Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (19 page)
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Authors: James W. Loewen
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Mena, Arkansas, had a small African American population until February 20, 1901, when “Nigger Pete” was lynched. Pete was “considered by many locals to be insane,” according to a 1986 article based on newspaper accounts of the time. He had gotten into “a fracas” with a twelve-year-old white girl, “knocking her down, and injuring her quite badly. Later in the evening Pete was arrested and placed in jail ‘as has often been done before in similar offenses.’ The episode flashed across town and it soon created strong feelings against the Negro.” Whites then lynched him: they shot him, fractured his skull, and cut his throat. No one was ever apprehended for his death. According to an article written in 1980, “The black folks began to leave Polk County after the ‘Nigger Pete’ lynching.” The county’s African American population, 172 at one point, dropped to 12 in the aftermath, then slowly dwindled to zero as the remaining few died or moved away. Does this qualify as a violent expulsion? The African Americans obviously felt threatened. They also knew that two years earlier whites had posted notices around Mena warning blacks to leave. On that occasion other whites, including the mayor and newspaper editor, denounced the threat, but it had to have been unsettling nonetheless. Moreover, the editor had said then, “The number of Negro citizens in Mena is very small and as a whole exceeding well behaved. As long as these facts remain true they have their rights as citizens and the city officials will take any necessary steps to protect them.” Pete’s action, given whites’ penchant for holding the entire African American community responsible for the misstep of any individual, threatened the premise undergirding white forbearance and prompted the expulsion. According to Shirley Manning, Mena historian:
My father said he was only a boy of 5–7 (born in 1897) when the people of Polk County ran all the blacks out of town, and as they left from the race track, ... white people set the wagons on fire. My dad died when I was 10, but I remember the story, and my much older brother has told it to me, also.
So in Mena, at least, threat of violence crossed over into actual attack.
26
26
Many other towns saw their African American populations leave suddenly after one member of the group was lynched. On February 10, 1918, for example, whites in Estill Springs, Tennessee, lynched G. W. Lych, an African American minister. Two days later, in a spectacle lynching, they burned another African American alive before 1,500 spectators; “black residents of the community were forced to watch,” according to Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck. “After the incident the black population of Estill Spring[s] quickly disappeared.” The lynching of an African American by whites from Toluca and Lacon, north of Peoria, Illinois, in 1898 probably led to the exodus of African Americans from those towns.
27
The Role of the Ku Klux Klan27
The rise of the KKK after 1915—the so-called second Klan—often amounted to an implicit threat to blacks in largely white communities. In many towns across the North, from Maine to Illinois to Oregon, Klan rallies in the 1920s drew more people than any assemblages before or since. (See Portfolio 21 and 22.) On August 20, 1923, for example, 8,500 members of the Ku Klux Klan met two miles east of West Frankfort, Illinois—a gathering equal to the town’s entire population at the time—and inducted 400 new members. A 1925 Klan rally near Montpelier, Vermont, drew nearly 10,000, almost twice that city’s population. Such huge gatherings gave whites a sense of power, a feeling that they could do whatever they wanted to African Americans, and sometimes to Jews and Catholics as well. West Frankfort was already a sundown town, but in towns with black residents, these monster demonstrations had a chilling impact on the few and scattered African Americans, who knew their safety depended upon white goodwill.
28
28
In Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, for instance, local historian Sally Albertz believes “the KKK was instrumental in driving the blacks away.” In the early 1920s the Klan held a “Klanvocation” at the Fond du Lac fairgrounds; newspapers claimed that 5,000 people marched in the parade. Subsequently, several crosses were burned in the areas where the blacks lived in the city. The earlier sense of possibility for African Americans in Fond du Lac—the welcome meal, the rooms at the hotel described in the previous chapter—had been replaced by a sense of terror.
29
29
Sometimes this implicit threat became explicit. The Klan played a direct role in making some Oregon towns all-white in the 1920s. In Medford, Klansmen took George Burr, a bootblack, to the mountains, placed a noose around his neck, hung him from a branch, then cut him down and ordered him to leave town. He did. In Oregon City, six masked Klansmen confronted car wash owner Perry Ellis, the only black man in town, accused him of sleeping with a white woman, and nearly lynched him. Ellis moved to Tacoma, Washington, and Oregon City had no black household thereafter until the 1980s.
30
Creating Sundown Towns by Ordinance30
Under the thrall of the white supremacist rhetoric of the Nadir, many towns passed ordinances to prohibit African Americans from being within the corporate limits of the town after sundown or forbade selling or renting property to them. As with sundown towns themselves, actions against Chinese Americans led the way. Several authors tell of ordinances in the West banning them. Eureka, in northern California, passed its ordinance informally, at a large civic meeting on February 14, 1885, the day it expelled its large Chinese population, nicely showing the link between violence and ordinance, and did not repeal it until 1959.
