All night, as Mae Crow drifted in and out of consciousness, searchers called through the pines, the sound of her name rising and fading into the drone of the tree frogs. There, in the woods along the Chattahoochee River, in the Appalachian foothills north of Atlanta, she’d been beaten and left to die, and now lay too bloodied and breathless to answer. Near dawn, as the first rays of sunlight dappled the gulley, a farmer who’d known Mae all her life came stamping down a narrow footpath. He stopped in his tracks, turned, and hollered for the others to come.
By the next day—September 10th, 1912—the Forsyth County sheriff had arrested three young black suspects. And while it would take two months and three separate deployments of the Georgia National Guard before Ernest Knox, sixteen, and Oscar Daniel, eighteen, were formally tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang, for the third prisoner, a 24-year-old man named Rob Edwards, death came quickly. When a rumor spread that “Big Rob” had confessed to the crime, a group of white farmers stormed the county jail and, according to one witness, shot Edwards as he cowered in his cell, then bashed in his skull with crowbars. Others say Edwards emerged alive, pleading for mercy, and died while being dragged from the back of a wagon, a noose cinched tight around his neck. As spectators streamed toward the town square, someone lobbed a rope over the yardarm of a telephone pole and hoisted Edwards’s limp body skyward. People took turns with pistols and shotguns, and each time a load of buckshot spun the mutilated corpse, the crowd of hundreds roared.
There was nothing unusual about the lynching of a black man in Georgia in 1912, and the next morning the sight of Edwards’s body, laid out on the courthouse lawn, seemed to satisfy those most hungry for vengeance. But a few weeks later, newspapers reported that Mae Crow, known as one of the most beautiful girls in all of Forsyth, had weakened and died from her injuries at the age of eighteen. On the day of her funeral, groups of white men gathered at crossroads all over the county. They talked quietly on the porches of country stores and huddled in the dusty thresholds of barns. At the graveside they held their hats over their hearts, eyes blazing as they watched Mae’s mother, Azzie, weep over the casket. They were quiet and respectful all afternoon, according to one schoolmate of Mae’s. But when darkness fell, she said, “all hell broke loose” in Forsyth County.
That was the night bands of white men set out on horseback, riding toward the little clusters of cabins that dotted the woodlands and pastures along the river. Using posted notices, scrawled letters, rifles, torches, and sticks of dynamite, they delivered a message to their black neighbors—including many they had known and worked with all their lives. The black people of Forsyth could either load up and get across the county line before the next sundown, or stay and die like Rob Edwards.
By the end of October, the night riders had forced out all but a handful of the 1,098 members of the African American community—who left in their wake abandoned homes and schools, stores and livestock, and harvest-ready crops standing in the fields. Overnight, their churches stood empty, the rooms where they used to sing “River of Jordan” and “Go Down Moses” now suddenly, eerily quiet.
The purge was so successful that within weeks there was no one left for the mobs to terrorize, and whites who had either taken part in the raids or simply stood aside as they passed now settled back into the rhythms of farm life. They shooed stray livestock into their own pens, milked their neighbors’ lowing cows and slopped their starving hogs, and at family tables they bowed their heads and said grace over the last of the meat raised by black hands. Eventually they picked the leaning corn rather than watch it all go to waste. And when, years later, the last remaining “Negro cabins” collapsed, they salvaged the boards and tore down the rotten fence posts that had once marked a border between black and white land.
Generation after generation, Forsyth County remained “all white,” even as the Great War, the Spanish influenza, World War II, and the civil rights movement came and went, and as kudzu crept over the remnants of black Forsyth. The people of the county, many descended from the lynchers and night riders, shook their heads as the South changed around them. They read about the clashes in Montgomery, and Savannah, and Selma, and felt proud of their county’s old-fashioned ways, its unspoiled beauty, and a peacefulness that they saw as a direct result of having “run the niggers out.” But now and again throughout the century, whenever someone intentionally or unwittingly violated the racial ban, white men could be counted on to rise up like they always had and drive the intruders away. Years might pass between such episodes, but each time it happened, Georgians were reminded that while the racial cleansing of 1912 seemed like ancient history, in truth, it had never really ended. In truth, many in Forsyth believed that “racial purity” was their inheritance and birthright. And like their fathers’ fathers’ fathers, they saw even a single black face as a threat to their entire way of life.
