Patrick Phillips on Blood at the Root
b'Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today\\u2019s guest is Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America.
Published in September by Norton.
This is Patrick\\u2019s first work of non-fiction. His poetry is, I guess, his first love, and his Elegy for a Broken Machine was named a finalist for The National Book Award in Poetry. His other works include Boy, When We Leave Each Other and Chattahoochee.
His work has appeared in The NYT, WSJ and The Nation.
Blood at the Root chronicles a southern county in Georgia, Forsyth County, where racism held sway for most of the 20th century. The impetus that gave rise to this long season in hell was an incident that occurred in 1912 and which we\\u2019ll talk about.
Much of what is to a lesser degree still present in America is an attitude grounded in fear and anger and even now is being fomented in the current election cycle.
Whether we talk about Ferguson or Trayvon Martin, or the incident the other day in which an unarmed black man, his arms raised in surrender was shot to death, point blank, by a female police office, while he was being tased is really not the question.
Whether Black Lives Matter means anything to you as a motto or as a credo or as a symbol, or as an insult, what happened in Ferguson also happened in Forsyth County but to a degree much more evil and violent, reserving for the participants a seat in a much lower circle of hell.
The epigraph of this gripping tale is an excerpt from Strange Fruit an uncanny and unnerving work, perhaps best heard as sung by Billy Holiday and written by Abel Meeropol under the pen name of Lewis Allen in 1937.
Blood at the Root shines a harsh and unforgiving light on a time and place in America that we should all be ashamed of, yet the same horrible atrocities that occurred in Forsyth occur all over the world every day, some still by us. Where this leaves us, I don\\u2019t know, but perhaps we can gain some insights in today\\u2019s interview.
Welcome Phillip and thanks for joining us today.
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