#61: Strange Fruit and Stolen Lives
Forsyth County, Georgia, is infamous for being\u2014for a remarkably long stretch of the 20th century\u2014one of the only all-white counties in America. This week, we\u2019re revisiting our interview with Patrick Phillips, whose book Blood at the Root is both a history of the county where he grew up and a personal reckoning with the \u201cghost story\u201d that he heard for most of his childhood: the racial cleansing of 1912, when white night riders violently drove all 1,098 black citizens out of their homes, and out of the county. But the people who pushed out Forsyth\u2019s black residents weren\u2019t Klan members: their identities might well surprise you.
Go beyond the episode:
- Read more about Forsyth in Patrick Phillips\u2019s new book, Blood at the Root
- View a slideshow of images from the book on our episode page
- Watch Oprah Winfrey\u2019s televised 1987 visit to Forsyth County, Georgia
- Learn more about Forsyth, and other black citizens driven out of their communities, in the documentary Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings
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This episode features Billie Holiday\u2019s rendition of \u201cStrange Fruit.\u201d Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
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