Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (20 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Lower taxes, for one thing, better climate, nice people, and good schools. I maybe shouldn’t say this, but this was an item some years ago in the 1940s and is not going to trouble me at all. Brea used to have a law that no black person could live in town here after six o’clock. See, Fullerton had its colored section; Placentia at that time was predominantly a Mexican town. But for years there were no black people in Brea at all. The shoeshine man was black, but he had to leave town by six o’clock. It was an illegal law, of course, if you’d gone to the Supreme Court.
 
No one took Brea to the Supreme Court, so its unconstitutional law was legal, so far as its effect in Brea was concerned. The same point held in countless other towns.
43
Why shouldn’t towns ignore the constitutional question? After all, during the Depression the federal government acted as if
Buchanan
did not exist when it set up at least seven towns—Richland, Washington; Boulder City, Nevada; Norris, Tennessee; Greendale, Wisconsin; Greenhills, Ohio; Arthurdale, West Virginia; and Greenbelt, Maryland—that explicitly kept out African Americans.
44
At the same time, and for three more decades, the Federal Housing Administration—a government agency—
required
restrictive covenants before insuring housing loans. If the United States government, charged with enforcing
Buchanan,
could exclude African Americans, obviously any community could.
Attempts to enforce illegal sundown ordinances in the streets were still being made in the 1990s. In 2001, a central Illinoisan related that when she and her husband were about to buy a house in Maroa a few years earlier, the realtor “told us we wouldn’t have any problems with black neighbors because Maroa had an ordinance and they weren’t allowed.” Indeed, if a seller, agent, and black would-be buyer in Maroa all believe today that the ordinance is legal, in a very real sense it remains in effect, even though it
is
illegal. Residents will think that selling to an African American violates the law; some will conclude that it is also wrong. They will not sell to a black and may take steps to keep others from so doing. As an attorney who grew up in Martinsville, Illinois, a sundown town, put it, “If you say there’s an ordinance, then whether there was or not, that gives it the color of law.” Even an unconstitutional ordinance connotes to the residents of the sundown town that the black would-be newcomer is not
supposed
to be here—especially if those residents don’t know that the law is illegal. Whether legal or not, and even whether actually passed or not,
belief in the ordinance puts it in force.
Indeed, residents in some midwestern towns think their sundown ordinances are
still
in effect.
45
Creating Sundown Towns by Official Governmental Action
 
Even without enabling legislation, many municipal and county officials drove out or kept out African Americans by formal policy. Discussing Crawford County, Indiana, historian Emma Lou Thornbrough tells of “a contractor for the Louisville, New Albany, and St. Louis Railroad who had hired a gang of colored construction workers.” White residents warned him that they would not be allowed to work. “When he sought protection from the county officials, they confirmed that it was an unwritten law that Negroes were not permitted in the county.” A resident of Crawford County in the 1960s told a similar story about contractors building a different railroad in a later decade who also hired blacks: the sheriff warned African Americans about the law, but this time he allowed them to remain in the county, so long as they stayed on railroad property. Accordingly, they lived in tents near the work site. An “unwritten law” enforced by county officials including the sheriff
is
a law, to all intents and purposes.
46
For that matter, an unwritten law enforced by a police chief or sheriff can be even more serious than a written law. Consider this conversation real estate developer Hank Roth had with the sheriff of Graham County in western North Carolina in about 1969: “He wanted me to know they didn’t have any blacks in Robbinsville. He said the last ‘nigger’ who came to town ‘hung under that tree over there.’ ” Thus no bright line can be drawn between unwritten understandings backed by official actions and formal ordinances.
47
Towns that posted sundown signs implied they were all-white by municipal action. I have confirmed 184 towns in 32 states that displayed sundown signs.
48
Consider the Connecticut town whose sign is: “Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark (Portfolio 7).” To the passerby, that certainly
looks
official, and year after year, no one took it down, after all. Willie Harlen, president of the Washington County (Indiana) Historical Society, made this point when he wrote, “It is said there was a sundown sign east of Salem near Canton. Our Historical Society Treasurer was born in 1928. She remembers her parents telling about the sign . . . I don’t know whether there was an ordinance posted or blacks were made to believe there was.” Of course, whites too were made to believe there was. Towns that sounded whistles or sirens to warn blacks to get out of town at 6 PM also implied they were sundown by official action. Historian David Roediger grew up in Columbia, Illinois, a sundown town near St. Louis. Like Villa Grove, Columbia had a 6 PM whistle. Roediger reported that his mother moved to Columbia from Cairo in 1941 to teach elementary school. The police chief “almost immediately took her aside to say that she should feel secure, unlike in Cairo, because Columbia had a 6 PM whistle to warn blacks out of town.” Coming from the chief of police, that is official policy.
49
Jim Clayton, a retired
Washington Post
reporter who grew up in Johnston City, a sundown town in southern Illinois, wrote, “Although there never was an anti-black ordinance, it was well understood that blacks were not permitted to stay in [Johnston City] over night.” An ordinance would be superfluous, he suggested: everyone already knew no African Americans were allowed in town, so why bother saying so? If a black person tried to move into Johnston City in the 1940s, according to Clayton, “the Chief of Police would have told them to leave, and that would have been all it would take.” The police chief also played a key role in Batesville, Indiana. According to Judy Tonges of the Batesville Historical Society,
From what I can piece together, there was never an ordinance or law in Batesville prohibiting blacks. However, the knowledge was there. I talked with our police chief who grew up next to a lumber yard. He would visit the black truckers who were delivering lumber. He said they always rushed to get unloaded and out of town before dark.
 
