Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (29 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Jews, Italians, and Mexicans were more open, in suburbs and also in neighborhoods within cities. After studying northern cities in the 1920s, T.J. Woofter wrote, “Almost without exception the groups which are most heavily mixed with Negroes in the North are Jewish and Italian.... Those least mixed are the Irish and native white people.” Even after World War II, according to a long-term black resident of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, police cars served informally as taxis “to take us away from Cabbage Hill, the German neighborhood, when the sun went down,” back to the Jewish-Italian-Greek-African American neighborhood that was home.
36
Across the nation, when African Americans did move to previously white suburbs, often it was to majority Jewish neighborhoods. Unlike WASPs, Jewish Americans lacked the social power to keep blacks out, as Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon showed in the Boston area. So when brokers agreed to sell and bankers agreed to make loans to African Americans seeking homes in Jewish neighborhoods, Jews couldn’t stop them. Many metropolitan associations of realtors kept out Jewish as well as black agents, making it more likely that Jews and blacks would deal with each other. Also, Jews were not as unified in opposition to blacks as some other ethnic groups. Having faced discrimination based on race themselves, some Jews refused to discriminate. In Detroit, for example, Jews were suspicious of racial covenants, concerned that such provisions might be turned against them. Not only did this make houses available to African Americans, it also undercut public support in Jewish neighborhoods for the kind of violent response that sealed off many other ethnic communities against black would-be pioneers.
37
Consequently, according to historian Charles Bright, “blacks have historically followed the lines of Jewish settlement.” The process left most WASP, Irish, and Polish suburbs all-white for decades and helps explain the concentration of African Americans into just a handful of suburbs in each metropolitan area. Ironically, it also confirmed elite WASP suburbs in their anti-Semitism, one reason for which was their fear that “Jews will let blacks in.” Evidence in Chapter 14 will suggest that more recently, Mexicans have also been both less willing and less able to keep blacks out. Both of these groups absorbed less of a “white privilege” viewpoint, which came all too easily to other immigrants after they had been in the United States for a decade or two.
38
The case of Irish Americans merits further discussion. Certainly the Irish faced discrimination throughout the nineteenth century. Often they shared slum neighborhoods and lowly occupations with African Americans. Why, then, did they wind up, in Woofter’s words, “least mixed” with blacks, along with WASPs? Writing in 1843, John Finch noted the Irish animosity toward African Americans:
It is a curious fact that the Democratic Party, and particularly the poorer class of Irish immigrants in America, are greater enemies to the Negro population, and greater advocates for the continuance of Negro slavery, than any portion of the population in the free States.
 
Finch correctly ascribed Irish racism to
successful
competition. They drove African Americans from occupation after occupation in eastern cities. Then, in the words of Noel Ignatiev, author of
How the Irish Became White,
“To avoid the taint of blackness it was necessary that no Negro be allowed to work in occupations where Irish were to be found. Still better was to erase the memory that Afro-Americans had ever done those jobs.”
39
The third and final point about ethnic group membership is that white ethnic Americans rapidly became “regular” Americans, while African Americans were not allowed to. Even when the Swedish, Italian, Polish, or Greek American newcomers entered as strikebreakers, in competition with older groups, eventually the American part of their identity became more important than the foreign part. Owing to the restrictive 1924 immigration act, new white ethnics grew less common, so the communities of Swedish Americans, Italian Americans, Polish Americans, and Greek Americans grew less Swedish, Italian, Polish, or Greek. White ethnics lost their accents and changed their names. Anders Andersson, prototypical Swedish quarrier, became Michael Anderson, less Swedish and more American. His son in turn never went into the quarry but learned to fix those new horseless carriages and soon ran an automobile dealership.
His
son went to college and became an engineer. Indeed, by the end of the Nadir, around 1940, whites had coalesced as an in-group, except possibly Jews and Mexicans.
40
Soon enough, the only place it mattered that anyone was Swedish American was on public radio’s
Prairie Home Companion.
41
By 2004, an Eastern European name was a source of mild amusement if it was somewhat long, like Brzezinski, but was otherwise regarded as American. So was its bearer—as
white
American.
Even in multiethnic towns, African Americans increasingly served the function of America’s primary outgroup, spurring in-group solidarity among whites. Their very presence—or, even better, their mandated absence—by definition grouped all European ethnics as “white.” White ethnic groups more and more distanced themselves from African Americans during the Nadir, and even some multiethnic towns went sundown. The history of Granite City, Illinois, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, illustrates the process. Between 1900 and 1910, hundreds of new immigrants, mostly from Macedonia and Bulgaria, poured into Granite City. “Poorly paid, they lived in pathetic squalor, ignorant of American institutions,” according to a book published in 1971, Granite City’s 75th birthday. Nevertheless, Granite City at least tolerated and sometimes even welcomed these white ethnic group members. They were nonblack, which was more important than being non-American. Precisely at this time, Granite City expelled its African Americans. The white ethnics had started at the bottom, in competition with African Americans, but driving the blacks from Granite City erased that memory over the years. Moreover, when WASP, Irish, Polish, Greek, Italian, and now Macedonian and Bulgarian Americans joined to expel or keep out African Americans around 1903, the whites were now united. No longer could Poles be used against Germans, or Italians against Poles. And no longer could African Americans even live in the community. By 1971, Macedonian American and Bulgarian American children were fully accepted, while African Americans were still totally excluded. Historian Matthew Jacobson showed how whites nationally unified racially during the same period.
42
Labor Strife
 