I KNOW BECAUSE I was raised in Forsyth, just a few miles from Pleasant Grove Church, where Mae Crow’s casket was lowered into the ground. My family moved there in 1977, when I was in the second grade, and I spent my boyhood and teenage years living inside the bubble of Georgia’s notorious “white county.” At first, I was too young to understand that Forsyth was different from the rest of America. But as I grew older, I realized that many people there lived as if much of the twentieth century never happened—as if there had been no Montgomery Bus Boycott, no Brown v. Board of Education, no Civil Rights Act of 1964. Instead, whites in Forsyth carried on as if the racial integration of the South somehow did not apply to them. Nearly everyone I knew, adults and children, referred to black people as “niggers,” and for the entire time I lived there in the 1970s and ’80s, “whites only” was still the law of the land. Only in hindsight, and from a great distance, did I come to see that I’d grown up not in the America most white people imagine, but something closer to the fearful, isolated world of apartheid South Africa.
In 1987, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the expulsions, a group of activists organized a peace march to protest the ongoing segregation of the county. The Brotherhood Marchers, as they were called, boarded a chartered bus at the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, in Atlanta, then drove up Highway 400 toward Forsyth. When they reached the outskirts of Cumming, the county seat, blacks and whites climbed down off the bus, lined up on a two-lane country road, and began the first civil rights demonstration anyone in Forsyth County had ever seen. Almost immediately they were attacked by hundreds of locals who had gathered in a nearby pasture, then flooded toward the road, waving Confederate flags and carrying signs that said, “FORSYTH STAYS WHITE!” Men, women, and children joined in a chant of “Go home, niggers! Go home, niggers!” and pelted the peace marchers with rocks, bottles, bricks, and whatever else they could find in the weeds beside the road.
When he discovered that many of the “counterprotesters” had come heavily armed, county sheriff Wesley Walraven warned the Brotherhood Marchers that he could no longer guarantee anyone’s safety and urged them to abandon the demonstration. The main group of activists reluctantly climbed back onto the bus, and as they rolled down the on-ramp and headed back to Atlanta, local whites cheered in triumph. Even march organizers like Hosea Williams, among the most hardened veterans of the civil rights movement, were shocked by the scene. Williams had led the first Selma march in 1965, and had survived the attacks of billy-club-wielding Alabama state troopers. Yet there he was, decades later, facing another mob of violent white supremacists. Twenty-seven years had passed since “Bloody Sunday” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but Williams knew what he was looking at in 1987: segregation was alive and well in Forsyth County, Georgia.
My mother, father, and sister were among a handful of Forsyth residents who’d marched in solidarity with the protesters that day, and when the buses left, they found themselves face-to-face with hundreds of men who, in the blink of an eye, had turned from a crowd of good ol’ boys and rednecks into a violent mob. Unlike nearly everyone else on the march, my family lived in Forsyth, and when Sheriff Walraven recognized their situation, he hurried my parents and my sister into the back of a police cruiser, where they hunkered down below the windows as men swarmed around the car, screaming, “White niggers!”
I was sixteen that year and had arrived late to meet my parents for the march. When I finally got to the Cumming square and began searching for them, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other young men walking toward the county courthouse. Only when one of them held up a piece of rope tied into a thick noose did I realize that I was not at a peace rally but had somehow stumbled into the heart of the Ku Klux Klan’s victory celebration. As I ducked my head and struggled to make my way out of the crowd, I heard the buzz of a microphone switching on. “Raise your hands if you love White Power!” a shrill voice screamed into the P.A., as the people of my hometown surged all around me and howled in unison: “White Power!”
That night, news stations all over the country showed footage of hoarse-throated men yelling, “Go home, niggers!”—followed by shots of Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and Coretta Scott King standing at podiums, condemning the violence and bigotry. How, they asked, nearly two decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and only forty miles from his birthplace, could the fires of racial hatred still be burning so fiercely in the north Georgia mountains? The next day’s New York Times featured the story on page 1, with a quote from Frank Shirley—head of the Forsyth County Defense League—that made it sound as if, in Forsyth County, Georgia, no time had passed at all since 1912. “We white people won,” he told reporters, “and the niggers are on the run.”
