There's always something more to learn about the breadth and depth of racial oppression in America: the middle passage, slavery, the internal slave trade, sharecropping, lynching, segregation, voter suppression, redlining, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, mass incarceration, bombings, discrimination, kangaroo courts... and it turns out we barely knew the history of anti-black pogroms, some of which the author has recovered. African Americans in many places have taught their children to steer clear of towns and counties denuded of black people: here are stories of why. ( )

"Buried in the Bitter Waters" is a book describing forced removal of blacks in a number of areas of the U.S. around the turn of the (20th) Century. It's a story I hadn't heard of in my exposure to U.S. History, although most of us have heard related stories of forced removal of Native Americans from Indian lands during the 19th Century. The author describes his research into the facts following his accidental discovery of an all-white County in Arkansas ten years ago. Detailed digging into census records, newspaper accounds from the past, property deeds, and personal accounts led to his discovery of many cases of "racial cleansing", and his conclusions appear well substantiated. The stories he tells, ranging from many areas of the Country including Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana, and a number of other States and Counties, are both tragic and riveting. With continuing evidence of situations of ethnic cleansing on-going around the globe, such as what took place after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Shia vs. Sunni in Iraq, Janaween attacks in the Darfur region of Sudan, Hutu attacks on Tutsis in Rwanda, or earlier examples ranging from the Holocaust by the Nazi's to Khmer Rouge attacks in Cambodia, it shouldn't be surprising that there may have been examples in our own Country. Without being a point of the book, the history told also reminds us that "the right of return", a sticking point in Arab-Israeli Palestinian peace negotiations, can be applied to many areas around the world, including our own United States. With so many other similar examples evident around the world, it's a comfort to think that our Country appears to have advanced from near universal national racial bias at that time to being able to elect our first black President 100 years later. Hopefully, 100 years from now that lesson will be spread to other areas around the world as well. ( )