>> we'll take a minute and line everybody up. quick note about the signing line.. scott's going to come sit here. we'll form the line going this away and the easiest way to do that is go out the door you came in and turn left. if you still need to buy your book, the good folks from classic lines will sell you one or two or five. they make great christmas gifts. >> this is booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here is our prime-time line-up. tonight starting at 8:30 p.m. eastern, a look at first lady eleanor roosevelt. and at 10:00, sondra cisneros delivers the fairfax prize lecture. we wrap up our monday prime-time line-up at 11:30 with hillsdale college professor, bradley birzer talks about conservative writer, russell kirk. that happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> there is a story about a

murdered girl and a campaign about what i imagined as white sheeted night riders, torch wilding mounted klu kluxers. i thought this was a kid's fantasy, something you talk about in the back of the bus. in a newspaper database up came a list of headlines sure enough told of an 18-year-old woman raped and killed near the banks of the chattahoochee river allegedly by three black men. her name is may crow. there is photograph about her 1912. she lived very near where my parents house was little town called oscarville, a little village. this is me really playing hooky, i was doing graduate work at nyu on the 17th century beau bonn playing outbreaks. i was bubonic plague outbreaks. i was board writing dissertation.

a lot of things were many coming on line this is 2005. a lot of things were coming on line first time. archives like the atlanta history center was scanning information an digitizing it. a lot of it was newspapers. this story i imagined as murky and unknowable lost in the mists of time. i clicked a link that led to an old issue of "atlanta constitution." this is the picture that came up. this is from october 2nd, 1912. i didn't know at the time who these people are. jane daniel, prisoners, on the front, jane daniel, her brother oscar daniel. 18-year-old man named tony howell. this is ed collins, 24. isaiah perkel, ernest knox who is 16. the two boys and oscar and earnest were eventually hanged for the murder of may crow. i didn't know any of that when i saw this picture.

it was something i couldn't escape. these were the first faces of blacks i fosyth, i ever seen. this raises more questions than answered. if two faces belonged to teenage boys were doomed to quote swing for their crime, which two? if they were accused of raping and killing may crow, who are all the others? all my life i questioned whether black people ever really live in fosyth. now i was face-to-face with the truth or something much closer to it than i thought i would get. while the legend i grew up was riddled with lies and distorted by bigotry at its heart was no myth. its with a terrible reality. these were real people being led to real deaths at the start of the season of violence that would lead to expulsion of all 1098 african-americans residents of fosyth. as i learned more about the

residents the tale made racial cleansing seem like only a legend. something we never understand, what it was, deliberate campaign of sustained terror. this is another photograph, jane and oscar being led through the streets of atlanta and got on the full ton tower where they were led to their trials, same day, october 2nd, 1912. but regret of at my first look at these photographs, which gave me hope that it might be possible to learn at last who the african-american refugees of fosyth were and what happened in fall of 1912. i spent years searching for every scrap i could find about the expulsions. i dug through old newspaper archives, paged through ledgers in the basement of the county courthouse. read brittle old letters in the archives of atlanta history

center and interviewed descendants of many plaque families forced out adding to amount of evidence that the expulsions happened but where, when and how, too whom and by whom in this case the devil was truly in the details. that is what i was after. this is a photograph of the children of jeremiah and nancy brown who were expelled from forsyth in 1912. the book i made out of all the material aims at telling true story behind the legend i heard some times. it speaks of a murdered girl, a public lynching on the town square, kangaroo court trial and excuse of two teenage boys and months of terrorism and arson that succeeded in closing forsyth's borders to non-whites for nearly a century. the book's character include a county sheriff. you can tell you who is the villain and who is the good guy. can you tell? [laughter].

i had been thinking about these two for a very long time before i found a photograph of them. when i looked at the picture, oh, yeah, that is definitely reed on the left. to me looks, loomis looks overmatched already. the book's characters include a county sheriff who just a few years later would help found the local chapter of the ku klux klan as well as a number of unexpected heroes, including a deputy who tried to, tried desperately to stop the violence and a mayor who held off a lynch mob on the steps of the county courthouse. of course the real protagonists at heart of the story are the african-american farmers, field hands, ministers, merchants and servants who were forced out by the mobs. all my life these people had been an absence, vanished civilization whose names and struggles i assumed were unknowable and now lost forever. but i have come to know more about them than i ever thought possible. and come to know just how heroically they carried on.

this is joseph kellogg who is the largest black property owner in the county. he founded the colored methodist church and was a real leader in the community. one of the lives i had kind of picked up growing up in the county that the black community was this monolithic group of very poor, marginal sharecroppers and there were plenty of people like that including ernest knox and oscar daniel but there were also educated and property-owning african-american citizens who were deeply ehe meshed in the culture of some of the elite white people in the county. this was a surprise to me. it complicated my sense of both the white community and the black community. i'm hopeful this one very focused story which is a kind of a historical core sample, drilling down through 200 years in the life of a single place might suggest ways we can at least begin coming to grips with our racial history of violence and injustice.

as i was worked on the book, truth and reconciliation hearings in south africa were never far from my mind with insight about corrosive effects of denial and the healing power of the truth i'm sometimes confronted with whites in forsythe who were angry i was dredging up was ancient history, most recently in the journal section of the "atlanta journal-constitution." i made his take of scrolling down. that is still there. they want rewarded of mandela's revolutionary peace process. that rewarded is reconciliation without paying harrowing price without turning and facing the truth. when i started searching in the surviving primary sources like the documents housed in atlanta history center it's archives, i found myth of fosyth racial cleansing contained omissions distortions, many outright lies, many designed to shield whites

of guilt and pain of what really happened and facing their ancestor's involvement in terrible communal crime. i was always told the klan did this. i was told the original ku klux clan was prosecuted out of existence in the 18 '70s and was not reconstitutessed in the 1915. speaking of atlanta there are people who know the story, right, in the wake of lynching with leo frank. . .

so, the first night she did night riders, cannot watch the film and that's when the pointy hats and masks happened. but, that rebirth of the ku klux klan was still three years in the future in 1912, so it's simply impossible that the campaign of terrorism. who then were the the persons unknown responsible for the purge? i found a letter written by 80-year old reese jordan after a lot of searching when suddenly there is something significant. he would-- she was a 14-year old girl in 1912 and had been a classmate of may crow and at the end of her letter after recalling how all hell broke loose on the night of the funeral, jordan wrote, it was the klan done this, it was just ordinary people of the county. >> you can watch this and other programs online on a book tv.org