Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (18 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Towns with successful riots wound up all-white, of course, or almost so, and therefore had an ideological interest in suppressing any memory of a black population in the first place, let alone of an unseemly riot that drove them out.
6
Whites also tried to “cleanse” at least fifteen larger cities of their more substantial nonwhite populations: Denver (of Chinese) in 1880; Seattle (of Chinese) in 1886; Akron in 1900; Evansville, Indiana, and Joplin, Missouri, in 1903; Springfield, Ohio, in 1904, 1906, and again in 1908; Springfield, Missouri, in 1906; Springfield, Illinois, in 1908; Youngstown, Ohio, and East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917; Omaha and Knoxville in 1919; Tulsa in 1921; Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1923; and Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1929. (Portfolio 10 shows the attempt in Tulsa.) They failed, mainly because the task would have taken three or four days, giving their governors time not only to call out their state’s national guard but also to realize they would get considerable criticism—and so would their state—if they failed to act.
Some of these larger riots have received some attention, including books and historical markers. Since they were unsuccessful—in that they failed to drive out all African Americans—they have left fuller records of the process, because interracial communities have no need to deny that they had once had a black population. As well, they have black populations with their own collective memories. Indeed, in Tulsa, an ongoing controversy concerns reparations. But most of the little riots have gone entirely overlooked, and as a result, the pattern of widespread “ethnic cleansings,” of which these failed large attempts represent the tip of the iceberg, is not generally understood. Moreover, even when the cleansings were incomplete, they made a profound impact upon surrounding towns, often inspiring satellite riots.
Consider the 1903 attack on the black community in Joplin. As was often the case, it started with an act of violence against one white person, in this case the murder of a police officer. There was little doubt that the assailant was a black tramp named Thomas Gilyard, who was quickly taken into custody. Several hundred white people then gathered outside the jail, broke through the wall, and lynched him, after a tug-of-war with other whites who tried to stop it. Then the mob went through black neighborhoods, attacking African Americans, burning their homes, and cutting firemen’s hoses so they couldn’t intervene. Half of Joplin’s 770 African American residents fled for their lives. Joplin was large enough that the mob could not drive all African Americans from the city, but the results are still plain: in 2000 Joplin had a lower African American population proportion—just 2.7%—than it did in 1902. Moreover, this riot, along with several others in Missouri and Arkansas, helped foment an ideology of ethnic cleansing that made most of the Ozark Plateau a sundown region by 1920.
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Another unsuccessful cleansing—in Springfield, Illinois—had a still greater impact. In 1908, residents of Springfield acted on their desire to have an all-white city. A white woman, Mabel Hallam, claimed George Richardson, an African American, had raped her. Police jailed him, whereupon a mob gathered at the county jail to lynch him, along with another black prisoner accused of murder. The sheriff borrowed an automobile from businessman Harry Loper, however, and managed to get both prisoners safely out of town. Angry at being foiled, the mob destroyed Loper’s restaurant and then turned its rage on the African American community in general. According to Roberta Senechal, whose book is the standard source on the riot, “During two days of violence, white rioters gutted the capitol’s black business district, left blocks of black homes in smoldering ruins, and lynched two innocent black men,” Scott Burton and William Donnegan. “The rioters’ ultimate goal seemingly was to drive away all of Springfield’s blacks,” Senechal concluded. The task was simply too large, however, since Springfield in 1908 had about 3,100 African Americans in a total population of 48,000.
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Nevertheless, some 2,000 did flee the city. Only the belated arrival of the Illinois state militia kept the mob from finishing the job. Springfield being the capital, the state government simply could not ignore this riot.
9
The Springfield riot was famous briefly throughout the world, not because it was unusual, which it was not, but because it happened in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown.
10
Springfield’s history encapsulates America’s downward course in race relations from the Civil War to the Nadir. When Lincoln’s funeral train brought his body back to Springfield for burial in 1865, a regiment of black troops led the procession to the state capitol. Thousands of African Americans “had journeyed for days in order to be in Springfield at the funeral,” according to an officer in the military escort for Lincoln’s body. Afterward, some of them stayed on to live in the city. Now the townspeople of the Great Emancipator were trying to expel them all. “Abe Lincoln brought them to Springfield and we will drive them out!” shouted members of the mob.
11
After the riot, Hallam admitted she made up the story about being raped, to cover up an affair she was having. Nevertheless, most Springfield residents showed no regret, except about failing to drive every last black person from the city. The tree from which the mob hanged Scott Burton, a black barber, was hacked to pieces to make souvenirs of the occasion. After the riot, some employers fired their black employees, and many local shopkeepers now refused to serve African Americans. Later, 107 people were charged with crimes, but the only person sentenced was a man convicted of petty theft for stealing a sword from a National Guardsman. No one was ever convicted for murder, arson, or any other crime against an African American.
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The Springfield riot stands as a prototype for the many smaller riots that left communities all-white between 1890 and 1940, most of which have never been written about by any historian. Indeed, the Springfield riot itself spawned a host of imitators: whites shouted “Give ’em Springfield!” during attacks on African Americans as far away as Alton, Illinois; Evansville, Indiana; St. Louis, Missouri; and the Cumberland Plateau in Kentucky and Tennessee. Closer to home, the
Illinois State Register
reported, “At Auburn, Thayer, Virden, Girard, Pawnee, Spaulding, Buffalo, Riverton, Pana, Edinburg, Taylorville, Pleasant Plains, and a score of other places in central Illinois a Negro is an unwelcome visitor and is soon informed he must not remain in the town.”
