Racial Cleansing

Published: Sept. 2, 2011, 7 p.m.

Ethnic cleansing is not something that is peculiar to Nazi Germany, Rwanda or Bosnia. American history shows that many communities here are guilty of it too. These communities banished their black citizensoften violently. Many of these communities remain virtually all white to this day. Brothers Charles and James Brown traced their family tree to Pierce City, Missouri, and learned their ancestors had been forced out at gunpoint. Marco Williams produced a documentary titled Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks out of Town in America.