News Summary

Leave or die America's hidden history of racial expulsions is exposed in this explicit account

Many driven off in violent, swift purgings

Editor's note: Please be advised this story contains explicit racial slurs.

It is America's family secret.

Beginning in 1864 and continuing for approximately 60 years, whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions, driving thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white.

An interactive account of the expulsions

In at least a dozen of the most extreme cases, blacks were purged from entire counties that remain almost exclusively white, according to the most recent census data.

The expulsions often were violent and swift, and they stretched beyond the South.

It is impossible to say exactly how many expulsions took place. But computer analysis and years of research conducted by the Washington Bureau of Cox Newspapers reveals that the expulsions occurred on a scale that has never been fully documented or understood. The incidents are rarely mentioned in the numerous books, articles and movies about America's contentious racial past.

Even less has been written on the legacy of these expulsions.

"I am actually less surprised by the number of instances of this that you've uncovered than I am by the extent of the historical failure," said David Garrow, a former Emory University law professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who is now a senior fellow at Homerton College at the University of Cambridge.

Legacies of expulsion

Today, one of the physical legacies of these attacks is an archipelago of white or virtually all-white counties along the Mason-Dixon Line and into the Midwest. Blacks remain all but absent from these counties, even when neighboring counties have sizable black populations.

The social legacy of the upheaval and horrific violence is less clear.

Descendants of those driven out often describe a sense of shame about what befell their families. Whites frequently decline to talk about what happened, typically saying, "It will only cause trouble." Amid the silence, the extent of these racial expulsions has remained unnoticed.

Using computer analysis of thousands of U.S. census records dating back to the Civil War, Cox Newspapers identified about 200 counties, most in states along the Mason-Dixon Line, where black populations of 75 people or more seemed to vanish from one decade to the next.

Several years were spent gathering old news accounts, government records and family histories to understand the reasons for these apparent collapses in black population. Benign events, such as blacks migrating in pursuit of better jobs elsewhere, explained some.

But in 103 cases, the data indicated that there might have been a conscious effort by whites to drive blacks out. These included counties, for instance, where blacks disappeared while the white population held steady or continued to grow, or places where the black population remained small for decades after collapsing.

The investigation was narrowed to identify racial expulsions that were county-wide and documented through contemporaneous accounts and where few, if any, blacks ever returned. In other words, whites succeeded in running blacks out.

Within those narrow parameters, Cox Newspapers documented 13 countywide expulsions in eight states between 1864 and 1923, in which more than 4,000 blacks were driven out. These are only the most extreme examples of a widespread pattern.

Racial purges were not investigated further in places where blacks were driven from a town but not an entire county, or places where blacks returned within months of an expulsion.

There is no evidence the attacks were coordinated nationally by government officials or racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

Despite a long trail of murders, torture and theft, the investigation found only three instances in the 13 countywide expulsions examined closely in which any of the white vigilantes were arrested or convicted of a crime. In at least one of the 14 counties — Forsyth County, Ga. — an examination of county tax records and land deeds suggests that some black-owned land was appropriated by whites after the expulsion and was never returned.

Why did it happen?

Some purges were triggered when whites, angry about a particular crime, lynched someone and then ordered the black population to leave. But in at least three counties, whites simply decided they did not want to live near blacks.

Old newspaper accounts often describe the incidents in graphic detail.

"For nearly fifteen hours, ending about noon to-day, this town of 3,000 people has been in the hand of a mob of armed whites, determined to drive every negro from its precincts," a Pierce City, Mo., newspaper reported in 1901. "In addition to the lynching last night of William Godley, the mob today cremated Peter Hampton, an aged negro, in his home and with the aid of State militia rifles stolen from the local company's arsenal drove dozens of negroes from town."

