9.3d Expulsion

Expulsion or forced displacement occurs when the dominant group uses persecution, violence, or other extreme measures to make a subordinate group leave the region. For example, the Indian Removal Act (1830) exemplifies how the U.S. government used the law to expel Indigenous people from the east of the Mississippi River to the west. Expulsion is violent. The U.S. Department of War removed the Cherokee from their homes, placed them in internment camps, and forced them to walk 800 miles from Georgia to resettlement in present-day Oklahoma, on a route now known as the Trail of Tears (The National Park Service, 2023). Approximately one in five Cherokee died on the way.

In other cases, White residents and local officials have led expulsions. There are many examples of the violent expulsion of African Americans from cities throughout the United States. For instance, in 1921, White residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, engaged in violence toward the thriving African American community there. The White residents destroyed their property, killing dozens if not hundreds of African American residents and injuring many more (Parshina-Kottas et al., 2021). Contemporary forms of expulsion include mass incarceration (see Chapter 5), which disproportionately affects men of color and their families.

Photo 9.10

Destruction from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre