Is this book about the Lake or about areas in America?
Book looks interesting and informative
Background:
“Do You Think You’re Not Involved?” The Racial Reckoning of “Blood at the Root”
Patrick Phillips' 'Blood at the Root' examines the lasting effects of racial cleansing
Nearly fifteen years ago, the poets Natasha Trethewey and Patrick Phillips were sharing a taxi in New York City when they began talking about their shared Southern origins. She was born and raised in Mississippi; he grew up in Georgia. Midway through their conversation, Trethewey said to Phillips, “I know about Forsyth County. I know about where you are from.”
Only those who know the history of Forsyth County, Georgia, can imagine how exposed Phillips must have felt in that moment. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented sixty-four hundred lynchings of Black men, women, and children between 1865 and 1950, and, although every one of those was a horrific act, only one is known to have inaugurated a decades-long reign of terror. That terror is what Trethewey was referencing when she said she knew about Forsyth County. “Why have you been silent on this?” Phillips
remembersTrethewey asking him. “Do you think you’re not involved?”
Trethewey challenged her friend to write about his whiteness, as she had
writtenabout her Blackness, and it prompted him to spend years investigating the lynching of a man named Robert Edwards, in 1912, and all the violence that followed: church burnings, house bombings, and night raids that forced out the nearly eleven hundred African-Americans who lived in Forsyth County at the time. For seventy-five years, almost none returned. Phillips published his painful survey of that history, “
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America,” in 2016