Forsyth County, Georgia, is infamous for being—for a remarkably long stretch of the 20th century—one of the only all-white counties in America. This week, we’re 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 “ghost story” 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’s black residents weren’t Klan members: their identities might well surprise you.

Go beyond the episode:

• Read more about Forsyth in Patrick Phillips’s new book, Blood at the Root
• View a slideshow of images from the book on our episode page
• Watch Oprah Winfrey’s 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’s rendition of “Strange Fruit.” Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.

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