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Elliot Jaspin
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Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America Hardcover – March 5, 2007

by Elliot Jaspin (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 152 ratings
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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.
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  1. Print length
    352 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Basic Books
  4. Publication date
    March 5, 2007
  5. Dimensions
    5.25 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0465036368
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0465036363
  8. See all details
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4.7 out of 5 stars
152 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book informative and well-researched. They appreciate the evidence-based approach and extensive bibliography. The book is described as an interesting read with powerful elements reminiscent of a provocative film.

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HistoryInformation qualityReadabilityPower
9 customers mention "History"9 positive0 negative

Customers find the book's history engaging and informative. They appreciate the evidence-based approach and say it provides an insightful look into American history, especially Black History. Readers also mention that the book dispels myths and challenges long-held views.

"Very enlightening and disturbing regarding events that led up to the expulsion of people of color and the disappearance of these towns. Good read." Read more

"...This is a chapter in American History that I had not known before...." Read more

"Shocking history and appreciate the evidence-based approach to exploring what would have been completely lost...." Read more

"A powerful and provocative book, and sad at the same time...." Read more

8 customers mention "Information quality"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book informative and well-researched. They appreciate the evidence-based approach and factual information. The book is concise with an extensive bibliography and index.

"Very enlightening and disturbing regarding events that led up to the expulsion of people of color and the disappearance of these towns. Good read." Read more

"...The reporter did an excellent job of research and showing how black folk had their lands stolen from them beginning right after reconstruction." Read more

"Shocking history and appreciate the evidence-based approach to exploring what would have been completely lost...." Read more

"...Well written and concise, with an extensive bibliography and index." Read more

8 customers mention "Readability"8 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy reading the book. They find it a good read and interesting.

"...Good read." Read more

"...As document the book is excellent. After 100 years - what should the communities where these horrors took place do of all this?..." Read more

"Excellent book for the surpressed history of "cleansing" in my region, mostly going back to the forced removal of African Americans from..." Read more

"An incredible read. Not a single thing in this book for any American to be proud of." Read more

3 customers mention "Power"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the book powerful and provocative. They mention it has elements of a powerful film like Yojimbo or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

"...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..." Read more

"...I thank him for the sacrifices that he made to bring this powerful work to us...." Read more

"A powerful and provocative book, and sad at the same time...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening Book
    Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2022
    Verified Purchase
    Very enlightening and disturbing regarding events that led up to the expulsion of people of color and the disappearance of these towns. Good read.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Gio
    5.0 out of 5 stars Violence, Villainy, Victimization...
    Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2008
    Verified Purchase
    ... 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.
    47 people found this helpful
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  • Aramintha J. Grant
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Hidden Chapter of American History: the Economics of Lynching
    Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2008
    Verified Purchase
    I wish to commend Mr. Jaspin, the author of this work for his intelligence, his tenacity, moral integrity. I thank him for the sacrifices that he made to bring this powerful work to us.

    This is a chapter in American History that I had not known before. I learned of Forsyth County for the first time when I read the accounts of the protest and its racist past in the New York Times. And I was born and raised in Atlanta during the time when segregation was the order of the day. Having read this work, I believe it is possible that my own family may have felt the terror of a racial cleansing and banishment. My father, now deceased, told me that my grandfather packed up his family and belongings, left Monticello and came to Atlanta in fear of the Klan in 1902.

    This book makes one of the strongest cases for reparations. The problems of racism and inequity in economic relations in America will never be solved as long as the problems are denied. While there was an apology given by congress for its inaction at the height of the lynching era of blacks in America for the first time in June 2005, the apology is meaningless without an atonement with a compensation for the real and personal property that was lost and stolen under the threat of death in the early part of the 20th century. And finally, unless justice is rendered and actions are taken to protect the property rights of all Americans, then the perpertrators will be encouraged to continue their brutality and theft of the property of the citizens who are least able to protect their rights; the Hurricane Katrinas will continue and the entire American economic fabric will be destroyed as is occurring in the subprime mortgage crisis, though the fraud in these transactions initially targeted to African Americans, the victims now envelop the global economic community.
    11 people found this helpful
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  • s
    4.0 out of 5 stars The reporter did an excellent job of research and showing how black folk had ...
    Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    humans with power suppressing fellow humans...it never ends and goes on all around the earth today. The reporter did an excellent job of research and showing how black folk had their lands stolen from them beginning right after reconstruction.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Marci
    5.0 out of 5 stars Buying fourth copy now
    Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    Shocking history and appreciate the evidence-based approach to exploring what would have been completely lost. My first copy was taken by my teenager - I’m so okay with that. We should all know this history!!
    One person found this helpful
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  • Nancy Darabpour
    5.0 out of 5 stars Bitter Indeed
    Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2008
    Verified Purchase
    I was channel hopping and came across a PBS independent file "Banished" and was quite surprised when the 1st place they mentioned was Washington County, Indiana, where I am orginally from and where my family still is. I was curious, so I did a search on Amazon and came across this book. Again, 1st thing mentioned, Washington County, Indiana. Then, later on in the book I came across Laurel County, Kentucky, where my maternal grandmother's people are from! I never thought I could be so ashamed of where I came from. It hurts to read this book, that people can be so ignorant and cruel.

    I definitely suggest reading this. As I mentioned, it hurts, but we all should know our history, and hopefully quit repeating it.
    31 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • William A. Bolduc
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in Canada on July 17, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    Very good, wish they would make it required reading in schools.
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