Transcripts For CSPAN2 Blood At The Root 20161210

I suppose we are. Good evening. Im the president for the Atlanta History Center and its my pleasure to welcome you all tonight professor, author and po et patrick phillips. Patrick phillips received ph. D from nyu. He was a fullbright scholar and a National Endowment for arts fellow and recipient from the translation prize for translation of the works of danish poet. His 2015 poetry collection was a finalist for the book award. Even though we are in the presence of a distinguished poet, tonight phillips will be discussing his first work of nonfiction, blood at the root. A racial cleansing in america. This work tells the disturbing story, by tracing the broader historical phenomena that led to similar violent around our nation, phillips tells a story thats tragically much larger than foresight county. It is a significant work in so much that begins to tell a story about a bunch of people throughout the country who can effectively erase from the historical record. Im excited to welcome a georgia native home, also after tonight and after this book the second most famous figure after Junior Samples [laughter] please join me in welcoming patrick phillips. [applause] hey, everybody. Thank you for coming and thanks for that introduction. I also want to thank Program Director for inviting me. All of you specially for coming. Im going to talk about my book which is called blood at the root which tells the story about the racial cleansing of county georgia and the place where i was raised in the 1970s, 80s. Its a pleasure to be invited at the Atlanta University center. It was a researchheavy project and in the Centers Archives i made a number of discoveries. I had a few eureka moments and theres lots of dead ends and false turns and i was here a year ago and found a couple of letters that really changed my sense of the story, so i felt a deep debt to the history center. Before anything else let me say heartfelt thanks to the librarians and staff and all the donors who support this work. You are truly preserving history for all of us and books like mine would not be possible without institutions like the Atlanta History Center. So the plan for tonight is im going to talk briefly, im hoping that this would turn into something of a conversation because there are a number of people in the room who have a personal connection to the story. I live in brooklyn and its a little bit different to do this in atlanta than it is to do it in new york in that there are number of people who have personal involvement in the story and we are going to open it up for questions later on. But before that, theres some things that i want to tell you about what a racial cleansing looks like in 1912 in north georgia and the way it uncoiledded and how i came to write the book, thousand whole project came to be. And i want to show you some pictures of some of the people involved. So im really a poet but ive taken a little vacation. A little vacation into nonfiction, but natasha challenged me about ten years ago to finally tell this story. Some people may know, natasha went to the university of georgia and so among my friends in the poetry world shes one of the rare people who when i said i was from the county, it actually registered. Natasha is an africanamerican woman. She was also head cheerleader at the university of georgia. I always like to mention that. [laughter] shes decided the only poet who had cheerleader. Shes a dear friend of mine. Natasha, her father was white and her mother was a black woman and when she was born in mississippi in 1964 her parents marriage was illegal in the state of mississippi. Natasha has written about this in great deal. I see people nodding that know about her work. The project started with a latenight conversation at a conference, at a professional writing conference in new york and natasha and i were riding in a cab and she really surprised me by asking the startling question that i didnt see coming, she said, why was it that she a southern woman of color wrote so often about blackens, yet i a white man from one to have most racist places in country and natasha was the rare person who actually knew that when she found out where i was from, why from one of the racist places in the country never said a word about whitens. Why natasha asked, did you think race is only a subject for black writers, she said, why do you think youre not involved . And i remember that vividly. A moment that really changed my life and it started me on the search for the truth about an old ghost story that i had always heard growing up in county. When i was 7 my family moved in 1977. Affluent suburb of atlanta. Ive been back to write this book and i didnt know where i was. I was constantly getting lost because i didnt recognize any of it. Back in those days 1977. There are people who remember. It felt a lot from atlanta. There were cow pastors and it felt much more of the appalichian foothills than sa bush bean saburban atlanta. There were no black people anywhere. Kids tole me what they heard from their parents and grandparents. A long time ago they said, this white girl got raped and killed by a black man and her body was found in the woods just a few miles from the house where i grew up. This why it was all white and according to my classmates, it always would be. Is that up to me . Hey. Yes, you may. The world learned that there was a place in north georgia where segregation was alive and well and white people lived like if there had been in brown versus education, no selma march, no montgomery busboy cot. Boycott. It kept all country all white from 1912 to 1987. Easy to forget now that the king day was actually rather controversial and a guy name Chuck Blackburn who had moved to the county from california and been shocked that none of his friends from north could visit him came up with a modest plan was to march 2 miles along bethelview road. The brotherhood march. The idea was to speak out against all intimidation fear that had reined. Africanamerican activists, a lot of them from the