Blood at the Root is an attempt to understand how the people of my home place arrived at that moment, and to trace the origins of the “whites only” world they fought so desperately to preserve. To do that, we will need to go all the way back to the beginning of the racial cleansing, in the violent months of September and October 1912. That was the autumn when white men first loaded their saddlebags with shotgun shells, coils of rope, cans of kerosene, and sticks of dynamite—and used them to send the black people of Forsyth County running for their lives.
I FIRST HEARD the story in the back seat of a yellow school bus as it lumbered past the cow pastures and chicken houses out on Browns Bridge Road. My parents bought land there in the mid-1970s, hoping to escape Atlanta’s vast suburban sprawl and to rediscover some of the joys of small-town life they had known growing up in Wylam, Alabama, just west of Birmingham. The first “lake people” had come north after the damming of the Chattahoochee River formed Lake Lanier in the 1950s, and by the early ’70s young professionals like my parents were just beginning to transform the county into a bedroom community of Atlanta.
Cumming, Georgia, January 17th, 1987
When we moved in the summer of 1977, I was a typical suburban kid. But as soon as I started school in September, I realized that to everyone at Cumming Elementary, I was a city slicker from Atlanta. I’d grown up playing soccer instead of football. I could ride a bike but not a motorcycle. And one day when I pointed excitedly at a herd of muddy Holsteins, the farm boys all burst out laughing, then just shook their heads in pity.
I had entered a world where nobody liked outsiders. Everyone on the bus seemed to be sitting next to a cousin, or a nephew, or an aunt, and I noticed that a lot of them had the same last names as the roads they lived on. The Pirkles got off at Pirkle’s Ferry, the Cains at Cain’s Cove. And in the mornings, a boy named John Bramblett was always standing with his lunch box next to a sign that said “Doctor Bramblett Road.” Their families had lived in Forsyth for so long that now you could navigate by them like landmarks—all those clusters of Stricklands and Castleberrys and Martins. I still remember my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Holtzclaw, who lived out on Holtzclaw Road, saying at the end of my first day, “G’won now’n’ fetch yer satchel, child.” It was as if, having moved forty miles north of Atlanta, my parents had transported us a century back in time.
As soon as kids heard where I was from, their questions were relentless: Did we live in a skyscraper in Atlanta? Had I ever been to a Falcons game? Did I see a bunch of niggers there? Had the niggers ever tried to kill us?
I’d heard kids call black people “niggers” in my old neighborhood, but my father didn’t allow it, and I’d seen many times how that one word could turn him fierce. I also remembered Rose, the black woman who’d cleaned house for my mother, and I could faintly recall skinning my knee once when no one else was home. Wasn’t it Rose who laid a hand on my back and said, “Alright, it’s gonna be alright,” pressing my face into the cool white cotton of her apron? And I remembered how a dozen women like Rose used to gather on the corner by our house, then walk down the hill and out of sight—back to their own kitchens and their own little boys, in places I knew nothing about, except that they were very far away.
Sitting on the school bus in Forsyth, I understood that for the kids around me, the color line was drawn not between rich and poor, not between white employers and black servants, but between all that was good and cherished and beloved and everything they thought evil, and dirty, and despised. It was one “nigger joke” after another, and at first I was too afraid to do anything but smile when they smiled and laugh when they laughed. But eventually I got up the nerve to ask my friend Paul why everyone in the county seemed to hate black people so much, especially since there were none of them around.
Paul looked at me in disbelief.
“You don’ know nuthin’, do you, Pat?” he said, slumping down beside me in the bus seat. “You ain’t never heard ’bout the KKK?”
I started to say I had, that I had seen them at a parade once, and that—
Paul just shook his head.
“Long, long, long time ago, see, they’s this girl got raped and killed over yonder,” he told me, glancing out the window. “And when they found her in the woods, y’know what they done?”
When I said nothing, Paul spat in the floor, then broke into a wide grin. “White folks run all the niggers clean out of Forsyth County.”