31
31
Reports of ordinances against African Americans began to surface after about 1900. I collected oral and written history from 25 towns in Illinois that have a tradition of such ordinances. In 1965, Donald Royer did a small study for the Indiana Civil Rights Commission, checking out nineteen Indiana towns with oral traditions of having passed sundown ordinances. He could not find any on paper. Between 2000 and 2004, I collected oral and written history from some of the same towns, finding the tradition still vibrant, and added another town. I also found evidence of sundown ordinances in 22 other towns in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Ohio, and Maryland.
32
In California, for example, historian Olen Cole Jr. tells how the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s tried to locate a company of African American workers in a large park that bordered Burbank and Glendale. Both cities refused; “the reason given was an ‘old ordinance of the cities of Burbank and Glendale which prohibited Negroes from remaining inside municipal limits after sun down.’ ”
33
32
In California, for example, historian Olen Cole Jr. tells how the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s tried to locate a company of African American workers in a large park that bordered Burbank and Glendale. Both cities refused; “the reason given was an ‘old ordinance of the cities of Burbank and Glendale which prohibited Negroes from remaining inside municipal limits after sun down.’ ”
33
Most of these towns, especially in the Midwest, were not close to any black population concentration and would not have confronted any inundation by African Americans had they failed to pass an ordinance. Consider De Land, for instance, a small village in central Illinois, population 475 in 2000. Present and former members of the De Land board of trustees agreed in 2002 that it had passed such an ordinance decades ago. De Land never had more than a few hundred inhabitants and is not located on any major railroad or highway, so it never faced an influx of nonwhites. Why, then, did it enact such a law? Since by the 1890s African Americans were defined in American culture as the problem, passing such an ordinance seemed prudent—the progressive thing to do. Towns that took similar actions were “up to date.” De Land is in Piatt County, whose county seat, Monticello, was also a sundown town and also has a tradition of having enacted an ordinance. I suspect De Land followed Monticello’s lead, and I believe that a wave of these ordinances swept the Midwest somewhere between 1900 and 1930. I have yet to find the text of a single midwestern ordinance, however,
34
so I cannot follow their spread via a written and dated record.
35
Ordinances, Legal or Illegal?34
so I cannot follow their spread via a written and dated record.
35
It turns out that these ordinances were all illegal. Again, action against Chinese Americans in the West led the way, in this case in a positive direction. In 1890, Chinese Americans challenged in court a San Francisco ordinance that required them to move outside the city entirely or live in “an area set aside for slaughterhouses and other businesses thought prejudicial to public health or comfort,” in the words of John Noonan, summarizing
In re Lee Sing.
The plaintiffs won; the ordinance was declared unconstitutional.
36
In re Lee Sing.
The plaintiffs won; the ordinance was declared unconstitutional.
36
In 1910, Baltimore passed a residential segregation ordinance. Quickly this was seen as the thing to do, and similar ordinances followed in Winston-Salem, Birmingham, Atlanta, Richmond, Norfolk, Louisville, New Orleans, St. Louis, Dallas, and other southern and border cities and towns. The Louisville ordinance became a test case. It designated city blocks with a majority of African Americans “black blocks” and those with a majority of whites “white blocks.” Blacks were not allowed to move into white blocks and vice versa. These ordinances were drafted to look equal so they could pass muster under the Fourteenth Amendment, as historian T. J. Woofter Jr. explained:
Although theoretically the law is supposed to apply to white and colored alike, in practice it never does. The colored people do not protest against white invasion, while the white people in mixed blocks do not hesitate to protest. Altogether about 50 cases have been made against Negroes under the New Orleans ordinance, and there has not been a single case against a white person.
In 1917, in
Buchanan v. Warley,
the U.S. Supreme Court held the Louisville ordinance unconstitutional. White civil rights lawyer Moorfield Story argued the case for the NAACP. In 1917, no plea for black rights would have been likely to prevail. Story won because a
white
right was at stake: the right of a white seller to sell his house to the highest bidder, even if that person happened to be black. The court held that the ordinance “destroyed the right of the individual to acquire, enjoy, and dispose of his property,” in violation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
37
Although
Buchanan
ruled unconstitutional a law intended to create sundown neighborhoods, there can be no doubt that as a precedent, it would also invalidate ordinances intended to create sundown towns, which did not hide their explicit anti-black intentions behind even a gloss of fairness.
