Patrick Phillips – författare

In 1912, a young girl’s murder rocked the rural community of Forsyth County, Georgia and led a mob of whites to lynch a black man on the town square. Later, bands of night-riders declared Forsyth “whites-only” and sent 1,100 citizens running for their lives, slowly erasing all evidence of their crime.Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale, spanning the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the promise of Reconstruction and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. The story continues, including a violent attack on civil rights activists in 1987 as residents fought to “Keep Forsyth White”, well into the 1990s. Patrick Phillips breaks the century-long silence of his hometown and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that shapes America in the twenty-first century.

In 1912, a young girl’s murder rocked the rural community of Forsyth County, Georgia and led a mob of whites to lynch a black man on the town square. Later, bands of night-riders declared Forsyth “whites-only” and sent 1,100 citizens running for their lives, slowly erasing all evidence of their crime.Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale, spanning the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the promise of Reconstruction and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. The story continues, including a violent attack on civil rights activists in 1987 as residents fought to “Keep Forsyth White”, well into the 1990s. Patrick Phillips breaks the century-long silence of his hometown and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that shapes America in the twenty-first century.

This follow-up to Patrick Phillips's award-winning debut navigates the course of the male experience, and particularly young fatherhood. Like Virgil's Aeneas, the book's central figure is in the middle time of life, a grown man with an aging father on his shoulders and a young son at his hand. Phillips's plainspoken and moving lyrics add an important voice to the poetry of home as they struggle to reconcile fatherhood and boyhood, present and past, and the ache of loving what must be lost.