Kentucky Town Re-Examines Its Racial History

David Slone arrived in the small Kentucky town of Corbin in 2005, seeking a haven after Hurricane Katrina ripped through his hometown of Biloxi, Miss.

He was in a shelter in Gulfport, Miss., and saw a flier left by the Corbin church offering to house displaced families.

Slone didn't know until he arrived that he would be one of only a few blacks living in Corbin, a town still trying to come to terms with a troubled racial history.

In 1919, more than 200 black men worked 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 I.

In what came to be known as Red Summer, white mobs shot and lynched dozens of blacks in more than two dozen locales from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta....

Trouble came to Corbin the following fall, when reports surfaced that a white man had been mugged by two black men there.

Soon, a mob drove nearly all the town's black residents to the train station.

"They swore at us and said: 'By God we are going to run all Negroes out of this town tonight,'" said longtime black resident John Turner in a signed affidavit a few months after the incident. He and his wife were taken to the depot at gunpoint and forced to leave.

In Buried in the Bitter Waters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin writes about racial cleansings from Central Texas through Georgia.