Of course they did, after the police chief “visited” them.
50
Like Johnston City’s, many towns’ sundown reputations were so well known that the municipalities felt no need to pass an ordinance. According to a longtime resident of Niles, Ohio, Niles qualifies: “I would be surprised if there were official ordinances prohibiting African-Americans from settling here. Things operate here much more informally.... Laws and ordinances are irrelevant and unnecessary.” Many other sundown town residents made this point about their home communities, large and small. African Americans, or in some cases Jews or Chinese Americans, were not to live there, period. It was, and in some communities remains, as simple as that—written or not, legal or not. In many sundown towns and suburbs, law enforcement officials follow and stop African American motorists to this day as a matter of departmental policy. Thus we cannot assume that towns with ordinances were more racist, more rigid, or more notorious as sundown towns than communities whose officials kept out African Americans without such laws.
51
Creating Sundown Towns by Freeze-out
 
Sometimes no specific act of violence or formal policy was required to turn a town or county all-white. As the Nadir deepened, white churches, schools, and even stores across the North often made African Americans unwelcome. In 1887 in Grundy County, Missouri, for example, a white school that previously had admitted black children now barred them. Their parents sued under the Fourteenth Amendment, but in 1890 the Missouri Supreme Court denied their appeal. Yet fifteen black children were required before a county had to have a “colored” high school. So African American children in Grundy County simply had no high school. It comes as no surprise that the black population of Grundy County fell from 254 in 1890 to just 85 by 1930, 35 in 1950, and 18 by 1960.
52
Historian Robert Nesbit documented what happened to Pleasant Ridge, a small black community that grew up in Grant County, Wisconsin, after the Civil War. The neighboring white school agreed to take in their children, and in the years after the Civil War, Pleasant Ridge hosted an annual picnic that “featured an agreeable mixing of the neighbors.” But by the late 1880s, its white neighbors had rechristened it “Nigger Ridge” and no longer deigned to attend community events such as the picnic. Residents continued the picnic for a few years, “as a mostly Negro affair” in Nesbit’s words, but Pleasant Ridge “went into decline.”
53
No specific event forced African Americans out, but Grant County’s black population fell from 98 in 1870 to 68 in 1890, 43 in 1920, and just 7, all males, by 1960. To be black in Pleasant Ridge in 1870 when there were 97 other African Americans in the county was all right, because one also had white friends and neighbors. By 1920, being one of 43 African Americans meant living in a sea of Caucasians who ranged from indifferent to actively hostile.
54
In some towns, whites who still wanted to befriend their black neighbors now felt compelled to do so surreptitiously, lest they too be ostracized by the larger white community. The one black student in the Wyandotte (Michigan) public schools in the 1910s had white school “friends” who were pleased that he did not embarrass them by recognizing that he knew them when their paths chanced to cross away from school. A woman in southern Illinois told me she played with the children of the black family that lived near them, but only under cover of darkness. Faced with such discouragements, especially in towns and counties where they were few, African Americans could no longer struggle on. So they pulled back into larger cities. At least there one’s pariah status wasn’t always right in front of one’s face, and one might have friends.
55
No bright-line boundary can be drawn between public prohibition and private freeze-out. A “Mass Meeting” in Bell City, Missouri, 110 miles south of St. Louis, on December 20, 1939, exemplifies this blurring. Citizens passed eight “Resolutions,” all dealing with forcing out every African American from Bell City and northeastern Stoddard County and keeping any new blacks from moving in. The first “resolved that all land and property owners . . . be invited, urged, and requested not to permit or allow any Negro or Mexican families or single person or persons to move and reside upon their lands or property in the above described territory for any purpose whatsoever.” Another warned “that the moral standard of living conditions will be greatly lowered if Negroes or Mexicans are allowed to inhabit this territory.” Resolution 7 was the most ominous:
That every Negro family or individual which numbers some six or eight now residing in said district be invited to move out of said territory in a reasonable length of time and that the landowners where said Negroes now dwell be invited to rid their premises of said Negro in a reasonable time.
 
The final resolution invoked officers of the law:
Further resolved that all citizens and peace officers in this and adjoining counties are asked to cooperate with this convention and its committees in carrying out these resolutions in a peaceful and lawful manner.
 
Clearly “John Wright, Ben Oakley, Rev. Jones, and Committee,” who affixed their names to the resolutions and had flyers printed up—official-looking, suitable for posting—thought they would have the law on their side. Apparently they did, for by 2000, Bell City still had only 5 African Americans among its 461 residents. Yet just to the southeast lies one of Missouri’s blackest areas.
56
Communities that froze out their African Americans might seem at first glance to be “kinder” than those that forced them out violently or as a matter of law. But as Wyandotte historian Edwina DeWindt points out, for such a crusade to succeed requires “a general unity of action of all Wyandotte citizens in not renting or selling property to Negroes, refusing to serve them in stores and restaurants, and not hiring Negroes in places of employment.” Such unanimity over time might require more widespread anti-black feeling—which Wyandotte had in abundance—and more systematic discrimination than is manifested in a town where a mob suddenly erupts to force out African Americans overnight. Moreover, some campaigns to force African Americans out by firing them were mounted in the 1920s by the KKK or labor unions that also threatened violence, so the intimidation level may have been no lower than in Fond du Lac. Whites who wanted to retain their black employees often found themselves violently intimidated and forced to let them go—so freezing out proves no kinder on close inspection.
57
Creating Sundown Towns and Suburbs by Buyout

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