Racial Cleansing: America? Yes!!!

[Baba Ahmed]

Tales of Racial Cleansing in America


Writer finds hidden history in old records, newspaper stories
By GREG LANGLEY
Advocate books editor
Published: Jul 15, 2007

In 1998, Jaspin was visiting the small town of Berryville, Ark. He was just rambling around when he happened on a small history museum. In the museum, he found a framed picture with a will beside it. The will belonged to a farmer who lived in the town and was dated to the time before the Civil War. Among his possessions, the farmer listed five slaves. That struck Jaspin as odd, because he realized that he had encountered no black people on his visit to the town. The seeming contradiction interested the reporter in Jaspin who works for Cox Newspapers and who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1979.

What happened to this town's black residents? Jaspin decided to see if he could find out.

He went back to Washington, D.C. (he lives in Annapolis, Md.) and began to check census records. In the early 1900s, census enumerators listed residents of each polling place by sex, age and race. He downloaded census information on Arkansas counties from the Internet. He was surprised by what he found and checked out more returns.

"I collected census data for other southern states. Tennessee. Georgia. North Carolina. Kentucky. Texas. Each time I found some counties that were either all white or populated by so few blacks as to be virtually all white. This is not what I expected," Jaspin writes.

He sensed the data was telling him something. Jaspin happened on a site maintained by the University of Virginia that had data from the last century. He wrote his own short computer program to analyze it. He found dozens of counties where black populations had suddenly plummeted by 50 percent or more. Cross referencing the counties to newspaper archives from the period provided an answer. Jaspin found story after story about black people being driven from towns, whole counties even. It was, he felt, the historical evidence of racial cleansing. While racial violence was evident across the country, the expulsions were different.

"These counties remain 'holes' in America's racial map," he writes.

"Like an archipelago, the counties where racial cleansings occurred form a rough arc that begins in North Carolina, crosses the Appalachians, and extends into the Midwest. In some cases more than a century has passed since blacks were driven out of the counties, and yet they still remain islands inhabited exclusively by whites."

The expulsions were remarkably similar. They began with some grievance on the part of the majority white residents. It was usually a sexual assault on a white woman or a murder of a white woman or man. Jaspin doesn't say the inciting incidents were based on false accusations. To the contrary, some of the rapists and murderers confessed. What happened next, Jaspin notes, is what was unique: not just the guilty parties were punished (the actual rapists and murderers were almost always lynched right away), but then the whole black population was told they had to leave or face dire consequences.

Often these actions were cloaked in myth and lost to memory so that one local historian Jaspin cited "trying to account for a racial cleansing that involved three murders, the burning of black-owned homes, and a military-style assault on the black quarter by more than a thousand men, only told readers that blacks left after 'a disturbing situation.'"

Jaspin uncovered the stories by digging in records, old newspapers and talking to area residents. In Forsyth County, Ga., he found that several events started the spiral into violence in 1912, including a claim by a 22-year-old white woman that she had been raped. Five black men were arrested and charged in the case. The furor over that case hadn't died down in October when the rape and brutal assault of 18-year-old white girl Mae Crow culminated in an all-out assault on black residents. Crow's attacker, black teenager Ernest Knox, admitted raping the girl and bashing in her head. The county became all-white after black residents were ordered out. "The black population in Forsyth County dropped by ninety-seven percent," he writes.

The crimes, Jaspin suggest, were used as excuses for the white people's real motivation in expelling the black residents: greed. In Forsyth County for instance:

"The Forsyth County tax roll was divided by race. Before the expulsion, a clerk carefully inscribed the name of the fifty-eight black landowners in Forsyth County (churches did not appear on the tax roll) along with a list of the parcels they owned. After the expulsion, the whites would troop to the courthouse to claim their neighbor's land. Although some parcels had been sold and were now listed under the new owner, the majority had not. For thirty-four of the black landowners, there is no record they sold their land. It made no difference. Whites, money in hand, would pay the tax on land they did not own and the clerk would note the transaction. In the three years after the expulsion, nearly two-thirds of the black-owned farmland that had not been sold was appropriated this way. By 1915, the number of black landowners paying their tax had shrunk to just four names."

Jaspin tells the stories of other expulsions in Tennessee, in Missouri, in North Carolina, in Texas, in Arkansas, in Indiana. These stories are hard to read, and it's hard to imagine that some of these events happened less than 100 years ago. Yet Jaspin's work is not the first book to examine this subject. James W. Loewen's Sundown Towns, A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (The New Press, 2005) is an examination of these all-white enclaves across the country. Jaspin's work is heavily footnoted and sourced, Loewen's is even more carefully attributed. Loewen is a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont.

The best, most comprehensive book on racial strife in this period, however, remains Leo Litwack's 1998 book Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. Some of the same events referenced in Jaspin's book appear in Litwack's book.

Jaspin's book is well-written and engaging to read. It's clearly meant as a poke in the eye to racists and those who would defend the actions of racists. Jaspin brings up the sticky subject of reparations for those who lost land in Forsyth County, Ga. Efforts to recover the properties or collect payments by black descendants failed. Records were too spotty. Such issues cast a lingering shadow over race relations in America, Jaspin says.

"In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, black objections to the word 'refugee' seemed overly sensitive, even eccentric, to whites. When the poor in New Orleans, who are overwhelmingly black, are left to their own devices while the city is being evacuated, whites talk about a 'class' problem. Blacks, with long and painful memories of being outcasts, decry what they see as yet another example of racism. The same is true when it comes to the debate over reparations: Whites, with almost no memory of racial cleansings, see reparations claims as a not-so-subtle attempt by blacks to get a handout. Blacks, who remember how their families lost all they owned in an expulsion, wonder why they cannot get justice. The list is almost endless because, as unsettling as it may be, Americans do not share a common history."

But the fact that Jaspin even wrote this book is a sign of progress. In a country that has the words "whites only" still ringing in its collective ears, discussions of our different histories is highly desirable.