Buried in the Bitter Waters

"Leave now, or die!" From the heart of the Midwest to the Deep South, from the mountains of North Carolina to the Texas frontier, words like these have echoed through more than a century of American history. The call heralded a very unnatural disaster -- a man-made wave of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation. We have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, but the story of widespread racial cleansing both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line has remained almost entirely unknown. Time after time, in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s, whites banded together to drive out the blacks in their midst. They burned and killed indiscriminately and drove thousands from their homes, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially "pure." Shockingly, these areas remain virtually all-white to this day. Based on original interviews and nearly a decade of painstaking research in archives and census records, Buried in the Bitter Waters provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil and fundamentally reshaped the geography of race. Elliot Jaspin is a reporter for Cox Newspapers. He won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1979, and in 1993 he was awarded the Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award by the National Press Foundation. Reader Don Leslie is an accomplished narrator who has also appeared on and off-Broadway, in feature films, and on television shows including Numb3rs an Law and Order.