Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (28 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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This pattern—Republican areas in the 1850s remaining interracial in the Nadir, Democratic areas going all white—was not just true for Illinois. It held throughout the North, including California and Oregon.
To be sure, since Democrats called themselves “the White Man’s Party,” it is somewhat tautological to cite Democratic voting majorities as a cause of white supremacy, rather than as simply another manifestation of it. But not wholly. Americans were Democrats for many reasons, not just the party’s racism, just as today Americans are Republicans for many reasons, not just the party’s racism. Once an individual became a Democrat, however, perhaps owing to such nonracist reasons as attractive local leaders, one’s ethnic group membership, or the Republicans’ increasing support for Prohibition, it was hard not to become more racist. After all, the party’s songs, speeches, and platform positions usually included attacks on African Americans, along with charges that Republicans favored black rights up to and including “miscegenation,” a word coined by Democratic politicos in 1863.
A Different Pattern in the Upland South: Many Unionist Areas Later Expelled African Americans
 
Political ideology played quite a different role in the South. Politically, the traditional South had been split between Democrats and Whigs in 1850, but with the disintegration of the Whig Party, it became more Democratic, and overwhelmingly so as the South seceded. But Democrats in the traditional South, where slavery had been strong, did not try to drive African Americans out. Instead, they made money off their labor.
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The South also had areas, large and small—especially in the hills and mountains, where slaves were few—that tried to stay with the Union.
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After the war, many of these Unionist areas voted Republican. Until the 1890s, they maintained fairly good relations with their small African American populations, partly because African Americans and white Republicans were political allies. In states where the Republican Party collapsed after the end of Reconstruction, some of these whites then supported third-party movements such as the Readjusters in Virginia, the Union Labor Party in Arkansas, and the Populist Party across all the southern and border states, again usually allied with black voters. After 1890 however, the nationwide tide of increasing white supremacy lapped at the valleys and mountains of the upland South. Like African Americans in Democratic towns in the Midwest and West, African Americans in these formerly Unionist or Republican areas now lived on a knife edge. Their town or county might go either way. Many went sundown.
What happened to cause this shift? Between 1890 and 1910, it became increasingly clear that interracial political coalitions would no longer be viable in the South. Since neither the federal executive nor the Supreme Court did anything to interfere with the “Mississippi Plan” for disfranchising African Americans “legally,” other states passed new constitutions emulating Mississippi’s between 1890 and 1907. Now white Republicans, Readjusters, Populists, or other anti-Democratic factions had no black counterparts with whom to ally. Democrats also used violence to demonstrate that they would no longer permit blacks or Republicans to hold political office; the coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 provided final proof. Now no politics was possible in the South outside the Democratic Party. The “solid South” would not really break until after the 1965 Voting Rights Act undid the disfranchisement of the Nadir period.
What were whites in the nontraditional South to do? In the newly solid South it would not pay to be anything but a Democrat. Allied with this Democratic resurgence, a wave of Confederate nationalism swept the southern and border states beginning shortly before 1890. No longer were Confederate leaders such as Jefferson Davis viewed with ambivalence, having led the South to defeat. Now they were seen as heroes. Now, indeed, the Confederate South had won—if not on the issue of secession, then on the matter of white supremacy. Now Confederate memorials went up across the South, even in counties in the nontraditional South that had not supported secession in 1860. In western Virginia and North Carolina, east Tennessee, northern Georgia and Alabama, north Texas, and much of Arkansas and Missouri, many formerly pro-Unionist whites changed their ideology to join this wave, now the winning side, often becoming hyper-Confederate and anti-black in the process.
At the same time, a new type of Democratic politician arose who professed to be pro-worker and pro-farmer, seemed not to be a tool of the aristocracy, and was rabidly anti-black. Jeff Davis in Arkansas (no relation to Jefferson Davis) was one example, as was James K. Vardaman in Mississippi and Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman in South Carolina. Now African Americans were stigmatized, apparently for good, and so were whites identified with them. Now more than ever it was in whites’ interest to distance themselves from blacks. So we find that precisely in counties where residents had questioned slavery before the Civil War and had been Unionists during the conflict, whites now often seemed impelled to prove themselves ultra-Confederate and manifested the most robust anti-black fervor.
Map 3 (page 73) shows places in the nontraditional South that went sundown as a result. Scott County, Tennessee, for example, had been overwhelmingly Unionist, sending 541 men to the United States army and just 19 to the Confederate army. According to county historian Esther Sanderson, “It was their strong nationalism, and not their love of the Negro that led them to fight desperately for the Union. They despised the [slave] system that had relegated them to the status of ‘poor mountain whites.’” I believe Sanderson is right: most Appalachian whites were anti-slavery, not pro-black. But Sanderson then goes on to suggest, “An aversion to the Negroes was an aftermath of the war, for many Union men considered slavery the main cause of the war.” Here I part company with her, because postwar population statistics in Scott County showed no evidence of “an aversion to the Negroes”: 157 African Americans called Scott County home in 1880, and 366 in 1890. Moreover, Scott County voted overwhelmingly (95%) for U.S. Grant for president in 1868, who explicitly favored full rights for African Americans. Scott County did not drive out its African Americans until around 1910, well into the Nadir. By that time, interracial politics were over in Tennessee, at least on the statewide level.
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What happened in northwest Alabama is still more graphic. During the Civil War, Winston County famously seceded from the Confederacy and declared itself the “Free State of Winston,” whereupon the Confederacy occupied the county by force. Many soldiers from the area deserted from the Confederate Army; some even took the next step and enlisted in the Union Army. After the war, many whites joined the Union League, an organization formed to support the Republican Party and black rights, because former Confederate leaders were still persecuting them. During the Nadir, however, Winston County found it expedient to lose the memory of its anti-slavery past, and while it didn’t quite forget that many residents had supported the United States, its contemporary allegiance switched from blue to gray. Steve Suitts grew up in Winston County in the 1950s. On a class visit to Shiloh Battlefield in Tennessee, he bought a blue Civil War cap; his classmates all bought gray, called him a “damned Yankee,” and meant it. As part of this switch, most of the county got rid of its African Americans in the 1890s. As late as 2002, except for Haleyville on its western edge, it was not clear that a black family could live peacefully in Winston County.
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Many other towns and counties in the nontraditional South that had been Unionist in the 1860s turned Confederate and went sundown at some point after 1890. Myakka City, Florida, for example, inland from Sarasota, had many Union sympathizers during the Civil War, some of whom joined the United States Army, according to local historian Melissa Sue Brewer. After 1890, neo-Confederates seized control and substituted a wholly Confederate past, and in the 1930s, Myakka City banished its African Americans. Although many counties in the Arkansas Ozarks opposed secession and harbored Unionists during the Civil War, every local history I read from Ozark counties, all written around 1890 or thereafter, tells of the war exclusively from the Confederate point of view. Most of these counties expelled their African Americans in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although not in the Ozarks, Grant County in central Arkansas also had many Unionists during the Civil War; during Reconstruction it was named for one Union general, while Sheridan, its county seat, was named for another. Nevertheless, the Grant County Museum in Sheridan in 2002 had four different Confederate flags for sale and no U.S. flag. Sheridan got rid of its African Americans in 1954. Many counties in north Texas similarly opposed the Confederacy during the Civil War but lost that heritage and drove out their African Americans in the twentieth century.
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Hermann, Missouri, on the Missouri River 70 miles west of St. Louis, showed perhaps the most striking transformation in racial ideology of any town in America. Mark Lause, who grew up nearby, notes that Hermann “started as a radical German colony and was an antislavery center in the heart of a slave state.” It became the most important Republican stronghold in the state outside of St. Louis. In 1860, Gasconade County, of which Hermann is the seat, cast 52% of its votes for Lincoln, 23% for northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, 19% for John Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate, and just 6% for John Breckenridge, the southern pro-slavery candidate, an astonishing proportion for Lincoln in a slave state. After the Civil War, “blacks in the general area used Hermann as the site for celebration of Emancipation Day for a number of years,” according to Art Draper of the Gasconade County Historical Society. But, Draper wrote, early in the twentieth century “the German School constituents voted not to integrate the schools,” by a margin of just one vote. After that, Hermann’s anti-racist idealism collapsed, and the county slid into exclusion. In Draper’s words, “The dominant conventional wisdom is that Hermann was a sundown town: ‘didn’t allow them to stay over night; could come and shop, OK, but don’t stay.’ ” Lause calls this slide “unforgivably pathetic.” Gasconade County teaches an important lesson about the power of the anti-black ideology of the Nadir period: if racism could grow to dominate Hermann, with its strong anti-slavery beginnings, it could dominate almost anywhere.
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Not every Unionist area in the southern and border states drove out its African Americans. Jones County, Mississippi, had been a center of Unionist activity; as with Winston, Confederates had to occupy it during the war. Jones County did not exclude African Americans. Neither did most counties in West Virginia. We shall see in the next chapter that such intangibles as historical contingency and local leadership made a difference. But even in these areas whites became far more racist during the Nadir than they had been during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
White Ethnic Solidarity
 
