As we move closer to what may very well be a milestone in America’s Racial History, it’s instructive to look back on where we came. I’m having my race and politics class look through a brilliant interactive site on racial expulsions put together by the Austin American Statesman newspaper in 2006. The investigative journalists working on the series found, along with numerous instances of town expulsions:

14 countywide expulsions in eight states between 1864 and 1923, in which more than 4,000 blacks were driven out. These are only the most extreme examples of a widespread pattern.

These expulsions were not pretty sights. Here’s an account from the intro to the Austin American Statesman series of an expulsion in Marshall County, Kentucky:

vigilantes led by a local doctor posted notices in 1908 telling blacks to leave. When that failed, more than 100 armed and hooded men raided the town of Birmingham, picked about a dozen people at random and tortured them. Nearly two-thirds of the blacks left, and the most recent census showed only 37 blacks among the 30,125 people living in Marshall County.

The series coincided with Elliot Jasper’s 2007 book on racial expulsion entitled Buried in the Bitter Waters which details the story of countywide racial expulsions throughout the United States. Here’s an NPR piece on racial expulsion in Corbin, Kentucky. the site includes an excerpt from Jasper’s book.

How do we make sense of this history today? it’s particularly poignant to me to see an African-American candidate for president with a reasonable chance of winning the majority vote in three of the four states featured in the Austin American Statesman piece (Georgia, Indiana, Missouri).

Which aspect of the interactive series was the most interesting to you and why?