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

Elliot Jaspin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 5, 2007

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 cleansingabove 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jaspin's harrowing and exhaustively researched history of racial cleansing in the United States is painfully eye-opening, and Leslie's voice—filled with horror and sorrow—takes the pain to another level. One's eyes cannot lightly skip over the cringe-inducing passage that explains the physics of whipping, or the scene of the burning and disembowelment of a pregnant woman, or white leaders' hate-filled speeches. In a low tone radiating rage and disbelief at the senseless violence and hardcore racism, Leslie relates Jaspin's accounts of a dozen instances of blacks being driven out of their homes by whites in a steady, commanding pace. The stories are disparate in locale and time—the cleansings happened in both North and South after the Civil War through the '20s—but they flow together thanks to their grim shared topic, Jaspin's eloquent prose and Leslie's almost cinematic delivery. Jaspin pursued this topic for 10 years. Listeners will be glad that he persevered to produce this important book: his passion and conviction are richly evident and inspiring throughout thanks to Leslie's first-rate narration.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jaspin draws on a decade of research of the horrific practices of small towns across America that resulted in the expulsion of black residents, the equivalent of racial cleansing. Drawing on archives and census data, Jaspin documents demographic changes from Reconstruction forward that show severe drops in black populations and the creation of towns that have remained all white. The most famous case of racial cleansing, Rosewood, Florida, in 1923, was no anomaly, as Jaspin notes 260 such towns. In fact, such expulsions were so common that newspaper accounts recorded them. Shame, an eagerness to forget, and reluctance to deal with reparations and compensation have allowed the expulsions to lapse into the past. Expulsions ranged from those centered on violence--lynchings and race riots--to threats and ultimatums that did not result in actual violence. Jaspin focuses on 12 of the worst cases, mapping out the counties, recounting the historical context, and interviewing those who remember. A chilling portrait of a shameful part of American history that has reshaped its racial geography. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (March 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465036368
• ISBN-13: 978-0465036363
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,016,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars DEEPLY MOVING AND FACTUAL, March 5, 2007

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Buried in the Bitter Waters (Audio CD)

Regrettably, there is a great deal in our country's history of which we are now ashamed. Surely the years between 1874 and the 1920s in America saw some of the most deplorable events. During that period of time racial cleansing took place over a wide geographical area. This was cruel, senseless and more to our disgrace these actions were condoned at the time and glossed over today.

Author Jaspin is twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, and is a reporter for Cox Newspapers. Years of prodigious research were poured into his book which presents clear evidence of what took place. Yet we hear of what was an apparent whitewash by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Editors ignored clear conflicts of interest while editing the racial cleansing series. Procedures designed to protect the integrity of the reporting process were dispensed with. And finally the head of the company's newspaper division overrode the judgment of editors in Austin and Washington and ordered that a different term be substituted for 'racial cleansings.' It is a cautionary tale about the lingering shame that trumps honest discussion of the full history of America's racial cleansings."

How sad that racial cleansing did occur - sadder yet that some will not acknowledge our misdeeds.

The apt title for Jaspin's book comes from the pen of Zora Neale Hurston: "Ah done died in grief and been buried in de bitter waters, and Ah done rose agin from de dead lak Lazarus. " For those who heard "Leave now, or die!" their lives were overturned in mere hours as they fled carrying what possessions they could. Those were the lucky ones - countless others were killed, their homes burned as blacks were driven from entire counties. Thus, even today some of these areas are still "lily-white."

According to the courts blacks were not considered citizens. Thus, it was quite literally leave or die. Jaspin bases his information on countless interviews, census records, and archives. It is a tragic story but a true one.

Actor Don Leslie offers an accomplished reading of Buried in the Bitter Waters, clearly stating facts and movingly relating the words of those interviewed.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Violence, Villainy, Victimization..., October 8, 2008

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (Paperback)

... elements of a powerful film on the order of Yojimbo or The Good the Bad and the Ugly - films where a defenseless minority in a village somewhere is terrorized by the rowdiest elements of their majority neighbors, but this time no Toshiro Mifune or Clint Eastwood is on hand to set things right. By individual violence and/or mob intimidation, the minority is driven from its homes and property, often with the memory of the public slaughter of family members to carry with them into exile and to preclude their ever returning. And in every case there is indifference or collusion from the police and other authorities.