Whites often applauded when the expulsions occurred. In Arkansas, the Boone County Chamber of Commerce noted in a 1920s-era marketing brochure that the town did not have "mosquitoes or Negroes." A similar brochure published around the turn of the century touting Comanche County, about 110 miles northwest of Austin, pointed out that its population "is entirely and absolutely ALL WHITE; there is not a negro in the county, and the chances are there will not be any for many years to come."

Blacks remain largely absent from these counties according to the 2000 census, the most recent numbers available. Many of them, rightly or not, have retained reputations as fearsome places where blacks dare not tread.

What's it like today?

The expulsions still tug at our world. Many African Americans interviewed explained how they still view the country as a kind of checkerboard where some squares remain too dangerous to land. While the specifics of a particular expulsion may be lost, the dangerous specter of these places has been passed by word of mouth.

In more recent history, some blacks venturing into certain counties have risked being threatened, attacked or rousted by police.

In 1987, a small band of civil rights marchers tried to enter Forsyth County, Ga. — where a violent expulsion had occurred in 1912 — and were chased away by about 400 whites whose screams of "Go home, nigger" were captured by television crews and broadcast across the nation.

In 1983, Evelyn Young and her two young daughters became one of the only black families in Comanche, Texas, nearly a century after blacks had been driven out.

Taunts from her elementary school classmates prompted Nicole Harlmon, Young's oldest daughter, to come home from school and ask her mother "What's a nigger?"

"The next time one of the kids calls you a nigger, just ask them to spell it for you," Young says she told her daughter. "And, if they can't spell it, they don't know what it is. But don't blame them. It's not them that's really talking. It's the adults. The kids don't know that they are doing wrong. They think it's a way of playing with you because you are different and you are unique."

Nicole's athletic prowess, including her role on a state championship basketball team in high school, helped the family win acceptance.

But during the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, the family started getting death threats. Comanche County Deputy Sheriff Ron Moe, a city police officer at the time, recalled in an interview pulling Nicole and her sister out of school and offering to move the family to a safe location. Young told the police she would not run, and the family lived in Comanche for 19 years.

"I stayed," explained Nicole's mother, "because they didn't want me to."

Historical accounts

Local histories written in the decades since the expulsions, typically by white historians, often minimize or offer justifications for what occurred.

Seventy years after the Pierce City expulsion, a local historian described in passing a purge that involved three murders of blacks, the burning of several black-owned homes and a military-style assault on the black quarter as "disturbing situations."

In a retelling of the Comanche County expulsion about 20 years after the event, whites were portrayed as being generous by doing nothing more than forcing all blacks to flee. "It may be supposed that this has grown out of unreasonable prejudice and without just cause, but . . . the forbearance of the people was manifest by a sentence so mild as banishment," read the county's promotional literature.

The reluctance to discuss what happened continues to this day. Linda Ledbetter, a Forsyth County high school government teacher and a county commissioner, says she does not teach anything about that county's 1912 racial expulsion. Although she says she knows the story, if students ask her about it she claims not to know.

In the black community the memory of these racial expulsions is kept alive through a series of warnings passed from parents to children.

Lillie Nash, 65, a school teacher who lives in Atlanta, says she learned about Forsyth County's past when her parents and grandparents talked about the night they fled. Growing up, she was warned never to go near the county and it wasn't until a few years ago that she dared to venture back.

When Shawn Livingston, a librarian at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, got his driver's license in 1984, he recalls that his parents warned him about areas of the state too dangerous for blacks.

"They told me you don't go here and you don't go there," Livingston said. "It really did stick with me. You are never to drive to Corbin or Morehead and, if we find out, you are going to be in more trouble than you can get from the police."

Livingston said no one in the family knew exactly what happened in Morehead, but it was considered a dangerous place. All but three African Americans were driven out of Corbin in 1919.

Though a few blacks have trickled back into some of these counties, they endure as symbols of America's divided history. Ignored or discounted by whites, their past is kept alive by word of mouth among blacks. Where one sees nothing, the other senses danger.

Between these two separate versions of history, it is difficult to talk about what happened.

That is the nature of family secrets.