king center that were led by Jose Williams, one of the street generals and they were joined by a small hand of locals that included my mother, father and my sister. My sister was home from college and noticed a little ad in the local paper and brought this to my parents attention. The mob tells demonstrators with rocks, bottles and bricks and the first brotherhood had to be arrested. A lot of them were armed. The county police convinced the williams to abandon the march and they all got back on the bus and got back on 400 and got back to atlanta. A lot of very angry white people between them and the car and they were eventually load intoed a Police Cruiser and ridden back to the car and they drove home. I think my dad probably doublechecked the locks quite a few times that night. This is Jose Williams. Thats Jose Williams and john lewis leading the marchers in 1965. I found the photo moving in that theres josea22 years later. I was 16 that year. Like a typical teenager i was late to meet my parents and so i got there and i couldnt figure out where the march was and when i finally got to the coming square i started looking for my parents and i knew that the march was going to conclude at the courthouse so i went there expect to go hear hosea williams, finally we live in a county for ten years finally speaking about all of this. But i feel with a bunch of other young men and only when one of them held up, that i realized that i was not in the middle of a peace march but had stumbled my way in the middle of the ku kluz klans victory celebration. I thought i had imagined this guy, i remember this vaguely but there were blurry memorieses from that day. She sent me a batch of photographs that werent ever published and when i clicked on this one, i couldnt believe it. I remember this guy, i was close to where this photo was taken at the moment. There was a lot of racial slurs and a lot what we would consider bad behavior and there was a moment that i realized there was something unusual. That seemed out there to me. A week later people came to versailles. John lewis, gary hart was running for president came and versailles county was on the national news. Oprah winfrey came to town and filmed episode. She filmed an episode of her show, shes only six months in her show and filmed on Forsyth County. Once the media picked up the story forsyth my hometown became one of the racial places in the country. Fastforward two decades. We are going to fastforward two decades and i was a long way from my childhood in georgia. I was living in new york and after that conversation with natasha, i decided to finally see if i could learn the truth about that old ghost story. I call it ghost story because it was always told in the vague and mythic terms and it was hard to believe any of this was really real. It was a story about a murdered girl and a rampage by what image as Knight Riders. I wonder if the whole thing was a racist fantasy. Something kids like to talk about in the backseat of the bus when forsyth in 1912, an 18yearold woman who was raped and killed near the banks of the chatahochee river and her name was may crow. She lived where my hands lived, oscarville. A little village. This was me playing hooky. I was doing graduate work on the 17th century. I was bored and tired of writing and i was playing hooky but i was sitting in the computer terminal that had all of this information and a lot of things were coming online. It was about 2005. A lot of things were coming online for the first time and archives like the Atlanta History Center libraries were scanning all of this information and digitizing it and so a long with that was newspapers and the story that i had always imagined as mirky suddenly started to come into view. A link of the old issue of the atlanta constitutional and this is the picture that came up. I didnt know who these people were but jane daniel, the prisoners in front, jane daniel, her brother oscar daniel, young 18yearold man tony howel. Ed colins and this is ernst knox. Oscar daniel and we arest knox would eventually be hang for the murder. It was something i couldnt escape. These were the first faces of black forsythi had ever seen. I knew that it raised more questions than it answered. If two of those faces belonged to the teenage boys that would swing for their crime, which two and if they were accused of raping and killing may crow, who are all the others, all my life i questioned whether black people ever really lived in forsyth but now i was face to face with the truth or at least something much closer to it than i thought i would get. The image was with lies and bigotry and heart was no myth, it was a terrible reality. These were real people being led to real deaths at the start of the season of violence. They would lead to expulsion of 1,098 residents of forsythi began to understand how the tale had made racial cleansing only a legend. Like something that we never fully understand rather than what it was a deliberate and sustained campaign of terror. This is another photograph that i came on, that i came upon very early. That is jane and oscar being led to streets of atlanta where they got on the train and went to forsyth for a trail. October 2nd, 1912. But first look at the photographs which gave me hope that it might be possible to learn at last who the african refugees of forsyth really were and what happened to them in fall of 1912. I now spent years searching for every scrap about the ex interviewed descendants of many the black families adding their stories to a mountain of evidence showing not just that the expulsions happened but when, where to whom and by whom and in this case the devil truly was in the details and thats what i was after. This is a photograph of the children of jeremiah and nancy brown expelled in 1912. The book aims to tell the true story behind the legend i heard so many times and it speaks of a murdered girl, a public lynching on the town square and execution of two teenage boys an months of terrorism and arson that succeeded in closing borders for nonwhite for nearly a