Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

Much of the eventual violence that would take place in Forsyth occurred as a direct result of Mae Crow’s injuries. Mae “went to school only a few months each year” (30), and often helped “her mother manage a household that included eight other children” (30). The last record of Mae’s life is her name recorded in the 1910 census. Mae’s family came from a line of farmers; her grandfather, Isaac, had owned “two hundred acres” (31), but after serving in the Civil War, he ended his life nearly “destitute” (31). Due to other economic and political circumstances of the time, like many other families, “in only a single generation, the Crows went from working fields their ancestors had owned…to being tenants and sharecroppers” (33).

After Mae’s body was found, there was quite a large crowd—including reporters, law officers, and “hundreds of whites from both sides of the river” (37). Very quickly the attention turned to a “group of black boys who sat watching all the excitement” (37). One of these, Ernest “Ern” Knox, an orphaned teenager, responded affirmatively to having owned a mirror that “had been found in the woods near Mae Crow’s body” (38). This was “seen by many whites as the smoking gun of the case” (38), even though it seemed strange that Ernest had “made no attempt to conceal” (38) that it was his, as a guilty person might have done.