FOR TWENTY YEARS, that was all I knew: a myth, a legend—or at least the faintest outlines of one. And I admit that long after that day on the bus, when I went to college in the North, I’d sometimes tell the story just to shock people. It was a kind of brag, about how I’d grown up in Deliverance country, in an honest-to-God “white county” whose borders were patrolled by gun-toting, rock-throwing rednecks with nooses slung over their shoulders. My classmates were horrified but fascinated, since the story fit every stereotype they’d ever heard about the South and confirmed their sense of being enlightened and evolved compared to all the Jethros and Duke Boys down in Georgia. Yet even after repeating it for years, after making the tale a staple of my act, I knew little more than I had as a kid, and nothing at all about the real mystery at the heart of Forsyth: those nameless, faceless, vanished people who’d once lived in the place that I called home.
By 2003 I was far from my childhood in Georgia and spending most of my time in the library, doing research on the bubonic plague outbreaks of seventeenth-century London. In those days, archives all over the world were digitizing their collections, and it was still astonishing to me that you could summon up old manuscripts and documents with just a few clicks. The more I searched the historical records, the more I realized that the Internet was becoming a kind of Hubble telescope, aimed back into the past. If you looked through it long enough, and with care, once faint and distant events started to emerge like clear, bright stars.
One night I decided to see what the telescope might reveal about the founding myth of my own home place: that old ghost story about a murdered girl and a rampage by white-sheeted night riders. I had always wondered if the whole thing was just a racist fantasy, but when I typed “Forsyth” and “1912” into a database of old newspapers, a list of results came up, with headlines that, sure enough, told of an eighteen-year-old woman named Mae Crow who was raped and killed, allegedly by three black men. “Girl Murdered by Negro at Cumming,” one front page read. “Confessed His Deed . . . Will Swing for Their Crime,” said another. I clicked a link that led to an article in the Atlanta Constitution, which slowly knit itself into an image. When it filled the screen, I stared in wonder.
I’d thought of the story of Mae Crow’s murder as a kind of tall tale all my life and had even questioned whether African Americans ever really lived in Forsyth. But now I was suddenly confronted with the truth—or at least something closer to it than I ever thought I’d get: three white soldiers in front of a train car, standing guard over six black prisoners. These were the first faces of black Forsyth I had ever seen, and while there was no way to know if they were really guilty of the “revolting assault,” when I zoomed in and panned across the photograph, I could hardly believe my eyes. Young, fearful, as alive as you and I, the prisoners stared back at me from the very twilight of that old world, and at the dawning of the all-white place I knew. As they peered across the century, frozen there beside the train tracks, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the image came to me bearing not just a secret but an obligation.
Atlanta Constitution, October 4th, 1912
As I read more about the accused, I realized that the picture raised more questions than it answered. If two of those faces belonged to the “Knox and Daniel” who were doomed to “swing for their crime,” which two? And if they were the ones who stood accused of raping and killing Mae Crow, who were the others? That teenager in the middle wearing a porkpie hat, his limbs growing so fast that his white shirt was already a size too small? What about the young boy on the right in overalls, resting an elbow on the thigh of an older, visibly worried man? And who was the lone woman, petite and fine-boned, who seems to be—maybe I am imagining this—almost smiling? Was it really true, as the headlines claimed, that she had helped “fasten the noose” around the neck of her own brother? And who was that big man in front: legs spread, arms gripping his knees, as if to shield the group?
This book began with my first glimpse of that photograph, and my realization that while the stories I’d heard were riddled with lies and distorted by bigotry, at their heart lay a terrible, almost unbearable reality. These were real people being led to real deaths, at the start of a season of violence that would send a ripple of fear out across the twentieth century. In the glow of that computer screen, I also began to see how the tale, stripped of names and dates and places, made the expulsion of the county’s black community seem like only a legend—like something too far back in the mists of time to ever truly understand—rather than a deliberate and sustained campaign of terror.
Having lived my entire life in the wake of Forsyth’s racial cleansing, I wanted to begin reversing its communal act of erasure by learning as much as I could about the lost people and places of black Forsyth. I was determined to document more than just that the expulsions occurred: I wanted to know where, when, how, and to whom.
It was then I set myself the task of finding out what really happened—not because the truth is an adequate remedy for the past, and not because it can undo what was done. Instead, I wanted to honor the dead by leaving a fuller account of what they endured and all that they and their descendants lost.