century. The book included county sheriff. Even if i didnt tell you, you can guess who the villain and who is the good guy, can you tell . I have been thinking about these two and when i look at the picture, oh, yeah, thats definitely thats definitely reed on the left. To me he he looks overmatched already. The books clakers included county sheriff who just a few years later found the local chapter to have ku kluz klan as well as a number of unexpected heros including a deputy who try today desperately to stop the violence and a major who held a lynch mobs on the steps of the county courthouse. The real protag onist are the African American farmers, field hands, ministers, merchants and servants who were forced out by the mobs. All of my life the people had been in absence. I come to know how heroic they carried on. He helped found the color Methodist Church and was a real leader in the community. One of the lives that i had kind of picked up that it was a monolithic very poor marginal sharecroppers and there were many people of like but they were also educated and propertyowning africanamericans citizens who were inmesh with the cultural of the elite white people in the county. This was a surprise to me. It complicated the sense of the White Community and the black community. Im hopeful that the focused story which is a kind of historical core sample drilling down through 200 years in the life of a single place night suggest way that is we can begin coming to grips with our nations history of racial violence and injustice. As i was working on the book, the truth and reconciliation hearings in south africa were never far from my mind with insight about effects of denial and healing power of the truth. Ive sometimes been confronted by whites in forsyth that i was, quoting dredging up what was called ancient history. I made the mistake of scrolling that far down. [laughter] but this is still there. Such people seem to want the reward of revolutionary Peace Process that rewards reconciliation without first paying the prize of actually turning and facing the truth. When i started searching in the surviving primary sources like the documents house and archives, i found again and again that the myth of racial cleansing contained omissions, distortions and often outright lies. Many of them designed to shield white tbrs the guilt and pain of what really happened and facing ancestors involvement in a terrible communal crime. I had always been told, for example, that the klan did this, but i learned that the original ku kluz klan was prosecuted out of existence in 1870s and not reconstituted until 1915. There are people who probably know the story, right. In the wake of the lynching, youll hear the mounting, Knight Riders i envisioned as a kid were the invention of film maker. It was the new quote, unquote, the new klan, modern kla, in that imitated the film and not the other way around. And the red crosses and all of that. But that rebirth of the ku kluz klan was three years in the future of in 1912. It is simply impossible that it was the work of whiteklansmen. I found a letter written by jordan, another one of those eureka moment after a lot of searching when suddenly theres something significant. Ruth was a 14yearold in 1912 and had been a classmate of may crow and after recalling of how all broke loose, it werent the klan done this, it was just ordinary people of the county. And how exactly did those ordinary people of the county managed to drive out more than a thousand of their black neighbors, i realized i had left my book back there. Hold one second. [laughter] im back. All right. And how exactly did they manage to drive out black neighbors, i found one startling example that a forsyth wrote to a governor of georgia and this is from a document that i found in the Atlanta History Center collection. Resident of forsyth was an old friend and after hearing reports of lawlessness. He wrote directly to the governor to make sure brown understood that the convictions of ernst knox and oscar daniel had not brought an end to mob violence. My dear gov, julian began, a very important matter i recall to tall your attention to is the protection of the citizens of georgia and specially of forsyth theres a gang that have run off about all of the negroes and they are bold in their operations. It seems the sheriffs are cowards and fearful. Julian told of one raid on a group of young women and infant children that were visited by Knight Riders only after whites maid sure that the adult men were away. They sent a young man up to see if the men were gone and asked if the women had any gun, when they found no pistols ordered the women to leave one with baby in arms and with pouring rain. They shot the dogs, taking all the furniture and piled it out in the yard and set fired and burned it, dogs and all. Julian clearly meant to shock the governor with the image of a young mother bathed in arms driven out in the storm as her familys whole household was burned dogs and all. He also knew that the governor would be troubled. Hundreds of acres of land will not be cultivated this year, julian wrote to the governor which will be a lost in taxes to both state and counties. Labor now cannot be found to hire or rent. Is this state of affairs to go on, it will end in race war if some check isnt put in outrages. The check julian proposed was simple. Pursue and arrest the offenders and prosecute them vigorously in the courts. While bound shared julians anxiety about financial consequences the governor was steadfast in view that this was a problem to be solved by local people themselves whenever possible not state or federal authorities, quote, the law abiding element browns reply to julian, will have to by concerted efforts run down these people and bring them to justice. That letter from julian helped me see for the first time that support for erm pulingses was not unanimous in the White Community as i had always been told and people like julian who recognized what was happening around them and sent desperate pleas to stop the attacks. Knox and daniels were guilty of killing may crow. I heard the explanation and people often claim that ancestors had no choice but to defend the white women of the county from a rampage by three murderist black rapists. 