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

Front Cover
Basic Books, May 6, 2008 - History - 416 pages
“Leave now, or die!” Those words-or ones just as ominous-have echoed through the past hundred years of American history, heralding a very unnatural disaster-a wave of racial cleansing that wiped out or drove away black populations from counties across the nation. While we have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, this story of racial cleansing has remained almost entirely unknown. These expulsions, always swift and often violent, were extraordinarily widespread in the period between Reconstruction and the Depression era. In the heart of the Midwest and the Deep South, whites rose up in rage, fear, and resentment to lash out at local blacks. They burned and killed indiscriminately, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially “pure.” Many of these counties remain virtually all-white to this day. In Buried in the Bitter Waters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin exposes a deeply shameful chapter in the nation's history-and one that continues to shape the geography of race in America.
 

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Buried in the bitter waters: the hidden history of racial cleansing in America

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The termcleansing used in relation to groups of people has come to convey an ugly reality Americans usually associate with distant places. Here, however, Pulitzer Prize-winning Cox Newspapers editor ... Read full review

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Long after mainstream America has forgotten its brutal history, some of it as recent as one generation back, this book and the stories it tells will remain a witness.
America owes Descendants of American Slaves reparations.

Contents

The Horse Thief Detective Association
185
Bedtime Stories
201
Lost Stolen or Strayed
219
EstasGift
233
Notes
267
Black Population Collapses
295
Black Forsyth County Landowners
307
Bibliography
315

Something in the Air
153
A Dog Named Nigger
167
Index
327
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Elliot Jaspin is a reporter for Cox Newspapers, where he specializes in computer-assisted reporting. He won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1979, and in 1993 he was awarded the Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award by the National Press Foundation. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

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