In the autumn of 1912, the white residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, expelled its Black community. The trigger, or the excuse, was the killing of a young white woman. A Black man was lynched in response, followed by the judicial murder of two more Black defendants and a campaign of white violence and intimidation that chased away more than a thousand Black residents. Blood at the Root, Patrick Phillips’s history of the ethnic cleansing, shows that the participants even included white children, who could dispossess a Black family by threat alone.
Such events do not fit neatly into the categories that conventional political science long used to understand politics in the United States. As debates over how to understand Jan. 6, 2021 demonstrate, until recently most practicing American social scientists reflexively dismissed such events as incidental, regrettable exceptions to a democratic, rule-based system.
