Recent reads

Buried in the Bitter Waters : the hidden history of racial cleansing in America, by Elliot Jaspin. Jaspin, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, noticed something strange when he started looking through historical census data while researching an outbreak of racist violence in Forsyth County, Georgia. The census data revealed, to his shock, that there were not just a few, or even a few dozen counties, but hundreds of counties, throughout the nation, in which the recorded black population practically vanished between one census and the next.

Once alerted to this anomaly, he followed up and found that in many such cases, newspaper articles, oral recollections and other sources showed that it was no mere coincidence. As he puts it, somewhat melodramatically but accurately, he had discovered America’s ethnic cleansings. Over and over again he found evidence of white mob violence, sometimes unofficially or even officially sanctioned by governing bodies, forcing blacks to flee for their lives from the town or the county in which they had lived. Jaspin documents, in exhaustive detail, episodes of similar racist mob violence in Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas and Missouri.

Some whites attempted to defend their black neighbors, but more often the evidence unearthed by Jaspin shows a sorry record of brutality, hypocrisy and opportunistic theft of the property left behind. In Forsyth County, for example, county tax rolls show that after black landowners were driven out of the county by white mobs and Klansmen with the collaboration of local and state government, the farms and houses belonging to the former black residents were simply appropriated by white neighbors. Local newspapers and city governments proudly proclaimed themselves “100% white”, “free of mosquitoes and Negroes”, in the aftermath. And, as Jaspin documents, racist attitudes persist in many of the “purged” locales to this day.

Almost as dismaying, if not particularly surprising, is the degree to which local historians and newspapers, including Jaspin’s own employer, seem to have collaborated in a conspiracy of silence about such pogroms.

Now it may be too much of a stretch to say that every county in which a precipitous drop in black population occurred in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century was necessarily host to such crimes. In some cases, significant numbers of blacks may have moved in or out of an area due to changing economic situations, such as the opening and closing of large industries that offered employment. And in some cases, lesser forms of discrimination, such as the refusal to permit black children to attend “white” schools combined with a refusal to supply schools that they could attend, may have accomplished similar results. But Jaspin proves conclusively that there was a pattern of such episodes across the country, and just as importantly, he documents that the local governments frequently supported or collaborated with the racist mobs.

This book serves a valuable purpose in documenting a pattern of systematic and criminal actions. It also provides a more logical basis for arguments in favor of reparations to blacks than any that I have heard before. It’s one thing to argue in the abstract that black people in the 19th century were generically victimized. It’s quite another to document the systematic theft and destruction of millions of dollars worth of land and other property with the collaboration of governmental entities whose duty it was to prevent such abuses. The descendants of those deprived of their legal property through such machinations have a defensible moral claim to compensation from the governments involved. And although individual perpetrators may be dead and gone beyond the reach of human justice, it is a legal characteristic of both governments and corporations that they continue, immortal and impersonal, from one generation to the next. The logistics, legalities, and politics of applying such claims may be very troublesome and impractical. It may even be impossible to document who is in fact descended from such property owners. But, whether or not it is practicable, the moral right and wrong are clear.