Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Racial Cleansing in America

People in Corbin, Kentucky will tell you their town is a friendly place with good schools. It?s the proud home of the world?s first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant...opened by Colonel Sanders in the 1930?s.

Lora Smith: ?I think the first time I realized that there was something was wrong with where I was from, / I think I was probably around 6 or 7 at the time....?

Lora Smith is 27. She has long blond hair. Her family has been in Corbin for generations. She says when she was a child...she and her mother were on a trip to Lexington when they ran out of gas.

Lora Smith: ?This really nice man stopped and picked us up...and he was African American. And he was just talking to us, talking to my mom, and finally came around, where you all from? And my mom just looked over and said, ?we?re from Williamsburg.? And I was shocked. Because my mom was lying! / I remember sitting in the back seat and just taking that all in and the gears starting to turn and just being like, okay, there?s something not okay with telling people, especially, you know, African American people...that we?re from Corbin.?

Lueverda: ?Well. (Sigh.) Years back, it was very, very sad situation in Corbin.
Lueverda Boose: ?My name is Lueverda Boose. I was borned in Knox County, 19 and 27.?

Mrs. Boose lives in Barbourville...15 miles southeast of Corbin. For a century...Corbin has been the railroad hub for this part of Kentucky. In the days of passenger trains...that meant blacks going to Barbourville used the Corbin station.

Lueverda Boose: ?They would be scared to even get off the train. Because it was just that ? way back in those days, just face facts, it was a very dangerous situation to come to Corbin?African Americans. It really was.?

Mrs. Boose is not afraid of Corbin anymore. On a Saturday in winter...she?s sitting in an apartment there...while her grand-niece...Tammy Rogers...gets her hair styled by her friend David Slone.

Sound: water running. Tammy: ?You are smart today!? David: ?Ooh, I?m enjoying this!? ...

This is David Slone?s apartment. He?s one of about ten blacks living in Corbin...out of about eight thousand people. He moved to town in 2005 to escape Biloxi, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. He met Tammy Rogers at a mostly-black Baptist church in Barbourville.

Tammy Rogers: ?When David said he was living in Corbin, I thought that was quite...strange. I laughed, actually.? (laughs)

David Slone: ?When I first came up here, / I had a little toddler walk up to me and rub me on the back of the hand and look at his hand. And I told him, it didn?t rub off, it?s permanent. He wasn?t used to seeing black people.?

The reason dates back to 1919.

Music: ?Darktown Strutter?s Ball,? James Reese Europe, rec. 1919

The 1910 census found 60 black residents in town. By 1919...another two hundred or so black men were working in Corbin...expanding the railroad yard and paving streets. But racial violence and labor strife were rampant across the country...as soldiers streamed home from World War One. In what came to be known as Red Summer...white mobs shot and lynched dozens of blacks in some twenty-five race riots...from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta. Then...that fall in Corbin...

Voice: ?Corbin Times. / Wednesday night occurred a highway robbery near the C.V. Bridge, when A.F. Thompson, switchman, 34 years old, was held up by two Negroes as he was nearing home from his work....?

The day after this alleged mugging of a white man on October 29th...word passed in town that something was about to happen. These are excerpts from affidavits signed a few months later by longtime black residents Alex Tye and John Turner.

Af-Am voice #1 [Tye]: ?At about eleven o?clock on the night of October 30th, my wife Annie Tye called me to look at a crowd of men going in the direction of John Turner?s house....?

Af-Am voice #2: [Turner] ?They swore at us and said, ?By God we are going to run all negroes out of this town tonight.?....

[Tye] ?I saw Steve Rogers on the porch of Lyttle?s house hammering on the door...calling on the crowd to brake (sic) in the door and bring them out, and hang them if they didn?t come out.?

[Turner] ?The Fireman, Bob Smith, held a gun to the back of my head....?

[Tye] ?...so the three of us got out through the back window and went over the top of a hill back of my house.?

[Turner] ?My wife and I were taken to the Depot and herded there with a large number of Negroes and compelled to leave Corbin.?
Sound: train...going away

Jaspin: ?By the end of this, / all but three blacks had been sent packing. The mob leaders decided that these three, who had been there for years and were harmless, in their view, they could stay. Everybody else had to leave.?

Journalist Elliot Jaspin spent more than five years researching places like Corbin ? places where whites violently expelled virtually all the blacks in their communities at some point between the Civil War and the 1920?s. In his new book...Buried in the Bitter Waters...Jaspin writes about racial cleansings from Central Texas through the Ozarks and parts of Indiana...into Appalachia and Georgia.

Jaspin: ?It?s kind of an arc that goes across the United States. /The counties are typically rural...along the Mason-Dixon line. / In a sense it?s become America?s family secret. / I found so many that I eventually had to limit the story that I eventually wrote to only those counties where the racial cleansing had been successful. Which is to say, it remains white or virtually all-white today.?

Sound: train

In Corbin, Kentucky...the railroad yard is still there...just off the charming Main Street. So is the depot where a couple hundred African Americans boarded trains at gunpoint on that night in 1919. In the Corbin public library...you can find this article in the local newspaper archives.

Voice: ?Corbin Times, November 7, 1919. In the matter of news there is nothing that The Times can ad (sic) to what has already been said about the terrible calamity that befell Corbin last Thursday night in the way of that mob....??

I take a copy of the article to Don Estep. He?s publisher of Corbin?s current weekly paper...the News Journal. Estep is 67 and a lifelong Corbin resident. But he says he?s never seen the article before...and has always heard a more benign version of what happened in 1919.

