>> there's a story about a murder girl in a rampage by what i imagine was the night riders, torch wielding melted clusters. otherwise i wonder if the whole thing is just a racist fantasy, just something kids like to talk about in the backseat of the bus but when i type foresight in 1912, i got a newspaper database, up came a list of headlines that sure enough , hold an 18-year-old woman raped and killed near the banks of the chattahoochee river, allegedly by three black men in her name was may grow. around 1912. she was very near where my parents house was in a little town called osterville, that little village. then it was me playing hooky,

i was doing graduate work at nyu on the 20th century bubonic plague outbreak. i was bored and tired of writing my dissertation so i was playing hooky but i was sitting at his computer terminal that had all this information and a lot of things were coming online area it was about 2005. a lot of things were coming online for the first time an archives like the atlantic history center libraries were scanning all this information and digitizing it so along with that was newspapers and the story i had always imagined as murky and unknowable and lost in this time started to come into view so i went to an old issue of the atlantic constitution and this is the picture that came up. this is from october 2, 1912. i didn't know at the time who these people were, this is jane daniel, the prisoner in front of the right, shane

daniel, her brother oscar daniel, young 18-year-old man named tony howell, isaiah percival and this is ernest knox, 16 and the two boys here, oscar daniel and ernest knox would eventually be hanged for those murders but i didn't know any of that when i first saw this picture. but it did, it was something i couldn't escape, this was the first basis of black foresight had ever seen and is ipad across the photographs i knew it raise more questions than it answered. if two of those faces belong to the teenage boys who were doomed to swing for their crimes, and if they were accused of raping, killing may grow, who were all the others? i questioned whether black people ever really lived in forsyth but now i was faced with the truth or at least something much closer to it than i thought i'd get. the image made me realize that while the rest of the world was written by lies, at its heart it was no myth. it was a terrible reality.

these were real people being led to real debts at the start of a season of violence that would relieve to the explosion of all 1098 african-american residents of forsyth. as i learned more about this event i began to understand how the tail stripped of names and dates and places had always made the racial cleansing seem like only a legend . like something that we'd never fully understand rather than what it was, i deliberate and sustained campaign of terror. here's another photograph i came across very quickly, this is jane and oscar being led through the streets of atlanta from the full sum tower where they got on a train and went to forsyth for their trial. that same day october 2012. what is the root of my first look at the photographs which gave me hope that it might be possible to learn last who the african-american refugees of forsyth really were and

what happened then in 1912. i spent years searching for every scrap i could find about the explosion, went through old newspaper archives, went through letters in the basement of the county courthouse, read old letters in the archivesof the atlantic history center and interviewed descendents of many of the black families forced out , having their stories showing not just the act that the explosion happened but where, when, how , to whom and by whom. in this case the devil truly was in the details and that's what i was after. this is a photograph of jeremiah and nancy brown, 1912. the book i made out of all this aims to finally tell the true story line that legend i heard so many times and it speaks of a murder girl, a lynching on the town square, a kangaroo court trial and execution of two teenage boys and once of terrorism and arson, that succeeded in

closing foresight borders and to nonwhite for nearly a century. the book's characters include a county sheriff, here he is. he would, i think you can guess who is the villain and who's a good guy, can you tell? i have been thinking about these two for a long time before i ever found the photograph and when i looked at this picture i said oh yeah, that's them , it's definitely read on the left and he looks really overmatched already. the book's characters include a county sheriff which just a few years later would help out the local chapter of the ku klux klan as well as a number of unexpected heroes including a deputy tried desperately to stop the violence and a mayor who held off a slob on the county courthouse. of course the real protagonist at the heart of the story are the african-american farmers, field hands, ministers, merchants and servants forced out by the mob. these people had been in essence, a banished

civilizationwhose names and struggles i assumed were noble, now lost forever . but i learned more about them than i ever thought possible and how heroically they carried on. this is joseph kellogg who is the largest black property owner in the county, he helped found the methodist church and was a real leader in the community.one of the lives that i had kind of picked up in the county was that the black community was this monolithic group of poor, marginal sharecroppers and there were plenty of people like that including oscar daniels. they were also educated and property owning african-american citizens who were deeply enmeshed with the culture of some of the elite white people in the county so this was a surprise to me. it complicated my sense of

the white community and the black community. i'm hopeful that this very focused story which is a kind of historical sample drilling down to 200 years in the life of a place might suggest ways we can begin coming to grips with our nations history of racial violence and injustice. the truth of reconciliation hearings in south africa were never far from my mind area with their insight about the corrosive effects of denial and the healing power of the truth . i sometimes think of whites in foresight who were angry that i was quote, dredging up what they saw as ancient history, was recently in the comments section of the atlanta journal-constitution which i made a mistake of rolling that far down but this is still there. people seem to want the reward of mandela's revolutionary peace process , in other words reconciliation without first paying the harrowing price of turning and facing the truth.

>> in the wake of the lynching of leo frank in marietta, and there are a number of intersections between the story and the lynching of leo frank, i learned that the white-sheeted night riders i'd always envisioned as a kid were the invention of d.w. griffith in his blockbuster movie, "the birth of a nation." when the film was screening in