Banished from home: a new documentary considers reparations and suggests how little has changed in more than a century.

IN HIS NEW DOCUMENTARY Banished, Black filmmaker Marco Williams weaves together a willfully forgotten American past from yellowed newspaper articles and oral histories. The omitted grievance is this: for decades after the Civil War, white Americans drove out their Black neighbors to create all-white enclaves in more than a dozen counties across the country. In many cases, the white townspeople would accuse a Black man of raping a white woman, lynch him and threaten more of the same if the Black families did not leave. The land that Black families left behind was often not sold, but rather taken by whites as their own.

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For the contemporary citizens of these still-white towns, communal memory takes on a fascinating life of its own, reshaping history in hushed tones and public disavowal. The memories of the banished are markedly different; shaped by displacement, they are fragmented and individualized, based more on a grandparent's tale or a newspaper article rather than a collective sense of loss. It is when these two collide that the central tension, articulated by a white pastor, emerges: "How do you make reconciliation with someone who's no longer there?" Or, what do you do when they're standing in front of you?

The documentary has three acts, divided by time and space, moving from Forsyth, Georgia, to Pierce City, Missouri, and ending in Harrison, Arkansas. All are sites of racial "cleansings," and all grapple, with limited degrees of success, with the question of atonement. The film begins in Forsyth and Pierce City through the eyes of curious reporters who unearth their towns' ugly histories, triggering communal grumbling. In Forsyth, the Stricklands, a Black family, are led by the exhortations of matriarch Leola Strickland Evans to discover that her old yarns were correct--their ancestor owned a large swath of land in what is now the suburbs. In Missouri, James Brown, living in St. Louis, learns about his family's banishment from Pierce City in a roundabout way--through someone who, upon learning his family is from Pierce City, tells him how "sorry" she is. Remaining in Pierce City is the body of his great-grandfather, James Cobb, in an unmarked grave. What follows is a long-winded and bureaucratic ordeal Brown undergoes to get the body exhumed and reburied in St. Louis.

The portrayal of Harrison, Arkansas, is more of an anthropological take, because there is no aggrieved family knocking on the town's door. What disturbs the townsfolk is having the reputation as a breeding ground for hate groups. Harrison's KKK members claim they speak for the town's white Christians. The concerned citizens, disturbed by such white supremacist proclamations, conduct a National Day of Prayer to acknowledge past deeds. They form a Task Force for Race Relations that brainstorms and occasionally acts on ideas like creating a college scholarships for students of color. While they are well-intentioned, they clearly opt for a token gesture rather than a paradigm-shifting act.

Williams is primarily a documentarian. His last two major works, In Search of Our Fathers and Two Towns of Jasper, meditated on race. The former, about Black families, began from a personal experience (he filmed meeting his father for the first time), while the latter studied the psychology of a town (he teamed with a white director, Whitney ...