A shameful racist pattern along the Mason-Dixon Line
In at least a dozen of the most extreme cases, blacks were purged from entire counties that still today 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 Cox News Service 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 Martin Luther King Jr., now a senior fellow at Homerton College at the University of Cambridge.
Today, one of the physical legacies of these attacks is an archipelago of all-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 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.