Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (16 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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The Index of Dissimilarity (D) provides a common measure of the degree of residential segregation within a metropolitan area.
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When D = 0, integration is perfect: every census tract has exactly the same racial composition as every other census tract. 100 represents complete apartheid: not one black in any white area, not one white in any black area. For values between 0 and 100, D tells the percentage of the smaller group—usually African Americans—that would have to move from disproportionately black areas to white areas to achieve a completely neutral distribution of both races. In 1860, the average northern city had a D of 45.7—only moderately segregated. If 45.7% of the blacks in an average city moved to predominantly white neighborhoods, the city would be perfectly integrated. Reynolds Farley and William Frey, premier researchers on residential segregation, point out that until about 1900, “in northern cities, some blacks shared neighborhoods with poor immigrants from Europe.” Even middle-class areas were interracial: “Tiny cadres of highly educated blacks lived among whites in prosperous neighborhoods.” Southern cities were even less segregated spatially, with an average D of 29.0. To some degree, especially in the South, these low D’s reflected the age-old pattern of servant housing near upper-class white housing. Even so, the low indexes reflected a lack of residential racial segregation, especially in working-class areas.
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After 1900, hostility ranging from shunning to violence forced the involuntary retrenchment of African Americans from dispersed housing in many parts of the city to concentration in inner-city ghettoes—an intracity manifestation of the Great Retreat. By 1910, northern cities averaged 59.2 and southern cities 38.3 on the Index of Dissimilarity. Even larger increases characterized the next few decades. By 1920, D was above 80 in most northern U.S. cities, and the South was catching up. Northern cities averaged 89.2 in 1940, southern cities 81.0. By 1960, the average northern city held at 85.6, while the average southern city rose to 91.9.
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These are astonishing levels, considering that the end of the scale, 100, means not one black in any white neighborhood and not one white in any black neighborhood.
Creating All-Black Towns
 
During the Nadir, African Americans were hardly passive victims. They thrashed about, trying tactic after tactic to deal with America’s increasing racism. One was the development of all-black towns. It is a matter of semantics, I suppose, whether these towns were an alternative to the Great Retreat or part of it. Certainly they were founded at precisely the same time.
Some commentators have interpreted the black-town movement as a giving up on white America. On the contrary, black towns such as Nicodemus, Kansas; Boley, Oklahoma; and Mound Bayou, Mississippi, emulated white towns. Indeed, their initial development was marked by a sense of self-respect and competition: they wanted to outdo white towns. They also hoped to provide employment and political opportunities not available elsewhere. Black towns ran their own post offices, which therefore hired African Americans, even when the Woodrow Wilson administration was shutting blacks out of this work. Black towns ran their own precincts, which therefore let African Americans vote, even as the outside society was shutting blacks out of politics.
To be sure, black towns were founded in a difficult, even dangerous period. The movement began in reply to the end of Reconstruction in the South, when African Americans were no longer voting freely and lynchings were increasing. In 1879, African Americans began an exodus from Mississippi and Louisiana to Indian Territory and Kansas, trying to find freedom and peace. In 1887, hoping to avoid the worst of the racist storm, African Americans founded Mound Bayou in former swampland in the Mississippi Delta. In 1904, African Americans in Indian Territory founded Boley. Both towns grew rapidly, fueled by a wave of optimism similar to that at the end of the Civil War, tinged this time with desperation. By 1908, Boley had 2,500 residents, two banks, two cotton gins, a newspaper, a hotel, and a college, the Creek-Seminole College and Agriculture Institute. Briefly Boley competed with Okemah, Weleetka, and Henryetta, nearby white-majority towns, for economic and political influence in the area.
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Unfortunately, the history of Boley and its neighboring towns shows that black towns offered no real solution to the increasing racism of the Nadir. Gradually Boley’s residents themselves realized they were to have no real chance at social, economic, or political rights, owing to forces outside their town and beyond their control. In 1907, whites merged Indian Territory into the new state of Oklahoma. Democrats took over the state and passed vicious segregation laws modeled on Mississippi’s 1890 constitution. Although the research has yet to be done by historians and sociologists in Oklahoma, I believe it will show that a wave of small expulsions swept through many Oklahoma towns shortly after statehood, as white Democrats reveled in their newly realized power over African and Native Americans.
Boley is located in Okfuskee County. Okemah, the county seat, had been founded as a sundown town in 1902. From time to time African Americans moved in, only to face violent opposition. In January 1907, for example, whites dynamited the homes of the only two black families in town.
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Later that year, Okemah businessmen leased a building and set up a hotel for African Americans who traded with the local merchants or had to attend court and could not always get back to Boley by sundown. By April 1908 it was doing a brisk business, which ended when other whites placed a heavy charge of dynamite under the front wall of the hotel. “The building was badly damaged,” wrote Okemah resident W. L. Payne. “Farmers living eight miles from Okemah were aroused by the terrific blast. This brought about a quick reduction in the Negro population of Okemah.”
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Henryetta, the next town to the east, went sundown in December 1907. According to the
History of Okmulgee County,
“A number of black families—perhaps as many as 200 people—lived in one area of Henryetta”; just south of town lived another 30 or 40 black miners and their families. On Christmas Eve, James Gordon, African American, tried to rent a rig from Albert Bates, white, who owned a livery stable. Bates refused, an altercation followed, and Gordon shot him. A posse soon caught Gordon a mile east of town and brought him to the jail. Whites “were incensed. They surrounded the jail, battered down the door, smashed the jail lock with a sledge hammer, and dragged Gordon across the street to a telephone pole,” where they “hanged him and riddled his body with bullets.” All the next day, Christmas Day, “there were rumors of black uprisings,” according to the county history:
The talk on the street was that “no more negroes will be allowed to domicile in Henryetta.” . . . Within a day or two, the whites rallied together with guns, rocks, bricks, “anything and everything” and ran the other black families out of town. “We didn’t care where they went and don’t know,” said one irate resident. From then on, Henryetta was off-limits to blacks except for business during the day.
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Then Democrats eliminated Boley as a voting precinct and forced citizens of Boley to vote in a smaller town twelve miles away. Boley voters turned out in droves and compelled the whites running that precinct to let them cast ballots, which Democrats then didn’t include in countywide tallies anyway. In 1910, Democrats amended the Oklahoma constitution with a “grandfather clause” that set up literacy requirements to keep African Americans from voting; whites were exempt so long as their ancestors could vote in 1861. Blacks’ grandfathers, being slaves then, could not vote, so the combination took away the ballot from African Americans while granting it to European Americans.
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Residents of Boley still hoped they could just mind their own business and run their own affairs, but whites weren’t satisfied with merely excluding African Americans from voting. In Bittle and Geis’s words, “Not only would all avenues of political expression be cut off, but all avenues of social and economic expression as well.” White neighbors set up Farmers’ Commercial Clubs,
the express purpose of which was to drive the Negro farmers from the area and to replace them with white farmers. Pacts were drawn up between whites in which each agreed to withhold employment from Negroes.... With each dreadful development, the Negroes attempted to reorganize their ethic for yet another time. But this reorientation became patently vapid, and the Negro community simply relented in the face of white hostility.
 
