Database, up came a list of headlines that sure enough toll of an 18yearold woman who was raped and killed if the banks of the chattahoochee river, allegedly by three black men. Her name was made crow. Theres a photograph of her around 1912. 1912. She lived very near where my parents house was in a little town called osterville, a little village. This is me playing with dee, i was graduate work at nyu and the 17th century bubonic plague outbreaks. I was bored and tired of writing my dissertation, and so i was playing hooky but it will launch a city at this computer terminal that all of this information a lot of things are coming online. It was about 2005 piccolo things are coming online for the first time in archives like the Atlanta History Center libraries were scanned all this information and digitizing it. Along with that was newspapers. The store at always imagined as murky and unknowable and lost in time so they start to come into view. I clicked a link to lead to an old issue of the atlanta constitution. This is the picture that came up. This is from october 2, 1912. I didnt know at the time these people are but this is the prisoners in front, jane daniel, our brother oscar daniel, a young age in your man named tony hal. This is bad call 24, isaiah, an artist knox who was 16. The two boys here, oscar daniel and artist knocks would eventually be hanged for the murder. I didnt have any of that when i first saw this picture. It was something i couldnt escape. These were the first faces a black as i panned across the photograph when it raised more questions than it answered. If two of the face to belong to the teenage boys who were doomed to quote swing for the crime, which to . If they were accused of raping and killing made crow, who are all the others cracks all my life i question whether black people ever really lived but now i was facetoface with the truth or at least something much closer to it than ever thought i would get. The image made her realize what a legend i grew up with was riddled with lie allies and distorted by bigotry, at its heart was no myth. It was a terrible reality. These are real people being led to real deaths at the start of the season of violence that would lead to expulsion of all 1098 africanamerican residents of forsyth. As i learn more about this event i begin to understand how the tale stripped of names and dates and places at always made the racial cleansing seem like only a legend. Like something we had never fully understood rather than what it was, that deliberate and sustained campaign of terror. This is not the photograph that i came upon very early. This is jane and oscar being led through the streets of atlanta from the phone tower where they got on a train and what you forsyth for their trial. Again, the same day, october 2, 1912. At my first look at these photographs, which gave me hope that it might be possible to learn at last to the africanamerican refugees of really were and what would happen to them in the fall of 1912. I now sprint youre searching for every scrap i could find about the expulsions. I dug through Old Newspaper archives, majors in the basement of the candid photos, read brutal old letters and archives are the Atlanta History Center and interviewed descendents of many of the black families forced out, adding their stories to a mountain of evidence showing not just that the expulsions happened, but where, when, how, to whom and by whom. 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 brenda were expelled from forsyth in 1912. The book i made out of all the special 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, they Kangaroo Court trial and execution of two teenage boys, and months of terrorism and arson that succeeded in closing forsyth aborted to nonwhites for nearly a century. The books characters include a county sheriff, areas. Even if i did tell you, i think you could guess who was of the villain who is the good guy. [laughter] can you tell . I had been think about these two are very long time for ever found a photograph of them. When i look at this picture, thats definitely read on the left. To me he looks overmatched already. The books characters include a county sheriff the gist of years later would help found the local chapter of the ku klux klan as well as a number of unexpected heroes including a deputy who tried to desperately stop the violence. And there who held off a lynch mob on the steps of the county courthouse. Of course the real protagonist as part of the story by the africanamerican farmers, field hands, ministers, merchants and servants were forced out by the mobs. Alall my like these people have been an absence, a vanished civilization whose names and struggles i assume were unknowable, and now lost forever. I have come to know more about them than ever thought possible and come to know just how heroically they carried on. This is Joseph Kellogg was the largest black property on and county. He helped found the celtic Methodist Church and was a real leader in the community. One of the lies that i had kind of pick up going up in the county was that the black committee was this monolithic group of very poor, marginal sharecroppers, and there are plenty of people like that including artist knocks and oscar daniel but there were also educated and proper owning africanamerican citizens are deeply enmeshed with the culture some of the elite white people in the county. This was a surprise to me. It comes to my sense of both the White Community in the black community. Im hopeful this one very focused story which is a historical core sampling drilling down through 200 years in the life of a single place might suggest ways we can at least begin coming to grips with our nations history of racial violence and injustice. As is working on the book the truth and reconciliation hearings in south africa were never far from my mind, with her insight about the corrosive effects of denial and healing power of the truth. I have sometimes been covered by whites in forsyth were angry that i was quote dredging up what they saw as ancient history most recently in the comments section of the constitution which are made the mistake of scrolling that far down. This is still there. Such people seem to me to want the report of mandel its revolutionary Peace Process that rewards reconciliation without first paying the harrowing price of actually turning and facing the truth. When i started searching in the surviving primary sources at the document house and Atlanta History Center archives i found again and again the myth of racial cleansing contained omissions, distortions and often outright lies. Many of them designed to shield whites from the guilt and pain of what really happened. And from facing their ancestors involvement in a terrible communal crime. Ive always been told that the klan did this, but i learned the original ku klux klan was prosecuted out of existence in the 1870s and was not reconstituted until 1915. Speaking of a letter, there people who probably know this story. In the wake of the lynching of leo frank in marietta, a number of intersections between the store you will hear in the minute and the lynching of leo frank, i learned the mounting, night writers id always envisioned as a kid were actually the invention of filmmaker dw griffith. In his blockbuster movie the birth of a nation. When the film was screened in a land in 1950 it was the new quoteunquote a modern clan that imitated the film rather than the other way around. So the first night she did night writers came out i watched the film and thats when the pointer casts, the cross and all that cod,that comes out of his imagination. But that rebirth of the ku klux klan was still three years in the future in 1912. It is simply impossible that the campaign of terrorism and forsyth was the work of white she did klansman. Who then were those quote persons unknown responsible for the purge exother written by 80yearold ruth may jordan was another one of those eureka moment after a lot of searching when suddenly something significant. She was a 14yearold girl in in 1912 which event a classmate of mae crow. At the very end of her letter after recalling how all hell broke loose on the night of the funeral, jordan wrote it worked the klan done this. It was just ordinary people of the county. You can watch this and other programs online at the booktv. Org. Heres a look at some of the current bestselling books according to powell said the books located in portland, oregon