PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewPhillips provides powerful insight into the motives of the various class and business sectors in the county’s white community, which conducted, acquiesced to or benefited from the terror ... Phillips’s goal in this book, however, is not just to tell the tale of whites who rained down violence on their black neighbors but also to capture the voices, hopes, fears and subsequent lives of Forsyth County’s African-American population...This part of the book is the most hopeful, ambitious and, unfortunately, least successful. Phillips’s effort is hampered by the scarce records, biased contemporary newspaper reporting, traumatized family memories and oral histories that are few and far between ... Blood at the Root meticulously and elegantly reveals the power of white supremacy in its many guises.