The heart of Buried in the Bitter Waters is narrative -- twelve tragic stories of violence in twelve far-flung communities, decades apart in time. In each story, ordinary people united by their history and ethnicity suddenly rise against their neighbors of a different history and ethnicity, attack them physically, intimidate them psychologically and economically, and force them to leave the community, never to return under threat of death. It's always majority against minority, of course, or it couldn't be done. And in these stories it's successful; in every case, the community remains "pure" even generations later, and feels darned proud of its purity. True, the level of violence is different from narrative to narrative, but violence is always the means. In one narrative, the mob - provoked by a crime committed by one young man of the minority group - rampages through the minority community. It grabs two young men at random and literally shoots them to pieces. Then it seizes a man considered one of the elders of the minority and lynches him, leaving his body hanging as "a grizly tourist attraction" for two days. When that man's pregnant wife seeks help from the authorities, the mob seizes her also, hangs her upside-down in a tree, douses her with gasoline and sets her on fire, then disembowels her and rips out her eight-month fetus. When the infant cries feebly, one of the mob throws it on the ground and stomps it to death.

This is not a scene from a Medieval pogrom, or for the Thirty Years War, or from Nazi Germany, or from sectarian strife in Iraq. The scene of the murdered mother occurred in Georgia in 1918, and all the others narrated in "Buried in Bitter Waters" took place in America - in Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas. The victims in every case were African-Americans - descendants of slaves brought to the communities by the ancestors of the mob, long-time neighbors but never accepted as such - and the perpetrators of violence in every case were European-Americans, local people, not roving marauders.

Ethnic Cleansing is such a horrifying concept that Americans will bristle in anger at the mere suggestion that it has occurred in their country, perhaps in their own region. But it has, and not just once, or in one big outburst. Rather it has occurred spontaneously, at random, and often. By careful analysis of census data, old news reports, memoirs, and oral histories, author Elliot Jaspin has identified 260 counties - COUNTIES! not villages - in the states of the South and lower Midwest where 'successful' ethnic cleansings took place sometime between the Civil War and the present. Because of such actions, the demographic map of America even today looks like a checkerboard when the percentage of African-American families is depicted county by county. Jaspin has found that even in communities where the living European-American populace has no historical memory of an ethnic cleansing, such memories persist in the African-American population at large, in the form of vague dread and a sense of unwelcomeness in those communities. Jaspin also speculates that if data were available by towns or townships, the number of incidences of ethnic cleansing in America would be much higher.

Jaspin is a European-American himself, a career journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner working for the Cox Newspaper chain.

Truly, African-Americans and European-Americans have lived through two different histories in "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." But while the European-Americans know and want to know only their own version of American history, the African-Americans are by necessity aware of both versions. Theirs is the ugly one: slavery, dashed hopes after emancipation, Ku Klux Klan raids, lynchings, disenfranchisement, Black Codes of labor, share-cropping peonage, "Sundown Towns," apartheid, denial of opportunity, unequal application of the law, humiliation in popular culture, ghettoization by way of real estate red-lining and denial of credit for home-buying, laws against intermarriage, a perpetual 'inferiority' imposed economically and psychologically. Some things have gotten better since the 1960s, but NOT ENOUGH. Remember that, my fellow European-Americans, when next you feel offended by the anger, expressed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright but felt by many others whose ancestors may have been "cleansed" by yours.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Uncovering Hidden Treasures, April 10, 2007

By 

Dr. Toby Ziglar (Boiling Springs, NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (Hardcover)

Jaspin should be commended for telling the stories of these towns, even when the information concerning these incidents is scant. Buried in the Bitter Waters serves as a reminder to its readers that racial cleansing in America took place throughout the country, not just the Deep South. It also reminds us that much of the history of our country has yet to be told. Selma, Birmingham, Memphis, and Montgomery are familiar names in the history of race in America. Jaspin shines the light on towns like Corbin and Commanche, not to disparage them but to remind us that the racial clensing in America was widespread.