MIDDLEBURY — National Book Award Finalist Patrick Phillips will discuss his recent nonfiction book “Blood at the Root; A Racial Cleansing in America” on Aug. 20, at 2 p.m., at Ilsley Public Library. The book explores the fraught racial history of his homeplace of Forsyth County, Ga.
In Forsyth County in the fall of 1912 a wave of white terrorism drove out more than 1,100 African American residents. Using archival sources, oral history, and his own experience growing up in the county, Phillips describes how Forsyth remained “all-white” for nearly a century, and well into his childhood there in the 1970s and 80s. This reading and discussion will focus on the process by which white supremacy is perpetuated, and the role of storytelling in the struggle for racial justice.