Blood at the Root opens with a concise summary of the events leading up to the lynching of Rob Edwards in 1912 Forsyth County, Georgia, which was “nothing unusual” (xii) in that time or place. Yet in the nights that followed this particular lynching, “night riders…forced out all but a handful of the 1,098 members of the African American community” (xii). For “generation after generation” (xiii), Forsyth County was all white.

In order to explain his own relationship with these historical events, Phillips notes that he was “raised in Forsyth” (xiv) in the 1970s and 80s, yet “only in hindsight… did [he] come to see that [he’d] grown up not in the America most white people imagine, but something closer to the fearful, isolated world of apartheid South Africa” (xiv). Phillips’ parents were activists during the Civil Rights Movement and raised him to resist Forsyth’s racist leanings.

In this text, Phillips intends to “understand how the people of [his home place]” (xvi) could have built and supported their all white county for so long. As a younger man, Phillips began looking at the ways the “stories [he’d] heard were riddled with lies and distorted by bigotry” (xxii) and eventually, decided to reverse Forsyth County’s “communal act of erasure by learning as much as [he] could” (xxii).