Listen to Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, explain the events of 1912
Transcript
Patrick Phillips: What exactly did happen in Forsyth County in the fall of 1912? The start of it is like the start of these same episodes that happened a lot in the Jim Crow South. A lot of lynchings, a lot of episodes of racial violence, white supremacist terror, expulsions, they begin with an accusation of rape. And in Forsyth County, it was no different.
There were two separate accusations, they came close together within a week of each other. So, a woman named Ellen Grice ‘discovered a Black man in her bed’. And the sheriff rounded up and arrested almost all the young Black men nearby and a lynch mob formed and there was a real effort to seize the guys who'd been arrested. But eventually, that was prevented by the state militia and then just when the militia were being withdrawn, there was a second accusation of rape of a woman named Mae Crow. And the reaction was very swift and immediately Oscar Daniel, Ernest Knox, and Rob Edwards were seized. White People in the county were already in this hysteria.
Rob Edwards was dragged out of the county jail seemingly with the collusion of the county sheriff who handed over the keys to the mob and he was beaten to death, hung from a telephone pole on the town square. And almost immediately it turned from the lynching to saying we're gonna get rid of the entire Black community and over the course of September and October, there was just this massive exodus of families. And this was enforced for decades. There are these attempts where people try to cross the line. And again, the reaction is violent. And it's kind of wild to think that each time that happens, it's a different generation of people doing it.
The story of Forsyth County is the story of this culture of white supremacy that really did treat the county line like a kind of apartheid state. And that only really ended in the early 1990s. And it's still a place where there's, I think, 4% of the population is Black. So it still has a long carry-on.