Old census records – I mean really old census records – are a pretty unlikely place to look for a news story. Even current census numbers aren't that exciting and, unlike a fine cognac, sitting around for 100 years doesn't help.
But as I began exploring a database of population figures that stretched from 1890 to 1930, I stumbled across something perplexing. In county after county throughout the United States, I found that the black population would suddenly and mysteriously disappear.
In places like Forsyth County in Georgia and Missouri's Lawrence County, one census would show blacks living in the county, and then a decade later, they were gone. Why had whole communities that had existed since slavery suddenly left? And, once gone, why had blacks never moved back?
At the time, I didn't know that I was looking at the unique signature left by one of the uglier events in American history: racial cleansings.
Like most people, I had never heard of America's racial cleansings. In 1998, I found myself on assignment in Berryville, Ark. With a little time to kill, I wandered into a small history museum and marveled at a display of antique embalming equipment in one