Estep: ?Well, until I?d read this I didn?t know there was a mob spirit. But they are openly in this article written in 1919 calling it a mob. [Reading...] ?Our name has gone out....? / Very interesting part of this, written in 1919, I think, is this: ?Our name has gone out over the nation with a black spot that can never be removed.? Wow.?

Jaspin: ?As a way to deal with this very uncomfortable history, what I see again and again, and this is certainly in Corbin, is that they develop a fable.?

Author Elliot Jaspin.

Jaspin: ?In Corbin, the fable / was that / there was a black work crew that came into town that caused trouble and they were told to leave.?

The mayor of Corbin... Willard McBurney...is 63 and a retired postal service manager.

McBurney: ?People in my peer group, they said they had heard from their grandfathers....?

The 1919 story McBurney grew up hearing is what Jaspin calls the fable.

McBurney: ?I?ve heard that it wasn?t to that severity ? that, you know, they were employed by the railroad company and they did move some out. But then they brought them back in two weeks later to finish the job.?

That is...the railroad brought in another crew of black workers. In this version of the story...that?s proof that the expulsion was not about race. In fact...in affidavits collected for the state?s criminal investigation several months later...white eyewitnesses agreed with blacks. They said the mob announced its intentions to rid Corbin of blacks...and that black baggage workers who tried to return a few days later were threatened and left again.

[Dr. B.J. Edwards] ?I know that some of the negroes who were compelled to leave Corbin were property owners ... and had always been considered peaceful and law-abiding.?

[A.C. Martin] ?I do not consider that it would be safe for any of the Negroes to return to Corbin, Kentucky at the present time.?

As a result of the investigation...a white railroad worker named Steve Rogers was convicted of leading the mob and spent two years in the Kentucky state penitentiary.
A lot of people of Corbin say there?s no point in dwelling on something that happened way back in 1919. That?s how Mayor McBurney feels. But he admits the race riot that happened long before he was born haunts his town...and its image.

McBurney: ?I had to go to a marketing meeting in Cincinnata....?

McBurney remembers an incident from the late 1980?s when was working for the postal service.

McBurney: ?There was probably over a hundred of us at this meeting....?

The main speaker at the meeting was an African American who?d flown in from Chicago.

McBurney: ?And he was / going through the plans and how they would do this and that and if any of us had any problems, he says, ?Hey, I?ll personally come down and work with you on that. / But,? he says, and he pointed his finger at me. He said, ?I won?t come to Carbon.? That?s what he called Corbin. / And that really made me feel small. To be singled out with other people like that. / I knew that he had heard of the stigma that has followed Corbin. / And I mean that was someone from Chicago.?

For decades after the 1919 race riot...Corbin was known as a ?white man?s town?...with a visible Klan presence...that would tolerate only a token handful of blacks. The criminal investigation of the riot did find that several whites stood up to the mob. A few protected blacks in their homes or businesses. Journalist Elliot Jaspin says most people in Corbin...and the other towns where racial expulsions took place...don?t know this part of their history, either.

Jaspin: ?When you have the fable, the heroic acts of the people in the community are lost. They lose their heroes.?

Almost ninety years later...Corbin?s leaders say their town is as welcoming to black people as any other. They just need a chance to prove it.

Sound: rock band...singer: ?Come...(guy shouts: ?Just as you are!?)...just as you are to worship. Come....?

On the edge of Corbin...a congregation with a 110-year history meets in a sprawling...much newer building. Senior Pastor Tim Thompson of the First United Methodist Church was sitting in his office with some of his staff in August 2005.

Thompson: ?We?re watching the news and this thing has just wiped out New Orleans and Biloxi and all that coast line down there....?

Thompson and his staff decided to turn their church into emergency housing for people who?d lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina.

Thompson: ?I went before the whole church on Sunday morning and said, here?s what we want to do. / We raised the issue: we?re certain some of the folks that are gonna come and live with us are gonna be black! And we just said, whatever! Whoever comes, we don?t care, it doesn?t matter, we?ll deal with it, it?ll be fine. And so the congregation said, Okay!?

The church hosted about 25 people from the Gulf Coast. They stayed in the church for weeks or months. About half were African American.

Thompson: ?Our hope was...that maybe a few of the black folks that came would stay here and live and become a Corbinite -- live in Corbin, and essentially become pioneers. So fifteen or twenty years from now there?s a growing population of black people in this town.?

Sound: TV...basketball game...

But a year and a half later...almost all of the dozen or so African American guests from the Gulf Coast have gone back home...or moved on to places like Louisville or Lexington. All except David Slone...who came to Corbin from Biloxi.

Slone: ?I?m thankful that the church had the vision to open up their doors to bring us up here. / I?m an adventurer, I?m a pioneer, I?ll try anything once.?

Slone now works in a cabinet factory in Corbin. He says he?s gotten some cold looks in town...and...he thinks...unfair treatment in a couple of previous jobs .

Slone: ?A lot of the people up here are stuck back in the Sixties.?

But he says...Corbin has not lived up to its old image as a town where a black man had better get out before sundown or else. Slone?s 79-year-old friend from nearby Barbourville...Lueverda Boose...agrees. She shops in Corbin regularly.

T70/15.25 Lueverda: ?It used to be that you could walk on the street: ?Oh, there go a nigger down the street.? You would hear this in Corbin, Kentucky! But now it seems to be much, much better. / Now you can walk into a store, you can get a nice smile.?

Still...some people in Corbin say their town has a lot of work to do before its old image is put to rest... and that can only start with some straight talk about the past.

Sound: train....

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