38
Buchanan v. Warley,
the U.S. Supreme Court held the Louisville ordinance unconstitutional. White civil rights lawyer Moorfield Story argued the case for the NAACP. In 1917, no plea for black rights would have been likely to prevail. Story won because a
white
right was at stake: the right of a white seller to sell his house to the highest bidder, even if that person happened to be black. The court held that the ordinance “destroyed the right of the individual to acquire, enjoy, and dispose of his property,” in violation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
37
Although
Buchanan
ruled unconstitutional a law intended to create sundown neighborhoods, there can be no doubt that as a precedent, it would also invalidate ordinances intended to create sundown towns, which did not hide their explicit anti-black intentions behind even a gloss of fairness.
38
In November 1915, Mayor J. R. Voigt introduced a segregation ordinance to the North Chattanooga City Council in Tennessee. Mayor Voigt was aware of the ongoing constitutional challenges to such a bill, similar ordinances having already been declared illegal in Winston, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia. He phrased the measure evenhandedly:
Section 1: It shall be unlawful for any colored person to move into and occupy as a residence, place of abode, or to establish and maintain as a place of public assembly, any house upon any block upon which a greater number of houses are occupied as residences, places of abode, or places of public assembly by white people than are occupied as residences, places of abode or places of public assembly by colored people.
Section 2 then repeated this language but with the races reversed, so it appeared to be in line with the “separate but equal” ruling in
Plessy v. Ferguson
two decades earlier. However, everyone knew that North Chattanooga had only two black families living in it. Therefore it had no block “upon which a greater number of houses are occupied . . . by black people.” As the
Chattanooga Daily Times
put it, “The passage of this ordinance will consequently make the town practically of an exclusively white population.” In short, it was a sundown ordinance.
Plessy v. Ferguson
two decades earlier. However, everyone knew that North Chattanooga had only two black families living in it. Therefore it had no block “upon which a greater number of houses are occupied . . . by black people.” As the
Chattanooga Daily Times
put it, “The passage of this ordinance will consequently make the town practically of an exclusively white population.” In short, it was a sundown ordinance.
To avoid legal challenge, Mayor Voigt also built in provisions so that the two black families then living in North Chattanooga would not be forced to leave. They got the message anyway, for by the time the ordinance passed, on December 22, 1915, the
Daily Times
was able to headline its story, “North Chattanooga Is Exclusively White Now.” The newspaper was proud to report, “As there are now no Negroes in North Chattanooga, it might be called the only town of its size in the country where the population is exclusively white.”
39
“Mayor Voigt has received many compliments on his segregation ordinance,” the story concluded.
40
Daily Times
was able to headline its story, “North Chattanooga Is Exclusively White Now.” The newspaper was proud to report, “As there are now no Negroes in North Chattanooga, it might be called the only town of its size in the country where the population is exclusively white.”
39
“Mayor Voigt has received many compliments on his segregation ordinance,” the story concluded.
40
Despite
Buchanan v. Warley,
many cities and towns seem simply to have ignored the constitutional issue. Cities kept right on passing them,
41
and as the authors of the
Encyclopedia of Black America
noted in 1981, “A number of these ordinances were maintained long after 1917. . . . Legal attempts to enforce them in the courts were still being made in the 1950s.” There is a scholarly tradition in American legal history that questions whether the U.S. Supreme Court can cause or has ever caused significant social change. The history of
Buchanan v. Warley
makes a good case for this theory.
42
Buchanan v. Warley,
many cities and towns seem simply to have ignored the constitutional issue. Cities kept right on passing them,
41
and as the authors of the
Encyclopedia of Black America
noted in 1981, “A number of these ordinances were maintained long after 1917. . . . Legal attempts to enforce them in the courts were still being made in the 1950s.” There is a scholarly tradition in American legal history that questions whether the U.S. Supreme Court can cause or has ever caused significant social change. The history of
Buchanan v. Warley
makes a good case for this theory.
42
Brea, California, offers an example of an ordinance, known to be illegal, yet still in force decades after
Buchanan.
Vincent Jaster, retired school superintendent of Brea, was an educated man who knew sundown ordinances were unconstitutional. He also knew their power, as can be seen in his answer when asked in 1982, “Why would you prefer to live in Brea rather than Yorba Linda, Fullerton, or elsewhere?”
Buchanan.
Vincent Jaster, retired school superintendent of Brea, was an educated man who knew sundown ordinances were unconstitutional. He also knew their power, as can be seen in his answer when asked in 1982, “Why would you prefer to live in Brea rather than Yorba Linda, Fullerton, or elsewhere?”
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