BANISHED -- When Jim Crow Came to Town, With Eviction Notices

MANOHLA DARGIS in The New York Times

There are ghosts haunting Marco Williams’s quietly sorrowful documentary “Banished,” about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War. Dressed in what looks like their Sunday best, in dark suits and high-collar dresses, they stare solemnly into an unwelcoming world. A couple ride in a cart along a pretty country road, and others stand awkwardly before houses with peeling paint. There are few smiles. Photography was then a serious business, though being a black landowner, part of a fragile, nascent Southern middle class, was more serious still.

It’s stunning how loudly the dead can speak, and with such eloquence. I couldn’t help comparing these images with those in one of my own photo albums of a large family of stern-looking Midwesterners dressed in what looks like their Sunday best. The rough, ill-fitting suits and somber dresses look similar to those in the documentary, and the simple clapboard house looming behind this family recalls comparable homes in “Banished.” There are, once again, few smiles, though in one photo my grandfather, then around 12, looks as if he’s trying to keep one in check.

Unlike the young men in Mr. Williams’s documentary, my grandfather raised a family and ran a business not far from where his photographs were taken — an upstanding white citizen in a nearly all-white land. The young black men in “Banished” never had the chance to take root. Some were falsely accused of molesting white women and were lynched. We see a few of these dead in other photographs, hanging from trees and lampposts, their bodies sometimes surrounded by a visibly excited white crowd. (A crude sign under one corpse warns not to wake him.) As Mr. Williams explains, his measured voice-over calm as ever, lynching was an instrument of terror, used against blacks as a means of control and “racial cleansing.”

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Race special: Racism in Britain 2007

The Independent

The subject of race is in the headlines again, but really it has dominated the social and political agenda for centuries. To start 20 pages of coverage, William Leith asks the question we all fear: 'Am I a racist?'

Published: 25 February 2007
I'm about to take a racism test, and it's making me uncomfortable. Why? I'm not a racist. For the record, I am an anti-racist. If you asked me, I would say that, while the races may look different, they are equal. I would say that racism, the theory that one race is superior to another, is fallacious. Also, it does nothing but harm. It harms the victim, and it also harms the perpetrator. There is no sense in it. It is, quite literally, nonsense.

Oh, I know about racism. I know that, in both senses of the word, it's wrong. Wrong morally, and wrong factually. I don't know anybody who doesn't know this. And yet, as an idea, it persists. Something, somewhere, gives it power. And this is what's making me uncomfortable. Racism gets its power from some mysterious place, and that place, somewhere in the shadows of our culture, our collective memory, scares me.

I have an idea where that place is, but I don't want to go there. (read entire article)