I read this book called Sundown Towns, and that's where they came from, and there were hundreds and hundreds of them, all with stories of (usually) imagined crimes, and African American families, and often whole communities, being driven out of town with mass terrorism-style riots.

But history books are written by white people, who have edited all of that out of our collective memory. Most of those stories have been lost, at least to white people, and I'm so glad you wrote your family's story down. It's an important part of our country's history.

An awful lot of white people think anything negative and racial is racist, even if it's the truth, as in this case. That's probably another good reason for writing this history and putting it out there. We (we being white people) have largely forgotten the history of racism, except for a sanitized version of slavery and one iconic photo of segregated drinking fountains. We need a full context.