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

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 352 pages
• Published by: Basic Books March 5, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0465036368
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0465036363
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Jaspin's harrowing and exhaustively researched history of racial cleansing in the United States is painfully eye-opening, and Leslie's voice—filled with horror and sorrow—takes the pain to another level. One's eyes cannot lightly skip over the cringe-inducing passage that explains the physics of whipping, or the scene of the burning and disembowelment of a pregnant woman, or white leaders' hate-filled speeches. In a low tone radiating rage and disbelief at the senseless violence and hardcore racism, Leslie relates Jaspin's accounts of a dozen instances of blacks being driven out of their homes by whites in a steady, commanding pace. The stories are disparate in locale and time—the cleansings happened in both North and South after the Civil War through the '20s—but they flow together thanks to their grim shared topic, Jaspin's eloquent prose and Leslie's almost cinematic delivery. Jaspin pursued this topic for ten years. Listeners will be glad that he persevered to produce this important book: his passion and conviction are richly evident and inspiring throughout thanks to Leslie's first-rate narration.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Kevin Boyle

People knew about the terror, of course. The stories came to them in whispers, passed on in warning or in shame or perhaps in pride. There was a day eighty or ninety years ago, they were told, when the rumor of a crime -- a rape, most likely -- had so enraged the whites in town that they lynched the black man they thought responsible. Then something else had happened, something every bit as sinister. In the fever of the moment, the whites had turned on their black neighbors, ordering entire communities of African Americans to gather what they could carry and get out of town, appropriating the property the victims were forced to abandon, destroying the homes they left behind. Years later, people still knew. But these weren't the sort of stories that you told in public.

In the last decade or so, the silence has started to lift. Oklahoma established a public commission to investigate the destruction of Tulsa's African American neighborhood in a horrific 1921 pogrom. Hollywood made a movie dramatizing whites' assault on the black town of Rosewood, Fla., in 1923. And two years ago, the sociologist James W. Loewen published an award-winning book, Sundown Towns, that systematically documented America's wave of racial purges, which he rightly called "ethnic cleansing." Now Elliot Jaspin's vivid Buried in the Bitter Waters digs deeply into 12 of the purges -- those he judged "the worst of the worst."

A reporter for the Cox newspaper chain, Jaspin brings a journalistic sensibility to the task. He's interested less in broad social dynamics than in the particulars of the small towns where the 12 purges took place. He carefully recreates the often convoluted steps that led to each town's racial cleansing "in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s." And he makes the horror come alive by describing the experience of people swept up in the violence of the moment: a mob member's viciousness, a white official's cowardice, a victim's heart-pounding fear as she fled across an open field, her house ablaze behind her. Jaspin then takes each story to the present day, showing how the purge left wounds that still refuse to heal.

As chilling as each incident is, though, the cumulative effect of stringing together 12 stories is problematic. Part of the difficulty is that Jaspin's choice of case studies leaves the wrong impression of American ethnic cleansing. All 12 incidents he describes took place in small towns, ten of them in the South, with African Americans always the victims. In fact, the majority of purges occurred in the North and West, including almost two dozen in Illinois alone, according to Loewen. Urban neighborhoods were particularly prone to racial expulsions since racism and the real estate market made for a ferociously toxic mix. And mobs in Western states were more likely to target Chinese immigrants than blacks.

Jaspin runs into another problem as well: Because the purges tended to follow a predictable pattern, his stories start to feel depressingly familiar, then frustratingly repetitious. As that happens, Buried in the Bitter Waters loses much of the emotional power that drives the book in its early stages.

Jaspin compounds the problem by devoting most of his conclusion to detailing a nasty fight he had with his editors at Cox newspapers in 2005, when he presented them with the multi-part series upon which the book is based. The conflict raised some troubling issues of journalistic ethics: The editors objected to Jaspin's use of the term "racial cleansing," which they thought too inflammatory, and his charge that Cox's flagship newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, repeatedly downplayed anti-black violence and racial exclusion in suburban Forsyth County, Ga., the site of a brutal purge in 1912. But Jaspin's intricate detailing of what was essentially a clash over professional standards deadens what should have been the book's dramatic climax.

That's disappointing because it's not enough simply to know that Americans once engaged in ethnic cleansing. We need to be shocked by that terrible truth, to read the stories and cringe at their cruelty. Only then, as Jaspin says, will we be willing to confront the question of how to secure justice for the families that were driven from their land in the early 20th century: to talk seriously of reparations for the victims' descendants, maybe even of restoring land to its rightful owners, a possibility that has already caused consternation in a few communities around the country. More fundamentally, if we're shocked by the violent separation of the races all those years ago, we might be forced to consider -- if only for a moment -- America's continued embrace of segregation, the enduring legacy of days so bitter we only now dare speak of them.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reader Reviews
I wish I could say that I cried over this book, but the truth is that I am so accustomed to America's legacy of genocide, social injustice, and external fraud, regime change, and invasion that I simply sighed and thought, "wow, about time this came to light." This is a stunning book that should be read by every American of every race, creed, and class. I previously reviewed a book today that discussed how white supremacy views were one of the causes of the downfall of democracy after the Civil War. I believe this. As a Marine, I learned there are only Marines, some dark green, some light green. That lesson has NOT been learned by all Americans, and that is one reason I favor a restoration of universal national service (including two years for any immigrant granted citizenship, at any age), with the option of armed, peace, or homeland service. I am Latino by culture, white by race, intelligent by design (pun intended). I believe that America genocided the native Americans, genocided the people of color, and is now in the process of disenfranchising the Latinos while making commons cause with the Asians. None of this bodes well for a Republic that is supposed to offer Liberty & Justice for all as the foundation for collective intelligence and the sovereign We the People. The Constitution has been trashed by Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative and Christo-fascist supporters, and it is high time someone stood up and said ENOUGH--we must make common cause with the people of color, embrace their leaders, both self-selected and elected, and MOVE ON beyond the corporate socialism and the corrupt political party environments that have broken the middle class and impoverished the working ppor--which the author of the book by that title points out, should be but is not an oxymoron. This is an important book. I hope it shames some, causes dispair in others, and that overall, it rises to be a liberation manifesto, a starting point for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission within America, to reveal, curse, and forgive all that has been done to the people of color on the assumption, the grotesque assumption, of white supremacy. I share Martin Luther King's dream, and I am committed to seeing it fulfilled. Semper Fidelis, Robert Steele Bonhoeffer Improper behavior The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Galaxy Books) Al On America Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States Comments (8) | | (Report this)