Buried in the Bitter Waters

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist exposes a dark and shameful secret in American history: more than a century of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation.

When we hear the term "racial cleansing," we think of Bosnia and Croatia, Rwanda, East Timor, the Nazi Holocaust—but America? In the period between Reconstruction and the Great Depression, whites banded together, burned and killed indiscriminately, and drove thousands from their homes, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially "pure." From the heart of the Midwest to the Deep South, the mountains of North Carolina and the Texas frontier, black Americans were told to "leave now, or die!" In many cases, it took no more than 24 hours to eliminate an entire African-American population. Shockingly, these areas remain virtually all-white to this day.

Based on nearly a decade of research in archives and census records, Buried in the Bitter Waters provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil, fundamentally reshaping the geography of race.