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Silas House is a fiction writer who grew up on the outskirts of Corbin, Kentucky. The town's official histories make no reference to the riot by the white mob in 19th century. Silas drives me around Corbin in his pickup. He says he thinks Corbin identifies very much as an Appalachian town.

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