- Director: Marco Williams - Running time: 87 minutes In 1890,
public records showed that 1,288 African-Americans were living
in Forsyth County, Georgia. In 1920, that number was down to 30,
and by 1960, it had dropped to four. Between the Civil War and
the civil-rights era, dozens of communities across the
country—and not all in the South—organized pogroms of a kind,
driving out black families and seizing their land. None of this
gets talked about much any more, but neither is it secret. The
local newspapers covered the stories at the time, and the
descendents of those exiled families have had anecdotes passed
down to them as a warning: Don't get too comfortable, because
one day, this may happen to you. Marco Williams' documentary
Banished digs deeper into incidents of racial cleansing in
America: the one in Forsyth County, one in Pierce City,
Missouri, and a succession in Harrison, Arkansas. He considers
both what happened a century ago and how it still affects the
communities in question and the people dri