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

New York: Basic Books, 2007. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Good. vii, [3], 341, [1] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix A: Black Population Collapses. Appendix B: Black Forsyth County Landowners. Bibliography. Index. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page. Minor cover undulation. Minor cover wear. Elliot G. Jaspin (born May 27, 1946) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist. Jaspin graduated from Colby College in 1969. While writing for the Pottsville, Pennsylvania Republican & Herald, he won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with Gilbert M. Gaul for stories on the destruction of the Blue Coal Company by men with ties to organized crime. In the same year, Jaspin won a Scripps Howard Foundation Edward J. Meeman Award and an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award. 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 cleansing above 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.