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