver who stopped to change a tire was being set upon. The whole world learned about bigotry in 1987 and that was the year my family took part in the first civil rights action. Some might have heard of this. It made headlines all over the world, in january of 1987, by idea was it was the Second AnnualMartin Luther king holiday, and the law that was passed in the 80s and was hotly debated and a white man in verse i, he wanted to have a march to celebrate brotherhood, and still been violently they were very surrounded by this mob. My mother and father and sister were there, the leader of the march was Isaiah Williams and you will see him there, one of kings real confidants and sergeants called my wild man, my castro, so adept in the most frightening situations, leading to the selma march of 1965. One thing that shocked people when these images hit cnn was 1965, 22 years later engaged in the same kind of action and being met with the same violence, and unabashed bigotry. In the wake of the second march, 20,000 people, tried to speak out against all this. I was 16, and i was late on the most significant day of our lives and as a result i went to find them on the Courthouse Square where i built my first baseball glove and the fourth of july parade, when i got there i was walking towards the courthouse, and a megaphone clicked on. All these young men started chanting white power and i passed this guy. I thought i imagined this moment, a photographer sent me a whole folder full of images and when i opened this when i was astonished. Fastforward two decades and i was a long way from the graduate work. In the bubonic plague outbreaks in london, one night i was playing cookies for my dissertation. I was exhausted sitting at this computer terminal, how much power it had to discover things about the past and using it that way and on a lark i typed in precise county in 1912, the year this was supposed to have happened and the newspaper database, and up came this image from the atlanta constitution, Atlanta Journal from september 1912, these are the first phases i had ever seen, the first time the myth of a racial purge became very real to me. At the same time the picture raised more questions than it answered because i didnt know who these people were. Of headlines told me two of them accused me of raping this woman, slowly as i worked on this the old myth, the old ghost story started to become something i could find out in more detail and i became fascinated with it. This picture gave me hope it might be possible to learn what really happened i spent years searching for every scrap i could find, october 1912 when 1098 black residents was in fact run out by fans that use arson, gunfire and the first thing they targeted was black churches, black churches had been burned in the first week 2 weeks, the book i made out of this material to tell the true story of the legend i heard so many times as a child, public lynching on the town square, the Kangaroo Court trial and execution of two teenage boys and dont know if you can see it in the slide but second from the left is oscar daniel, on the far right, and he was 16 and the newspapers reported this calling them fiendish guerrilla type negroes. And they were very poor. And eventually convicted in a 1day trial, both found guilty. I find a letter, recounted how it was held over an open well and a white man wrapped budget growth around his back and this was the source of the socalled confession and it was attended by 5000 people. They came out, in the field where it happened, made a horse shoe around it, and picnic baskets and they celebrated this hanging. The books character included county sheriff who a few years later founded the local chapter, a number of unexpected heroes including a deputy who tried to stop the violence and set off a bomb on the county courthouse. This is the sheriff on the left named bill reed and it deputy on the right, this complicated my sense of the White Community when i was learning more about the victims of all this i was led to believe this was a unanimous communitywide action and opposition, gave loomis, trying to save a man named rob edwards from the lynch mob, and local courts, the federal judiciary and the governor trying to get people to stop this. The real protagonists of the story are the africanamerican families, farmers, field hands, ministers, merchants and servants. All my life they had been a mystery, a vanished civilization whose names and struggles i assumed were unknowable and lost forever but i have come to know more about who they are and how they carried on. This guy was the largest Property Owner among the families who were forced out and he owned 200 acres in the county and i traced his journey from emancipation is a 21yearold man to 1912 and in that time he started with almost nothing. He invested the profits from each crop and bought a little more land, he made smart deals but they were accumulated over four years of labor, the story was heartbreaking but once i started to look into the eyes of these will, even more. I am hopeful, it was crossed out of this image a long time ago but there she is. Children who accumulated this land, i am hopeful this story spanning 200 years of single life in the life of a single place might be ways to begin coming to grips with the nations history of racial violence and injustice. As i was working on the book, the reconciliation hearings were often on my mind with insight about the healing power of the truth and the corrosive effect of denial. I was frugally confronted, that i am picking up and forgiveness and reconciliation without first paying the price of facing the truth. It goes without saying you liked the book, took the better part of a decade to do the story justice, that this has been necessarily briefed but i set the stage for discussion and a lot of things in common and moving forward in time and one more slide, these are the children, bert oliver, another one of the Property Owners in these are the children of nancy, jeremiah, and the not the kid in the lab but the little boy in the middle named fred, i was in atlanta and the woman stood up and said i have a comment that is my great grandfather. This has been a wild experience, i am hearing from many now that the book is out there and i welcome questions and comments. Reading extremely good storytellers, i would like to introduce our next author, doctor jason morgan, associate professor of history, Hanging Bridge, racial violence and American Civil Rights history, his previous book was also awardwinning defending white democracy, making a Segregationist Movement and remaking racial politics, in 1965, proclaimed as new generation of historians, Race Relations, and if we could welcome jason ward. [applause] summer of 1965 in the wake of the Voting Rights act of visiting journalist interviewed a pastor in east mississippi in the midst of a Voter Registration drive, a local leader of Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in park county which is a rural area on the alabama border on the city of meridian. There were 0 africanamericans registered to vote in 1960 in clark county, and what is authorized, an estimated third voting age in clark county in the span of a few weeks and he is part of that effort and is interviewed in the midst of this, the recent kidnapping of a teenage civil rights worker who slipped away from the vigilantes before they reached the hanging place on the southern