White ethnic group membership also helps to predict which towns would expel their African Americans. Of course, ethnic group membership often went hand in hand with politics, because the Democratic Party appealed more to most white immigrants. But ethnic group membership also made an independent difference, in three ways.
First, ethnic solidarity often led to sundown towns. When ethnic groups came to this country, first-generation immigrants from a country often lived together and worked together. They spoke the same language, shared the same culture, and planned to marry within the group. Often they came from one village in Italy to a village in, say, Vermont, where they quarried granite together, or from one county in Wales to a particular town in Wisconsin. They also banded together for protection from more-established Americans, who often put them down and tried to take advantage of them. Whole towns became overwhelmingly Czech, or German Mennonite, or Italian, sometimes because the town’s primary employer—perhaps a coal mine or factory—had recruited its entire labor force from one place in Europe. It was only a short step from this kind of in-group to a town that looked upon any newcomer of a different heritage as an outsider. Such towns were more likely to keep out or drive out African Americans, since they already formed a tight monoethnic in-group. To explain the startling paucity of African Americans in Cedar Falls, Iowa, for example, compared to neighboring Waterloo, historian Robert Neymeyer suggested that Cedar Falls was overwhelmingly Danish, while nearby Waterloo “had a variety of ethnic groups (Germans, Danes, Norwegians, Irish, Italians) with no single dominant force. It was easier for them to accept Croatians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Polish and Russian Jews, and ultimately blacks.” My impressionistic comparison of mono- versus multiethnic communities in Texas, Illinois, and elsewhere persuades me that Neymeyer is right: towns with more than one ethnic group were less likely to exclude African Americans than were mono-ethnic towns. Another predictor related to ethnic composition was the sheer size of the black community: African Americans did find some security in numbers.
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Second, some white ethnic groups wound up much more anti-black than others. Among mono-ethnic towns, WASP towns—especially elite suburbs— seem most likely to exclude, particularly after their residual Republican anti-racism wore off in the 1890s. German socialist towns such as Hermann, Missouri, and perhaps Scandinavian and Finnish socialist areas such as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, may also have excluded after their ideological anti-racism wore off. German Lutheran and Catholic towns, Irish towns, Polish towns, and Dutch and German Reformed towns also seem to have gone sundown frequently.

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