Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

A consistent tool of racial violence in the South, lynching was a horrific, murderous practice of white citizens. In Forsyth County, lynchings were a “time honored ritual” (49) and were often viewed not as a “gruesome communal murder but a case of old-fashioned frontier justice” (102). A group of white people typically carried out lynchings, and large crowds witnessed them; in addition to other mementos, it was common to have photographs made into postcards of these events.

The terror caused by frequent lynchings in Forsyth and other counties was twofold: Lynchings were, on their own, a terrible act of murder often including several forms of violence; in addition, the social climate of a place was significantly altered by a lynching, with the white community feeling emboldened and the black community feeling sad, angry, and terrified.

Phillips also describes the practice of mock lynchings, in which a white person or persons used the threat of a lynching to coerce a false confession from a witness. In a specific example in the text, a wealthy white man wrapped a rope around young Ernest Knox’s neck until the boy chose to testify. Though mock lynchings weren’t considered the same as a real lynching, Phillips points out that “there was little difference between real and ‘mock’ violence, since a ruse arranged to fool a suspect could… change… into a summary execution” (39).