24yearold roberts was never tried at all. He was beaten with crowbars and i should say this, this is the same square where i used to watch the fourth of july parade and bought my first baseball glove and, you know, you can go there now. You wont find any sign of this and no marker or remembrance. He was hung from a telephone and that was also something i didnt know. This was not a lynch party, this was a lynching in which pretty much the hundreds of people participated. When his body rose on telephone pole hundreds of people fired into his body. Two attorneys would join them in the lynch party and hung him outside in the woods outside of mariota. Even ernest knox whose famed confession that is often highlighted with a boy that confessed turned out it had been delivered in the midst of a mock lynching when a wealthy white man held knocks over and open well and put a makeshift news around his neck to this is all the say again and again the archives told a very different story from the legend i heard as a kid. Ive been led to lead believe the black community was made up of illiterate field hands but since the tax records reveal the whole strata of the black community that was educated prosperous and deeply enmeshed in the fabric of the county there was there he is who had been born a slave but along with his wife eliza slowly and steadily amassed large property and versailles. I followed this guy and his wife eliza from slavery to emancipation to owning a tiny bit of land and over the course of 30 years, 40 years simply investing the profits of each new harvest and buying a little more land and making true business deals and they eventually had built this 200acre farm but it happened over very long time. This was undoubtedly home. They were deeply, deeplyrooted in the county. There is also burt oliver a local minister and teacher who with his wife would go onto found Industrial High School in gainesville which for 40 years as one of the most important africanamerican schools in north georgia and finally there was Levi Greenlee a black minister who owned 120 acres in the county who late in his life was inducted into the first and only black member in a group of white clergymen called the Hightower Baptist association i should add im very honored to have three of his descendents here with us tonight. I think therell here. Deidre Brown Stewart and irma brooks jones so yeah. [applause] their generosity and kindness to me when i was a total stranger calling to ask about their families is typical of the many descendents i interviewed in meeting the greatgrandchildren and greatgreatgrandchildren of the versailles black community has been one of the rewards of this work. I could never told the story without their help. All these discoveries in the courthouses libraries in the georgia and versailles had been marginal and never owned much in the county anyway so their expulsion was no major crime. This was implied and said overtly when i was a kid. Instead i learned large prosperous donors like kellogg and Levi Greenlee who work not driven out by klansmen that ordinary white men they had known and worked with all their lives. Which brings us finally to the most fraught issue at all of all and that is the issue of land in preparation. In 1987 the wake of the violent brotherhood marches governor Joe Frank Harris appointed a Biracial Committee to investigate the history of violence and versailles in to look into the charge of coal unlawfully taken lampett i want to read a brief passage and it will give you a sense of how the community worked in a tightly controversial findings. The story stated from the News Headlines so i never knew what became of this committee. Made a lot of headlines when it was violence that took a year for this committee to go through its work and i had never seen their findings so i was working on that. Only a week after news cameras recorded shocking scenes of mob violence in january 17, 1970 meeting rooms at the versailles county courthouse worse sealed with racial strife at his local lawyers and businessmen recall the notion that they didnt receive anything at all from the county. The coming versailles county Biracial Committee met many times have an excellent pass that the governor on improving Race Relations and accounting investigating the events of 1912. The most striking thing about the official report the committee submitted to governor harris is that it contained not one set of findings but to one position paper written by local light members and another written by the coalitions mostly black atlantabased members. In other words even after working together from host a year the two races were as divided as ever and versailles and above all on the very first issue they discussed reparations to the victims in 1912. This document was in the georgia archives and it contained a black report and a white report to the governors. Not surprising like there was a Committee Many of whom own large stocks of property rejected the idea of returning land are paying reparations and the fear it stirred up in the local community. Versailles member said in a position paper that quote racial incidents allegedly drove a substantial number of blacks from the confines of versailles but they claim quote economics played an instrumental role in the black exodus. They argued the advent of the boll weevil and the boll weevil rice in 1915, early signs of depression, i never really figured out what i was talking about that quote shifting of the black population certainly have an equal impact on blacks leaving premier view most of her size 1098 black refugees quote voluntarily relocated. I had a moment when i read that and i sat on the floor of my living room and i thought my head is going to explode. Despite the denials of Mike Phil Pettis who is the head of the committee for the local title of attorney and despite the