end which was at a bend in the river, a bottomless blue hole. They were dumped in the past. And escaped the same fate. The same summer, 65, a head start organizer visited the same county to meet with local black women interested in working for the new federally funded war on Poverty Initiative preschool program which was a cornerstone of president johnsons war on poverty and the Child Development group in mississippi was one of the early large agencies and she was wondering why more women hadnt showed up because these were good jobs, tripling or quadrupling your income you were a cook in a white home. Why had more black women showed up . This is what one local black woman said, you know how they are. They remember things, she told of a Hanging Bridge where two boys had been lynched in 1942 and four young adults, two men and two women rumored to be pregnant were lynched in 1918, she continued, people said they went to look at the bodies and still see those babies wiggling around in the babies after those mothers were dead. The following summer, 1966, a White College student from wisconsin stepped off the bus, was a summer volunteer and a local civil rights worker wrote into his car, drove south, turning off the highway off of a small town. And the rusty river bridge. And this is where they hang the negroes would i read about a bridge, and landmarks and racial violence in american history, and extends beyond the jim crow era. And two lynching six victims. Memories and mobs diehard. And i wanted to learn more about 1942. And the effective process, what patrick described, theres a lot of amazing discoveries along the way. Both of those can be a book in and of themselves. In the 60s the classic phase of the civil rights movement, what does it look like in brutal history, and it has to do with the fact, i went through grad School Without reading a line, a word in mississippi. Nearly any outsider visiting the county and they were few and far between, and john tumbler, a 19yearold white kid from wisconsin who shows up to volunteer for the summer. Once you get in the car, a young africanAmerican Civil Rights worker from that county. This is where they hang the negroes, could have been last week or 100 years ago. I wouldnt know from the way he said it. Folks who ventured into this county countered an environment where black mobility, black mobilization of Voter Registration, to head start preschools, provoked fierce resistance from whites up to and including violence. In august 1966, a few weeks later local police, highway patrolman and dozens of whites attacked a group of marchers rallying for support of an economic boycott of white merchants and the real economic leverage behind the boycott was head start with pulling contract for food and supplies and workers stop cashing federally funded paychecks and in the wake of this even more effective than the violence were the other strategies whites used to end the threat, curtail the threat they saw to the social status quo, economic status quo in a small town across mississippi and across the south but this range of options, defunding head start, railroading a local young black civil rights worker into the draft, vietnam, terrorism, intimidation, police harassment, tools, this range of options had always been around, propped up assistance, violence reinforced the system of economic exploitation, political control and we see this in moments of crisis, when is the status quo threatened . It was threatened in mcmxviii, the world war i era because of labor, mobility, northern migration in northern cities, world war i upsurge, civil rights activism and black protests and diplomatic imperatives and pressures of entering into a global war supposedly for democracy, specifically to this Hanging Bridge case this is one of the first times walter white later becomes head of the naacp for two decades had just on to work for the naacp, former insurance salesman from atlanta, the lightskinned son of equally lightskinned uppermiddleclass atlanta parents, and investigate this quadruple binging in 1918 by posing as a white man, a traveling cosmetic salesman. The other side of the track. In 1942, world war ii when the two boys were lynched you have another story of Labor Mobility that drives local whites crazy, they literally believe there black cook is quitting because she has money coming in from a husband working in the shipyards on the coast, this is some sort of insurrection. And a harbinger of the end of White Supremacy so Labor Mobility, black migration, black protests, all reflect this horrible act of violence against two boys who were the same age until 13 years for. It is the first fbi investigation of a lynching. And eulogized ernest green in a poem. The connection to a larger history, world historical significance, these are important and endlessly fascinating stories in their own right. What made this book a book . What makes this panel a panel . The violence doesnt stop in all its forms, book ended by a book, looking at an earlier incident since 1912, then it is reverberation in the 1980s, but remember this wasnt all Ronald Reagan and michael j fox. The violence doesnt stop, it continues in all its forms, sexual, economic, psychological as well as physical violence, the ravages of racial terrorism and the violence echoes in our remembering and are forgetting, thank you. [applause] thank you. We have time for questions and if you have time for questions the microphone on the side of the room, my right, if you can come and ask your questions from that position. Be change could you talk a little bit about your primary sources, 1912 interview people who experienced it but would love to hear more. It was a learning process. One of the things in 1912, it was a real backwater so these, a lot of people i was trying to find out about, the voices of the Africanamerican Community were so faint, but so few traces. It was not exclusively sharecroppers but the majority of them, many of them never owned anything, never put their name on the deed, never signed anything so the faintest traces even in the White Community this is a place in the north george mountains that is not in the center of things. I did a lot of diving into archives finding everything i could. Had one deck of the Georgia National guard deployed after the lynching and it turns out a very detailed report. The commander of the unit that was there with the National Guard, i found his annual report and thought it was a bust and appendix h of the 1912 annual report, this minute by minute account one of the episodes of the lynching and minute by minute account, things like that, i had a difficult job dealing with the newspapers because newspapers were throwing gasoline on the fire but at the same time they provided the only account of things, often triangulate the atlanta constitution and Atlanta Georgia in which was the first paper in a tabloidy sensationalistic paper, often checking one against the other, and another goldmine, a letter by ruth jordan who was 14 and a neighbor of macro, when events happened in 1987, it came back to life in her memory, she was in her 80s and wrote a letter to her son. I heard rumors about this and managed to get a hold of that letter, a 7page letter describing everything she remembered from 1914, then i used ancestry. Com to find descendents, there are ways, i could have written a book in the way i did 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 1