In 1919, Corbin expelled all its Black residents. Here’s why I wrote a play about it. | Opinion

I first learned of the Corbin Expulsion through a writing contest conducted by Virginia’s Barter Theatre in 2021. Playwrights were invited to select from a list of historical events experienced by Black Appalachians to use as inspiration. One incident immediately caught my attention.

One hundred and four years ago this month, on Oct. 31, 1919, a white mob in Corbin, Ky., rounded up approximately 200 Black people, drove them onto boxcars, and sent them to Knoxville, Tenn. The expulsion of virtually every Black person from town was a response to the alleged armed robbery of a white man by two Black assailants. The Black population of Corbin had recently increased as people arrived seeking jobs on the railroad, and the local sentiment was that these new Black residents were undesirable.

I was surprised that I had never heard of the event. I was even more surprised to discover that the incident in Corbin was one of approximately 35 “race riots” that had occurred that year in the United States. The period is referred to as “The Red Summer of 1919.” Mobs of white people attacked Black Americans in various towns and cities, resulting in numerous injuries and deaths.

I selected the Corbin story as the basis of my contest entry. I’ve written about racial violence before, but I was taken aback at the audacity of this incident. Violence against Black people was a fairly common occurrence, but in Corbin, the goal was total erasure.

Barter Theatre challenged me to create a monologue, a dramatic piece performed by one actor. Later, the theatre asked me to expand the monologue into a scene, and then into a full-length play. I entitled it “Trains.”

The story of “Trains” focuses on two victims of the Corbin Expulsion, a father and son living in Knoxville in 1932. The son, who was 16 at the time of the incident, is still suffering from the trauma he experienced that night 13 years earlier, and he self-medicates with alcohol. Complications occur when a white man, a former friend of the son’s, arrives with a desire to reconnect and “make things right.” Trains examines racial violence, the resulting psychological damage, and white denialism.

Racial violence causes physical harm, but the psychological effects are worse. Knowing that there are people who despise you because of your race is detrimental to healthy self-esteem. For many African Americans, the seed of doubt is always there, no matter how many times we tell ourselves that we are good enough — or pretend not to care. It affects the soul. The harm caused by racism also manifests through discrimination in housing, education, employment, and in many other ways large and small. Occurrences like the Corbin Expulsion cause everlasting pain passed down through generations. We feel its impact whether or not we lived through it ourselves or even knew of the specifics.

There is a movement in the U.S. to stop considering America’s racial past: slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence. Atrocities are dismissed as the country’s growing pains, and those that would teach about the evils committed against Black people are warned not to stir up unnecessary resentments that would cause undeserved guilt for white Americans, or make plain the persistence of racism today.

Truth exists. It is authentic and objective. These days, people think they can choose their own facts, but that these events occurred is true — whether or not we are willing to bear witness. The point is not to wallow in the pain, recrimination, and self-pity. We must examine our past to avoid repeating history’s mistakes, and its cruelty. It is why I wrote Trains. I applaud Barter Theatre’s commitment to telling a more complete and true history of our nation on its stage, and for inviting playwrights like me to mine the history of our region for lessons that may inspire us all to forge a future we are proud to face.

Quinton Cockrell is a playwright and professor at Troy University in Alabama.

This story was originally published October 25, 2023 at 9:52 AM.