denials in 1987 when journalist elliott gas in went looking in 2007 he discovered a mountain of evidence that the land of black owners had been plundered as abandoned lots were slowly quietly absorbed into the property of their former white neighbors. Ironically the written records of these were housed in the basement of the county courthouse just below rooms in which the Biracial Committee met by i Racial Committee met. Nonetheless the Committee Paper concluded the charge of unlawfully taking land is an allegation without sufficient foundation in law or fact. Today many of the same locks arent not chicken and hog pence that suburban land with milliondollar homes what was once taken as a wink and a nod to county courthouse is some of the most valuable real estate in all of atlanta. After ejecting that change the position paper the white leader submits the governor scolded descendents of expelled families themselves. The report blamed quote perpetuating divisive and contrived issues and harassing local whites with an ever pointing finger of blame which the report said fosters deep and perhaps a volatile resentment. Having turned the tables and laying the blame on divisive africanamerican protesters to white leaders called on blacks to cast aside congregational tactics and intimidation are they reported it by declaring that versailles is a thriving suburb of atlanta with no similarities in 1912. Versailles has no apologies to make to anyone. Forsyth county also has no handouts only a welcoming hand of fairness and effort as his bill this county forever for over 150 years. The Committee Members believed they had no apologies to make to anyone to suggest ways in which forsyth do now was not just a product of racism at a primary cause of it. By wiping the crimes the path of memory generations of otherwise decent lawabiding white citizens could go on believing that each new violent episode was an extraordinary event for which they bore no real responsibility. Africanamerican members of the committee recognized the role of denial in forsyths tree and they said as much in a competing report to there seems to be a prevailing philosophy in forsyth road felker ward that its an undesirable activity of the hatemongers and the violence part is ignored at will simply go away. The fact that seven of the people arrested and charged after the first were forsyth residents. This denial and inaction allows for the growth and spread of philosophy. Silence is interpreted as consent. It was a long tradition of silence denial and erasure that motivated these groups in the first place. As a child i always found in the coming library of book that would tell the full story of 19 12 and i started this project when i realized no one else is going to ride it in if i wanted the truth about what happened i would have to purchase it myself. We found as many lack Property Owners sold early often at depressed prices given they were in no position to bargain. Others like joe kellogg held onto their land in hopes of coming back someday and sold when it became clear the white county of forsyth was no place for a black man. Finally there were owners who left with nothing exchange for that landed his property there is simply no record of a sale. In 1987 forsyth leaders claimed there was no evidence for which aspirin conducted a survey. He discovered a lot members of many of the abandoned black properties mysteriously reappeared in later transactions. Iodized imagines such happened at the end of a shotgun that seems that they happened with little more than a wink and nod at a county courthouses courthouse is one clerk after another ignored history and allowed whites to sell parcels of land they did not own. The crimes against black people in forsyth had been explosive in 1912 but their erasure happened slowly quietly and one post at a time. After working on the story for many years it is not shocking to me to go home to forsyth and see how successfully this is thence have been written out of mind. Like this change in less 30s and counties now 10 latino than a asian and 3 africanamerican progress astonished to learn a few months ago an africanamerican candidate is running for state state senate seat in forsyth and im honored to have him as well my friend Daniel Blackmon who is representing georgias 27th congressional district. Mr. Blackmon is on the ballot in the one notorious white county is a testament to how much forsyth has changed but theres a lot to do and im rooting for daniel to win. On november 8 if he does when we might finally have a leader who will knowledge the countys history and put an end to more than 100 years of erasure and denial. Even today there has been a reckoning with this past. [inaudible] honoring of the africanamerican families who once called forsyth home. Going to read just one more excerpt near the very end of the book. If you drive around coming today , some of you probably have youll see more than a few black and brown races among the white ones. People of color working and shopping in Forsyth County start walking the streets of the town square and sending their children to local schools. What you wont find is a single trace of 1912 or an acknowledged myth of the racial cleansing that defined the county for most of the 20th century. Instead the timeless veneer of american suburbia had so completely covered over the past but not even the young black men and women working the cash registers in the county seem to realize forsyth was quote white only just a few decades ago for the ground under some of the subdivisions malls and big talk stores wants to learn to hardworking farmers and how could they know . Theres no memorial of the lynching of roberts or no photographs of black leaders like joseph and eliza kellogg Levi Greenlee and burt oliver among the confederate portraits in the county Historical Society and no marker anywhere tells new black residents that they are far from the first to live in forsyth. Instead gazing out at the largerthanlife run statue of hiram parks. You will hear in a second. The statue of hiram parks bill confederate congressman u. S. Representative and selfdescribed extender of white over black domination. That was the celebrated native son whose most famous moment in washington came when king david of hawaii was head of state in november of 1874. As he spoke before congress the representative from georgia Hiram Parks Bell was overheard joking to a colleague that in the good old days of slavery became quote would have dropped 1500 on the rock. The southern democrats succeeded by the end of the second term and reversing all the gains that africanamericans have made under reconstruction. At the end of his colonel bell was proud of having stop what he called a folly, attempted social revolution to place the africans upon an equality with the caucasians. I should add the statue is new. Yeah. The corner of main street you will find signs of the countys newfound wealth everywhere at our new courthouse the glass facade of the new county jail branches of major banks that nothing will point you to the spot where the corpse of rob edwards hung from a telephone pole on the afternoon of september 10, 1912 or ignores their photograph of the same streets filled with government truth to quell his returns recurring state of insurrection. History is written by the victors 100 years after the expulsion victorious white people of forsyth have successfully written the racial cleansing completely out of mind and for anyone familiar with the class of 1912 id expect to find a reflection, apology even truth and reconciliation there is only deafening silence. Now that they have joined a the brave new world of the planet and the level of welfare dirt filling fog killing meal driving ancestors could never have imagined its clear most natives would prefer to leave this tale of murder lynching that pentair scattered in the archives are safely hidden in plain i was being woefully dangerously incurious about the rabbits are my home. It took decades before i finally woke up and asked the right questions. And it also gave me a saint and did glimmer of hope that truth and reconciliation might still be possible in america even in places like forsyth where prosperity rests on a foundation of lynching, arson, expulsion and communal sets. But to even begin healing danger once i believe White America was finally turned base our profound involvement in the struggle for equality and cultivated deep curiosity about what really happened in the 20th century in the seemingly innocent places where we live. James baldwin says the architects of injustice cannot also be innocent. It is the innocent that constitutes the crime. In 2016 with russell strife threatening to tear apart communities across the nation i believe they can no longer afford to remain ignorant of our ancestors violent past gave worth to the violent presence. I want to thank you all very much for listening and for coming and im hopeful this might generate some conversation and i think we are going to open it up for questions. Again thank you to the atlanta history system and thank you for cspan for covering the event and thank you to all of you for coming and listening. [applause] im afraid we cant leave Hiram Parkville up there. I am liked whether im here or not. Oh, i have to stay here . Can i come down there . That would be better. I get it, like jerry springer. [laughter] or better yet like oprah. Whats that . I had better get back up there. I would rather be a man of the people. I write cspan, i am back. Thank you again. Im kind of torn. [inaudible] im torn between two things. Even though your skin color is seen as and all of this a Political Party gets a pass. You mentioned the movie and how that comes into acclaim but it unleashed and that part of history is not talked about. The other thing how history repeats itself. Skin color and how everyone was portrayed as being [inaudible] today we have thoughts being demonized for the believe in they are being demonized. So i want to pick up on a few things he said. Im not sure i can untangle the kind of yoga move the Democratic Party does over the course of the 20th century but i do understand what you are saying. I would not want to claim in the book to have gotten to the bottom of exactly where this all comes from. I got very interested in once it was going how was it perpetuated for so long and what happened in Forsyth County 1912 exactly as you say has to be situated in the context of jim crow south, of a very race baiting Democratic Party at the time. I totally agree with all of that but whats interesting is the same kind of effort happened across the chattahoochee river in hall county as well. Have at a lot of places in america and i got very interested in quiet succeeded in Forsyth County because whats is forsyth apart is not that it happened and 1912 but it was still happening when i lived there in 1987 in and early 90s really. Thats been a part of it and that requires a tremendous amount of energy across generations. That requires the transmission and so i was interested not just you can certainly explain this from the context of the period whats happening and thats what occurred in forsyth as a kid, well thats how it was and thats just what happened but it happened in a lot of places. In polk county where there was night writing there was this period the local sheriff sent the deputy who pursued arrested charged and tried and convicted and jailed the white man who did it and their names were printed on the front page of the paper and later the sheriff said we dont need troops to stop us. We are going to crush this thing in its infancy and by simply engaging the laws thats exactly what happened. There was an attempt to do the same thing. In Forsyth County theres no record of an arrest. Theres no record of any Legal Mechanism ever engaging in response to the crimes against peoples color there when they were perpetrated by white people so i do understand what you are saying and it does come from a complicated period at the same time i dont really buy the argument that thats just how things were in georgia at the time. There were people