13
Some of these towns, such as Virden and Pana, were sundown towns before the Springfield riot; their exclusion policies had merely become newsworthy owing to the riot. Others, such as Buffalo and Pleasant Plains, excluded African Americans in its aftermath. Neither the local, county, state, or federal governments ever brought anyone to justice for any of these expulsions from smaller towns. Buffalo, a little town twelve miles east of Springfield, became all-white on August 17, 1908, two days after the National Guard ended the Springfield riot. Not to be outdone by Springfield, whites in Buffalo posted the following ultimatum at the train station:
All niggers are warned out of town by Monday, 12 m. sharp. Buffalo Sharp Shooters
 
 
Its black population fled, and since then Buffalo has been all-white. Today some whites commute from Buffalo to Springfield, because they feel Springfield is too black. Springfield was 15% African American in 2000.
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In addition to the small-town disturbances around Springfield in 1908, at least a score of other towns in Illinois alone became sundown through violence. Whites in Romeoville, in northeastern Illinois, expelled all the town’s African Americans in June 1893 in a pitched battle in which eight people were killed. Other violent expulsions include Beardstown at an unknown data, East Alton and Spring Valley in 1895,
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Virden in 1898, Pana in 1899, Carterville in 1901,
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Eldorado in 1902, Anna-Jonesboro in 1909, West Frankfort in 1920, probably Pinckneyville in 1927 or 1928, and Vienna in 1954. Additional possible violent expulsions in Illinois that I have not confirmed include Newman back around 1879, Lacon and Toluca between 1898 and 1910, Granite City in 1903, Coal City at some undetermined date, and Zeigler by mine explosion in 1905.
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A series of at least six race riots in the Ozarks, along with smaller undocumented expulsions, led to the almost total whiteness of most Ozark counties, which continues to this day. In 1894, Monett, Missouri, started the chain of racial violence. As happened so often, it began with a lynching. Ulysses Hayden, an African American, was taken from police custody and hanged from a telephone pole, although Murray Bishoff, an authority on Monett, believes him innocent of the murder of the young white man for which he was hanged. After the lynching, whites forced all African Americans to leave Monett. Pierce City, just six miles west, followed suit in 1901. Again, a crime of violence had been perpetrated upon a white person, and again, after lynching the alleged perpetrator, the mob then turned on the black community, about 10% of the town’s population, and drove them out.
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In the process, members of the mob set fire to several homes, incinerating at least two African Americans inside. Portfolio 3 shows one of the destroyed residences. Some African Americans fled to Joplin, the nearest city, but in 1903 whites rioted there. Three years later, whites in Harrison, Arkansas, expelled most of their African Americans, and in 1909, they finished the job. In 1906, whites in Springfield, Missouri, staged a triple lynching they called an “Easter Offering.”
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No one was ever convicted in any of these riots, which sent a message that violence against African Americans would not be punished in the Ozarks. On the contrary, it was celebrated. In Springfield, for example,
souvenir hunters sifted through the smoldering ashes looking for bits of bone, charred flesh, and buttons to carry away with them in order to commemorate the event. Local drugstores and soda parlors sold postcards containing photographs of the lynching, and one enterprising businessman . . . [had] medals struck commemorating the lynching. One side of the medal read “Easter Offering,” and the other side, “Souvenir of the hanging of 3 niggers, Springfield, Missouri, April 15, 1906.”
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The immediate effect was a contagion of ethnic cleansing that drove African Americans from nearby towns such as Cotter, Arkansas. Sociologist Gordon Morgan wrote, “It is entirely possible that the trouble that was experienced in Boone County [Harrison] affected the black populations in surrounding counties. The census shows precipitous drops in black numbers in the 1900–1910 decade in Carroll and Madison counties, both of which adjoin Boone.”
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Elsewhere in the United States, I have been able to confirm mini-riots that forced out the black populations from at least 30 other towns, including Myakka City, Florida; Spruce Pine, North Carolina; Wehrum, Pennsylvania; Ravenna, Kentucky; Greensburg, Indiana; St. Genevieve, Missouri; and North Platte, Nebraska.
22
Many of these mini-riots in turn spurred whites in nearby towns to have their own, thus provoking small waves of expulsions.
Creating Sundown Towns by Threat
 
Sometimes just the threat of violence sufficed, especially where whites were many and blacks few, as in Buffalo. For that matter, because the historical record is incomplete, we cannot always know when violence or “mere” threat of violence forced a town’s African Americans to leave. Most mass departures were probably forced by at least the threat of violence—why else would everyone leave at once?
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Sometimes expulsions were more gradual, taking several years and requiring repeated threats or acts of violence.
When one member of the black community was lynched, all African Americans took that as a threat to their continued well-being. Often they were right. Frank Quillen, whose 1913 book
The Color Line in Ohio
stands as an oasis of honest scholarship during the arid Nadir period, observed that after a lynching, such as in Akron, Galion, and Urbana, Ohio, “I found the prejudice much stronger than it was before the lynching, and the Negroes fewer in number.” A lynching by definition is a public murder. Those who carry it out do not bother to act in private, since they believe the community will support them. Thus a lynching becomes a community event in which all whites participate, at least vicariously, because the entire white community decides not to punish the perpetrators. After such an event, whites grew more likely to engage in such everyday practices as forcing African Americans from jobs like postal carrier or locomotive fireman, as well as from entire communities.
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The increasing frequency of mass “spectacle lynchings,” in particular, played a major role in the spread of sundown towns. These events, often announced in advance, drew hundreds and even thousands of onlookers. Typically in their aftermath, not only was no one brought to justice, but also whites reveled in the brutality, selling fingers and bits of the victim’s flesh as souvenirs and making postcards of photos of the event to send to friends across the country. Such events, reasonably enough, convinced African Americans in many towns that they were no longer safe. Chapter 7 tells how a spectacle lynching in Maryville, Missouri, not only caused African Americans to flee that town in 1931, but also led to their departure from neighboring counties.
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