Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick
Phillips, should be essential reading for all Americans. Phillips details what would be called, in a
Jewish context, a pogrom.
A sadly typical tale of Jim Crow era racism and lynching in 1912 leads to far wider and more drastic consequences. In a few short
years, Cumming Georgia and Forsyth county were “cleansed” of African–Americans.
This ban was enforced by terror, both latent and manifest, well into the 1980s. A series of civil rights marches
in 1987 heralded the beginning of the end of Cumming's apartheid.
But the end came not so much from a change of heart by the
white residents of Cumming, but by changing demographics. In the 1990s Cummings was transformed from a rural farming community into an
affluent Atlanta suburb.
African-American farm plots, stolen by white residents in 1912, are now the sites of
multi-million dollar mansions. Old
Cumming and its haters just died – both biologically and economically.
We are left to ask, has what racism and violence did quite well, is gentrification now carrying on?
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