who were trying to stop it in forsyth who succeeded in stopping it in hall county. Hi. Really happy to be here tonight. Thanks for coming. I am an alumni. I should say who is your greatgrandfather . Thats amazing. That deserves a hand. My name is shirley. Shirley thank you for coming. And listening to you talk about the statue that was erected i dont know how long ago in the square it tore me a little bit he does there is a lot going on and i am the mother i dont want to cry. An odd that he would be looked upon as a threat in america. And later on he said i dont want to be that anymore thats what it means that you are now something different. How do you move forward in this kind of strife that still feels like 1912 and having conversations with my friends. How can we have an intelligent conversation because thats how i feel that only i know that it hurts and my son know that it hurt. Thank you so much for that comment and for sharing that. I think when you say what was going on there feels like its still going on as i was watching the news about eric garner and mike brown and Trayvon Martin one of the things that i couldnt shake was mike brown was big mike and eric garner was a big man. Staten island is very close and rob edwards the man who was lynched and Forsyth County was known as big rob edwards so when i saw these cases happening over the last year i just could not shape the parallels that these were large man and there seemed to be this insane targeting of them simply because they were tall, exactly what you say. There are some sociologists who have done research on this and this is not imaginary. Mobs frequently targeted large man who also often came from somewhere else and if they were an outsider and if they didnt have kin nearby. They were often targeted and certainly its true or Forsyth County. I dont have a solution for race in america. I think only a fool would suggest that. I dont have a solution. What i found the one thing that motivated the book as i have faith and like us said the devil is in the details. It mattered who, what where when why and how. After that microscopic hourbyhour look at one place i dont have an answer for how we reconcile but i think i have a rebuttal to people who want reconciliation without the truth i became convinced that there are a lot of people in the White Community of america who would like forgiveness and reconciliation but dont want to do that hard and difficult work of facing the reality of it. I think the result you have people who dont know any of this and so you have people with two very different american histories in two very different understandings of the 20th century and very different understandings of what its like to walk around in 2016. So i dont have an answer. I wish i did but i have a faith that the truth is some part of it and the only thing i could possibly add to this overwhelming problem is one small piece of the truth. [inaudible] im sorry, i will. My name is bob hays. Several months before the 1987 march an odd. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] i got in the margin we saw in the crowd to ladies and it was just shocking to me. [inaudible] [inaudible] they put me in a car with the lady with the uniform on. The thing i wanted to say is i wanted to honor the people who are here but to that question about what to do about it, when the people who made the decision would not let hosea in because of [inaudible] [inaudible] i was on the welcoming committee for the second march and was astonished to find out there was a camera on the big march that everyone else in the room we were in had on a bulletproof vest. I got kind of nervous waiting a couple of hours and my son is out in this march. They gave him a picture about a month before and i didnt expect 20,000 to come. The point of it was over the next few weeks it became so obvious that this whole idea that this doesnt have anything to do with anything here and that was very demoralizing. I lived there for 18 years in Forsyth County and have relatives or inlaws there and have been in many social situations. All of the talk and these are relatives, all the talk in the 90s and beyond totally embraces it in our world today. Thank you so much. For sharing memories of eating their. Ive come upon so many people since i wrote a book that were part of this at the time and i want to pick up on one thing we said which is that idea of that kind of Wishful Thinking that maybe its all over and i was astonished when i looked at the record to find this went all the way back to the very beginning. The newspaper articles over and over and over again the last paragraph of the article would say all quiet at cummings, no further trouble expected. I read every decade almost when there was an incident and i understand that comes out of Wishful Thinking and i thought maybe thats it. Now that other system and now its over and we are going to be done with it. I still found this when i was looking at comments on the plan that journal of people saying why didnt you just leave us alone and there was a story where ray otwell, my Elementary School was named for this guy the present of the bank of cummings and he was there. When there was an incident of 1968 he told a reporter if they would just leave us alone as with all this would all be okay. A car across his whole life this had occurred and if he kept repeating if youll just leave it alone it will all be okay. Thats one of the main ideas i was writing about. Can everyone hear me . Cspan may not be able to. I want to thank you kindly for your presentation and more importantly thank you for talk about it. What i wanted to ask you is your research and looking at census records did you find a date in which migration of africanamerican people began going into forsyth . Less than 20 years ago my understanding was there were two organizations of the kkk at the high school. I wouldnt be surprised. Your questions a good one and this is what my friends in new york say, when did it and you know and there is not a date. Theres a sociologist at the university of georgia