Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
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Manufacturer: Basic Books
Written By: Elliot Jaspin
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.896073
EAN: 9780465036370
ISBN: 0465036376
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2008-05-05
Publisher: Basic Books
Studio: Basic Books
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Editorial Reviews for Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
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"Leave now, or die!" Those words--or ones just as ominous--have echoed through the past hundred years of American history, heralding a very unnatural disaster--a wave of racial cleansing that wiped out or drove away black populations from counties across the nation. While we have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, this story of racial cleansing has remained almost entirely unknown. These expulsions, always swift and often violent, were extraordinarily widespread in the period between Reconstruction and the Depression era. In the heart of the Midwest and the Deep South, whites rose up in rage, fear, and resentment to lash out at local blacks. They burned and killed indiscriminately, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially "pure." Many of these counties remain virtually all-white to this day. In Buried in the Bitter Waters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin exposes a deeply shameful chapter in the nation's history--and one that continues to shape the geography of race in America.
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Consumer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: A good book based on facts in America of past.
Comment: A book by Mr Jaspin, of Maryland of Cox News Service Washington DC, based
on facts found in county court house,s from Courts records, media reports
of the time from local news papers. A mountain of research went into this
porject with many good people involved through out 12 areas of this
USA, a record of whites taking the law into their hand and control
using young men of time to do dirty work aginst the local black citizens
that showed gaines in the community,s involved. Fourcing them to leave
of fear in future. This took place many years ago, yet today some the
place involved has not recovered fully from this white actions.
If you like history it worth reading and later your reviews yourself.
on this Book, Buried in the Bitter Waters, The Hidden History of Racial
Cleansing in America. The subject is disturbing, yet it was part of our
fore Fathers history.
Claude
Customer Rating:
Summary: Violence, Villainy, Victimization...
Comment: ... elements of a powerful film on the order of Yojimbo or The Good the Bad and the Ugly - films where a defenseless minority in a village somewhere is terrorized by the rowdiest elements of their majority neighbors, but this time no Toshiro Mifune or Clint Eastwood is on hand to set things right. By individual violence and/or mob intimidation, the minority is driven from its homes and property, often with the memory of the public slaughter of family members to carry with them into exile and to preclude their ever returning. And in every case there is indifference or collusion from the police and other authorities.
The heart of Buried in the Bitter Waters is narrative -- twelve tragic stories of violence in twelve far-flung communities, decades apart in time. In each story, ordinary people united by their history and ethnicity suddenly rise against their neighbors of a different history and ethnicity, attack them physically, intimidate them psychologically and economically, and force them to leave the community, never to return under threat of death. It's always majority against minority, of course, or it couldn't be done. And in these stories it's successful; in every case, the community remains "pure" even generations later, and feels darned proud of its purity. True, the level of violence is different from narrative to narrative, but violence is always the means. In one narrative, the mob - provoked by a crime committed by one young man of the minority group - rampages through the minority community. It grabs two young men at random and literally shoots them to pieces. Then it seizes a man considered one of the elders of the minority and lynches him, leaving his body hanging as "a grizly tourist attraction" for two days. When that man's pregnant wife seeks help from the authorities, the mob seizes her also, hangs her upside-down in a tree, douses her with gasoline and sets her on fire, then disembowels her and rips out her eight-month fetus. When the infant cries feebly, one of the mob throws it on the ground and stomps it to death.
This is not a scene from a Medieval pogrom, or for the Thirty Years War, or from Nazi Germany, or from sectarian strife in Iraq. The scene of the murdered mother occurred in Georgia in 1918, and all the others narrated in "Buried in Bitter Waters" took place in America - in Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas. The victims in every case were African-Americans - descendants of slaves brought to the communities by the ancestors of the mob, long-time neighbors but never accepted as such - and the perpetrators of violence in every case were European-Americans, local people, not roving marauders.
