Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America

Leave now, or die! From the heart of the Midwest to the Deep South, from the mountains of North Carolina to the Texas frontier, words like these have echoed through more than a century of American history. The call heralded not a tornado or a hurricane, but a very unnatural disaster--a manmade wave of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation. We have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, but the story of widespread racial cleansing--above and below the Mason-Dixon line--has remained almost entirely unknown. Time after time, in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s, whites banded together to drive out the blacks in their midst. They burned and killed indiscriminately and drove thousands from their homes, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially pure. The expulsions were swift--in many cases, it took no more than twenty-four hours to eliminate an entire African-American population. Shockingly, these areas remain virtually all-white to this day. Based on nearly a decade of painstaking research in archives and census records, Buried in the Bitter Waters provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil, and fundamentally reshaped the geography of race. In this groundbreaking book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has rewritten American history as we know it. The Mob Formed a Skirmish Line Along The RailRoad Tracks about fifty yards from the Negro Quarter and began riddling homes with gunfire. But they soon ran out of ammunition, and they turned back towards the Armory on Walnut Street. There they rearmed, this time with army rifles. Theyreturned to the Negro Quarter, and this time some crossed the tracks and began setting homes on fire. There were fifteen people crammed into the basement of the Cobb's small wood-framed house. As they crouched in terror in the basement, they realized the only escape was to the south. They would have to run through the Negro Quarter, wade a stream called Clear Creek and then race up a small hill and into the tree line. It was a distance of about 400 yards over open ground. The light from the burning buildings would illuminate every step. But once they got to the woods they would be safe. They had no choice. they crawled up the stairs and one by one they burst out of the house and bolted towards the creek. Rifles cracked behind them, and they could hear the zip of bullets on either side. Some stumbled as they crossed the creek and lay there, too frightened to go farther. On the gentle rise above the town where the whites lived, people stood on the sidewalk watching the spectacle below. Later, one woman recalled that night. We sat out on the walks all night until 3 o'clock in the morning watching the breaking in of the jail, the hanging, and the burning of the buildings. I couldn't keep from laughing at times at the strange things people did but all in all t'was a serious matter.

"People knew about the terror, of course. The stories came to them in whispers, passed on in warning or in shame or perhaps in pride. There was a day 80 or 90 years ago, they were told, when the rumor of a crime — a rape, most likely — had so enraged the whites in town that they lynched the black man they thought responsible. Then something else had happened, something every bit as sinister. In the... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) fever of the moment, the whites had turned on their black neighbors, ordering entire communities of African Americans to gather what they could carry and get out of town, appropriating the property the victims were forced to abandon, destroying the homes they left behind. Years later, people still knew. But these weren't the sort of stories that you told in public.

In the last decade or so, the silence has started to lift. Oklahoma established a public commission to investigate the destruction of Tulsa's African American neighborhood in a horrific 1921 pogrom. Hollywood made a movie dramatizing whites' assault on the black town of Rosewood, Fla., in 1923. And two years ago, the sociologist James W. Loewen published an award-winning book, 'Sundown Towns,' that systematically documented America's wave of racial purges, which he rightly called 'ethnic cleansing.' Now Elliot Jaspin's vivid 'Buried in the Bitter Waters' digs deeply into 12 of the purges — those he judged 'the worst of the worst.'

A reporter for the Cox newspaper chain, Jaspin brings a journalistic sensibility to the task. He's interested less in broad social dynamics than in the particulars of the small towns where the 12 purges took place. He carefully recreates the often convoluted steps that led to each town's racial cleansing 'in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s.' And he makes the horror come alive by describing the experience of people swept up in the violence of the moment: a mob member's viciousness, a white official's cowardice, a victim's heart-pounding fear as she fled across an open field, her house ablaze behind her. Jaspin then takes each story to the present day, showing how the purge left wounds that still refuse to heal.

As chilling as each incident is, though, the cumulative effect of stringing together 12 stories is problematic. Part of the difficulty is that Jaspin's choice of case studies leaves the wrong impression of American ethnic cleansing. All 12 incidents he describes took place in small towns, 10 of them in the South, with African Americans always the victims. In fact, the majority of purges occurred in the North and West, including almost two dozen in Illinois alone, according to Loewen. Urban neighborhoods were particularly prone to racial expulsions since racism and the real estate market made for a ferociously toxic mix. And mobs in Western states were more likely to target Chinese immigrants than blacks.

Jaspin runs into another problem as well: Because the purges tended to follow a predictable pattern, his stories start to feel depressingly familiar, then frustratingly repetitious. As that happens, 'Buried in the Bitter Waters' loses much of the emotional power that drives the book in its early stages.

Jaspin compounds the problem by devoting most of his conclusion to detailing a nasty fight he had with his editors at Cox newspapers in 2005, when he presented them with the multi-part series upon which the book is based. The conflict raised some troubling issues of journalistic ethics: The editors objected to Jaspin's use of the term 'racial cleansing,' which they thought too inflammatory, and his charge that Cox's flagship newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, repeatedly downplayed anti-black violence and racial exclusion in suburban Forsyth County, Ga., the site of a brutal purge in 1912. But Jaspin's intricate detailing of what was essentially a clash over professional standards deadens what should have been the book's dramatic climax.

That's disappointing because it's not enough simply to know that Americans once engaged in ethnic cleansing. We need to be shocked by that terrible truth, to read the stories and cringe at their cruelty. Only then, as Jaspin says, will we be willing to confront the question of how to secure justice for the families that were driven from their land in the early 20th century: to talk seriously of reparations for the victims' descendants, maybe even of restoring land to its rightful owners, a possibility that has already caused consternation in a few communities around the country. More fundamentally, if we're shocked by the violent separation of the races all those years ago, we might be forced to consider — if only for a moment — America's continued embrace of segregation, the enduring legacy of days so bitter we only now dare speak of them.

Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. His book 'Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age' received the 2004 National Book Award for nonfiction.

" Reviewed by Barry SchwartzDonna BrazileDavid BrownJosef JoffeKevin Boyle, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Maryland-based reporter Jaspin presents 12 in-depth case studies in which racial cleansing emptied entire counties of African Americans from 1864 to 1923. They encompass eight states, not all in The South. In many cases, he says, no one was killed; whites would simple deliver an ultimatum to be gone by a certain deadline. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Based on painstaking research, this work by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil, and fundamentally reshaped the geography of race.