Corbin's Troubled Past

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In Corbin, you can now get a cup of fair trade coffee and a local restaurant declared itself a sanctuary in the face of the Trump administration's travel ban on Muslim countries. The town still doesn't acknowledge its troubled past; there's still no public marker of any kind about what happened in 1919. Laura went to those lectures and was disappointed.

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