In 1911, Okemah residents lynched a mother and son who lived in the black community outside Boley (Portfolio 11), showing that a black town provided no safe harbor from white vigilante “justice.” The drop in cotton prices in 1913 finished the job. Now Boley started to lose population. “The economic and political setbacks added up to almost total disillusionment on the part of the Okfuskee County Negroes.... There would be no growing respect and admiration from white neighbors and no industrial and agricultural prosperity.” Boley still holds its annual celebration, but it became a shell of its former self. Its pariah status, conferred by the all-white towns nearby, sapped its morale.
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Black Townships
 
Sprinkled about the United States, often located at the edge of sundown towns or a few miles away, are other, smaller black communities, most of which never incorporated, many with dirt roads, off the beaten path. They are the flip side of sundown towns—places to which the excluded have retreated to live, yet close enough to nearby white towns to work. I call them “townships” because some of them resemble South Africa’s black townships, those gatherings of shacks built by squatters that supply maids for Johannesburg’s white households and janitors for its industries. Like Thokoza and Soweto, in America often these were haphazard gatherings of ramshackle houses, many of which were not, until recently, served by amenities such as city water.
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Some still are not.
If even independent black towns succumbed to the demoralizing effect the increased racism of the Nadir had on African Americans nationally, townships showed much less heritage of black pride. They too offered some refuge from the racist storm, but they never made any pretense of providing a solution to America’s racial inequality. The little area that housed African American adjoining Eugene, Oregon, during World War II was dubbed “Tent City” because its “houses” consisted of tents pitched over wooden frameworks on wooden floors.
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To some degree, these communities resemble reservations—places to which whites restricted African Americans, whose labor they desired but whose presence they did not want. Their residents knew it.
Chevy Chase Heights was an unincorporated community located just north of the town of Indiana in western Pennsylvania. In 1960, when college student Ralph Stone studied Chevy Chase Heights, he elicited only scorn when he asked a clerk at the Indiana Chamber of Commerce for information on the community. “Who in the world would want to know that?” she replied. Asked if she at least had population figures for the community, she replied, “Nobody knows. If you want to know, go out and count them.” Chevy Chase residents repeatedly petitioned Indiana for annexation so that they could have street lights, paved streets, and city sewage lines, and the settlement, “for geographical reasons, should be part of the borough,” according to Stone. But Indiana “wants nothing to do with Chevy Chase,” he concluded. Indeed, Indiana made this clear long before 1960: local historian Clarence Stephenson quotes a Works Progress Administration source telling that “the [black] families that formerly lived in the borough of Indiana were asked by the borough council to locate in Chevy Chase.” By 1960, according to Stone, 20 African Americans remained in Indiana and about 577 lived in Chevy Chase Heights.
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Even their names sometimes imply the racism that was their reason for being. For years “The Colony” was the name used by blacks as well as whites for the mostly African American community south of Cullman, Alabama. A librarian in Cullman explained, “The only full-time African American residents of the entire county through most of its history have lived in a tiny community called ‘The Colony’ which is roughly twenty miles south of the city.... ‘The Colony’ was incorporated as ‘Colony’ in 1980.” African Americans who worked as maids and handymen commuted into Cullman in the mid-1950s by carpools. The Colony had an elementary school, but before Cullman’s schools desegregated in 1970, African Americans who wanted to go to high school had go to another county. Colp, Illinois, a majority-black hamlet 1 mile west of Herrin and 3 miles north of Carterville, began as #9 Mine, a coal mine that employed African American miners. White miners called it “Nigger Nine.” Understandably taking offense, citizens of #9 Mine incorporated in 1915 as Colp, named for John Colp, the mine owner who employed them. But Herrin residents think Colp is short for “colored people” and thus mounts no challenge to white sensibilities. Now that mining has wound down, Colp residents work in Herrin, but for years Herrin residents informally threatened them with death if they remained overnight, and they could not set foot in nearby Carterville even during the daytime. Residents of Stump Town, a small African American community in western Illinois, worked in Warsaw but had to be out of there by nightfall. Residents of other sundown towns across the Midwest and border states simply called the little black townships near them “Niggertown,” while its African American residents struggled to have them known by more specific and less demeaning terms, including “Little Africa” in southern Illinois.
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