IÂ’d like to see the movie Banished.

There are ghosts haunting Marco Williams’s quietly sorrowful documentary “Banished,” about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War. Dressed in what looks like their Sunday best, in dark suits and high-collar dresses, they stare solemnly into an unwelcoming world. A couple ride in a cart along a pretty country road, and others stand awkwardly before houses with peeling paint. There are few smiles. Photography was then a serious business, though being a black landowner, part of a fragile, nascent Southern middle class, was more serious still.

The events and the period covered are clearly one of the great missed opportunities of American history, one of those “what ifs” that those of us who are students of history often look at and think of with a heart-felt sadness.

And it looks like Williams has done a great job, hitting many important but little-known incidents.

Mr. Williams isn’t one for hysterics or histrionics, even when seated across from a Ku Klux Klan leader who says he wouldn’t be happy if this African-American director moved in next door. The Klan leader lives in a nice-looking house adorned with white supremacist banners in Forsyth County, Ga., which in 1912 brutally expelled an estimated 1,000 of its black residents. Mr. Williams guides us through this terrible history, often while strolling on camera through the scene of the crime, talking to white residents and dredging up memories. He also uncovers some repellent images of a white mob trying to stop a peaceful, interracial civil rights march in the county in 1987. The marchers sing “We Shall Overcome.” The mob throws rocks.

There is so much more to the story than can be told by this 87-minute movie, which only casts glances at Reconstruction, the question of reparations and the bitter, enduring, living legacy of slavery. Although Mr. Williams somewhat overstates his case when he says that racial cleansing has “remained hidden,” there’s no denying that this ugly chapter deserves more than an occasional well-meaning documentary. (A national day of mourning might be a good start.) The 1997 fiction film “Rosewood” recounted one such expulsion that took place in central Florida in the 1920s, and journalists, activists and descendants, including those who appear in “Banished,” have dug into the archives and sifted through the evidence. Mr. Williams has done his own part to shed needed light, though I wish he had dug longer, harder.

In late 2006 The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., published a series about an 1898 white riot to destroy a political alliance between blacks and poor whites in Wilmington, N.C., where the literacy rates for black men were higher than those for whites. One agitator, a former Confederate soldier and the future mayor of Wilmington, vowed that he and other like-minded whites would never surrender “even if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses.” What followed was a coup d’état, possibly the only time that a municipal government was toppled in American history. Black residents were murdered; the local black newspaper was torched, and survivors exiled. Reconstruction died, and Jim Crow moved right in.

But what I find interesting in this review, even with the commentary on the Wilmington incident (which I wrote about earlier), is the fact that a single word appears nowhere in the entire piece. This despite the fact that it is crucial to the story being told, and the evil being perpetrated. It points to the thing that linked the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of these great evils, and the overwhelming beneficiary of them.

The missing word?

Democrat.

After all, the guilty individuals in most of these acts of domestic terrorism would have been Democrats, and the political party that benefited would have been the Democratic Party. It is an institution that today still benefits from the legacy of its own racism, even while trying to place the label of “racist” on its political opponents to obscure its racist past while exploiting black misery in the present. It is the party that placed a Klansman on the Supreme Court in the 1930s, and which still has an old Kluxer serving in the US Senate today.

For some reason, Manohla Dargis leaves those details out of the review. I hope that Marco Williams didnÂ’t leave them out of the movie.

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