named doug back so and he wrote an article and in it he said, his conclusion was as if a tsunami of Atlanta Development was just roaring out in all directions at a certain point it breaks and washes over the county and the population and 87 was about 30,000 has over 20,000 today. That means the old families in the county were just outnumbered at a certain point. The good news is that happen in the bad news is nobodys hearts and minds were changed, i dont think. Eventually there were so many newcomers in the county and his conclusion he said the racial ban died a natural death. I think it about the 2000 census and even that is very gradual. In the 90s at one point there are 600 black residents and they are all on the southern edge of the county near johns creek in sewanee which i think potentially people who were across the county line didnt really know what that meant. It looks just like any other part of suburban atlanta at that point at and at this point and daniel may know better than i do but the africanamerican population is 4. 6, there you go. 10 latino and 8 asian. Im not ready to give anybody a goldmedal that there is now a black population that is tolerated in the county. I think its an interesting question of how its changed and all i can come up with is simply the growth and the arrival of so many new people in the county. And there may also be a generational change. [inaudible] thank you for your research. Thank you for coming. Indeed the devil is in the details. Did you find the details anything about the original that started this whole issue . There was a young lady who was raped. Yeah im not going to lie back i started this wanting to solve the crime and i wish i could tell you that i have solved the crime. I dont know what happened to make road. I couldnt say this in the book because i didnt want to say any in the book that i didnt document. I have 35 pages of notes in the back because i didnt want anything said that was Poetic License or my opinions i base it on the facts. They didnt have the cold hard facts to make this claim but i found overwhelming evidence that the three men who were hung i did not say that in the book because i didnt want to go out on a limb that roberts was lynched. Oscar daniel and ernest knox were described in the papers as dean dish. Im sorry you have to hear this but a lowbrow guerrilla type knee grow and fiendish and then you see the picture. There is oscar daniel right there handcuffed to his sister. This is ernest knox at 18 years old. He was an orphan and he worked as a hired man from the time he was 14. And then his cousin oscar second from the left 18 years old and they are just dwarfed by the grown men in the militia. Im not saying that that automatically means they are innocent but rob edwards rocked daniels and ernest knox when you look at the census records were three young black men in the area and their trial was conducted by a future lynn sherr , the sheriff arrested them was future founder of the. Ernest knox confession which was really the main thing in the trial was delivered while he was being lynched. Ive felt sadder and sadder the more i read it. I wish i could have exonerated them in a court of law by finding out who did it but theres no question what happened in trial would stand up to scrutiny today. It does matter that question and this is the originating moment. This is the originating thing up 100 years really of injustice that came out. Thank you all so much for listening. [applause] c if you want to read the book fastforward to its pros. 25 off and he will sign up for you right now. Thank you so much for coming. Lauren leaderchivee the author of crossing the thinnest line home praising diversity from the office to the oscars makes america stronger, tell us about the book and why you chose to write it. 18 months ago when i started on the journey i did have a sense that this election might reveal some deep divisions in the country around race and gender and having worked on diversity issues particularly with American Companies but also in communities and now in politics i had a sense of something was brewing. The black lives Matter Movement had begun. There was an underlying tension i really wanted to make a case for the possibilities for how much better we could do as a country economically and socially if we can learn to understand one another across the many lines that really do divide us. The United States is going to be minority majority within my lifetime. 53 of the population is 30 of american breadwinners are female. This is not change in the identity of who is america and we have not prepared for that. What i wanted to do was say what will it take for us to actually go from conflict and confrontation to understanding prosperity and thats what the book tries to do. We think is the most Public Policy issue we face today and how does diversity plan to the progress of that . I happen to think immigration and criminal Justice Reform are the heart of some of the complex problems facing our country. We need a deeper Diverse Talent pool to fuel the growth of our economy and we are incarcerated a significant number of minorities. This contributes to our economy and where making it exceedingly difficult for people who bring the skills that we need to fuel especially in the hightech or some of the most innovative companies. Those are two Critical Issues but we also have to look at whats happening in terms of support for working women. For the first time in my lifetime we are seeing a decline in the Labor Force Participation of women and women have conjured it trillions of dollars to the American Economy are just closing the gap between men and women in Labor Force Participation but added trillion dollars to the American Economy. These are Critical Issues that we have to talk about them. Good evening everyone. My name is Jennifer Ferran and im a fairly new manager here at the Carnegie Library of pittsburghs main library. Im also the third string player you are getting tonight is the first and second were not available and im very proud that itu