Banished

It's painful to think of "ethnic cleansing" when it comes to the history of the United States, even though there's no better term to describe the terrorization, forced removal and murder of countless indigenous Americans over the past three centuries. But while these depredations are common knowledge, most Americans remain blissfully ignorant of another series of banishments that occurred to a different population: former African-American slaves who were violently expelled from their hometowns in the decades following the Civil War. This crucially important documentary from filmmaker Marco Williams examines three cases in particular, and raises some difficult questio...