Ethnic Cleansing is such a horrifying concept that Americans will bristle in anger at the mere suggestion that it has occurred in their country, perhaps in their own region. But it has, and not just once, or in one big outburst. Rather it has occurred spontaneously, at random, and often. By careful analysis of census data, old news reports, memoirs, and oral histories, author Elliot Jaspin has identified 260 counties - COUNTIES! not villages - in the states of the South and lower Midwest where 'successful' ethnic cleansings took place sometime between the Civil War and the present. Because of such actions, the demographic map of America even today looks like a checkerboard when the percentage of African-American families is depicted county by county. Jaspin has found that even in communities where the living European-American populace has no historical memory of an ethnic cleansing, such memories persist in the African-American population at large, in the form of vague dread and a sense of unwelcomeness in those communities. Jaspin also speculates that if data were available by towns or townships, the number of incidences of ethnic cleansing in America would be much higher.
Jaspin is a European-American himself, a career journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner working for the Cox Newspaper chain.
Truly, African-Americans and European-Americans have lived through two different histories in "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." But while the European-Americans know and want to know only their own version of American history, the African-Americans are by necessity aware of both versions. Theirs is the ugly one: slavery, dashed hopes after emancipation, Ku Klux Klan raids, lynchings, disenfranchisement, Black Codes of labor, share-cropping peonage, "Sundown Towns," apartheid, denial of opportunity, unequal application of the law, humiliation in popular culture, ghettoization by way of real estate red-lining and denial of credit for home-buying, laws against intermarriage, a perpetual 'inferiority' imposed economically and psychologically. Some things have gotten better since the 1960s, but NOT ENOUGH. Remember that, my fellow European-Americans, when next you feel offended by the anger, expressed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright but felt by many others whose ancestors may have been "cleansed" by yours.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Loewen's book is good-this is better
Comment: "Buried in the Bitter Waters," a look at American ethnic cleansing is inevitably comparable to James Loewen's (slightly) earlier book on the subject, "Sundown Towns." Of the two, I like this one better as Loewen's book, while excellent and informative, is a bit too heavy on the sociology and academia for my liking. This is a bit more layman-friendly. "Buried in the Bitter Waters" pretty much sticks to the stories and recollections of the events in question, although the author does get a bit rambly in th end with a story of the Atlanta newspaper's timidity in reporting racial incidents in nearby Forsyth County. Overall, it's a pretty good informal read of obscure (and uncomfortable) American history.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Bitter Indeed
Comment: I was channel hopping and came across a PBS independent file "Banished" and was quite surprised when the 1st place they mentioned was Washington County, Indiana, where I am orginally from and where my family still is. I was curious, so I did a search on Amazon and came across this book. Again, 1st thing mentioned, Washington County, Indiana. Then, later on in the book I came across Laurel County, Kentucky, where my maternal grandmother's people are from! I never thought I could be so ashamed of where I came from. It hurts to read this book, that people can be so ignorant and cruel.
I definitely suggest reading this. As I mentioned, it hurts, but we all should know our history, and hopefully quit repeating it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Hidden Chapter of American History: the Economics of Lynching
Comment: I wish to commend Mr. Jaspin, the author of this work for his intelligence, his tenacity, moral integrity. I thank him for the sacrifices that he made to bring this powerful work to us.
This is a chapter in American History that I had not known before. I learned of Forsyth County for the first time when I read the accounts of the protest and its racist past in the New York Times. And I was born and raised in Atlanta during the time when segregation was the order of the day. Having read this work, I believe it is possible that my own family may have felt the terror of a racial cleansing and banishment. My father, now deceased, told me that my grandfather packed up his family and belongings, left Monticello and came to Atlanta in fear of the Klan in 1902.
This book makes one of the strongest cases for reparations. The problems of racism and inequity in economic relations in America will never be solved as long as the problems are denied. While there was an apology given by congress for its inaction at the height of the lynching era of blacks in America for the first time in June 2005, the apology is meaningless without an atonement with a compensation for the real and personal property that was lost and stolen under the threat of death in the early part of the 20th century. And finally, unless justice is rendered and actions are taken to protect the property rights of all Americans, then the perpertrators will be encouraged to continue their brutality and theft of the property of the citizens who are least able to protect their rights; the Hurricane Katrinas will continue and the entire American economic fabric will be destroyed as is occurring in the subprime mortgage crisis, though the fraud in these transactions initially targeted to African Americans, the victims now envelop the global economic community.
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More Information on Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
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Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America(Hardcover (Cloth)) by Jaspin, Elliot
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