The Race Climate in the U.S.

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Adrienne Lentz-Smith is a history professor now at Duke. She wrote Freedom Struggles, a book about African Americans during World War I. Before the Great War, in the decades after the Civil War, she says, black Americans were in crisis. The two million U.S. soldiers sent to the battle in Europe, almost 400,000 were black.

In 1919, a white mob forced the entire black population of Corbin, Kentucky, to leave, at gunpoint. It was one of many racial expulsions in the United States. What happened, and how such racial cleansings became “America’s family secret.”

The history of Corbin as presented by the Corbin city government, with no mention of the 1919 racial expulsion.

Elliot Jaspin’s book, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansings in America