The Silence of White America

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LaVerta Booze traveled to Corbin, Kentucky. The town has been virtually all white since the 1800s. She met a woman who was shocked when she found out her family is African American. It's part nine of our Seeing White series on whiteness and how it works in the world.

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