Our discussion of ethnic groups as strikebreakers has brought us to labor strife as an underlying historical and sociological reason for sundown towns. American labor history is replete with the use of outsiders as strikebreakers. Capitalists often used white ethnic groups different from (and lower in status than) their workers who were on strike, because these newer immigrants had little solidarity with the workers whose jobs they were taking. Coal mine owners especially, and on occasion quarry and factory owners, used each successive ethnic group as strikebreakers against the last. In Portland, Connecticut, in the 1870s, for example, Swedes broke into quarrying when Irish and German workers were on strike. Twenty-five years later, Italians did the same thing to the Swedes. Over and over, all across the country, each new group came in as strikebreakers vis-à-vis the former group. Always this generated in-terethnic animosity.
43
But when African Americans were the strikebreakers, a special hostility came into play. Having first gotten their toehold in America by being strikebreakers in many cases, white ethnics now reacted venomously to
black
strikebreakers. As historian Ronald Lewis put it, writing about Virden and Pana, Illinois, “Not only were the imports scabs, they were
black
scabs, and the white miners displayed at least as much hostility to their color as to their status as strikebreakers.”
44
Only rarely did the more established group try to expel a white ethnic group en masse. “Whites” in West Frankfort, Illinois, did riot against “Sicilians” in 1920. Historian John Higham describes the scene:
During the night of August 5, 1920, and all through the following day hundreds of people laden with clothing and household goods filled the roads leading out of West Frankfort, a mining town in southern Illinois. Back in town their homes were burning. Mobs bent on driving every foreigner from the area surged through the streets. Foreigners of all descriptions were beaten on sight, although the Italian population was the chief objective. Time and again the crowds burst into the Italian district, dragged cowering residents from their homes, clubbed and stoned them, and set fire to their dwellings. The havoc went on for three days, although five hundred state troops were rushed to the scene.
 
Terrible as it was, that scene was less vicious and less permanent than most expulsions of African Americans. Some of the “Sicilians” were willing “to sacrifice their property interests for anything they can get,” according to a report in the nearby
Marion Daily Republican.
“Business men are discouraging that practice, assuring all the uneasy that everything will come out all right and they can live here in peace and quiet so long as they are good and loyal citizens.” Many returned as soon as the violence died. In the same riot, however, whites forced out all African Americans from West Frankfort. No one made
them
any assurances, and they “went to stay,” as a Franklin County history put it succinctly in 1942. In the 2000 census, West Frankfort had not one African American household among its 8,196 people. Similarly, miners in Zeigler drove all Greek Americans out of town at gunpoint and kept them out, but only for two days.
45
Residents of Zeigler told me that African Americans, on the other hand, were still unwelcome as of 2002.
46
When African Americans were used as strikebreakers, if the strikers won, they typically drove all the black strikebreakers out of town.
47
Often, all other African Americans became fair game at that point—as they sometimes did after a lynching—and the workers simply drove them all out, thus creating a sundown town. In Spring Valley, in northern Illinois, the Italians had come in between 1886 and 1893, recruited by mine owners to depress the wages paid to the French and Belgians who had preceded them. In 1895, the owners used African Americans to threaten the Italian Americans. Late in the evening of August 4, 1895, a mob of more than 800 Italian American miners marched from Spring Valley to the settlement of African American miners two miles west of town, led by the Italian American band as a sort of disguise. “The residents, therefore, remained in their homes and did not react to the oncoming mob,” writes historian Felix Armfield, who then quotes the account in the
New York Times
:
Italians fell upon them like a lot of Apache Indians. Men were dragged from their homes, clubbed, trampled upon, and made targets for the shotguns, rifles, and small arms that the mob had brought with them. The women were insulted, slapped, and two of them, while begging for mercy, were shot down and fatally injured. No one was safe from the mob. Men, women, children, infants, the elderly, and even invalids were attacked.
 
The rioting continued, and on the second day the Italian miners announced, “The Black Men Must Go.” Writing in 1945, historians Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy summarized, “Nobody knows exactly how many Negroes died before the tumult subsided, but as years went by colored folks, at least, referred to the incident as the ‘Spring Valley Massacre.’ ”The result was the expulsion not only of strikebreakers but of all African Americans in Spring Valley. However, Spring Valley apparently remained sundown only briefly, because African Americans protested statewide and the mine manager insisted on his right to hire black miners.
48
Similar expulsions took place in Pana and Virden, in central Illinois, in 1898. Miners at four coal mines in Pana had been promised the “Springfield scale,” 40 cents per ton, won by miners in nearby Springfield, to take effect April 1, 1898. They had been earning 33 cents. On April 1, the owners reneged, so the workers struck. On May 25, after negotiations, the owners offered 30 cents a ton. So at the next meeting, May 30, the workers demanded 35 cents. On June 29, mine owners announced they would bring in strikebreakers from Alabama. Union miners then surrounded the coal mines with mass picket lines, which kept the mines from opening. Eventually, with the help of police and many ordinary citizens deputized into the police, the owners reopened the mines, using African American labor. On September 28, in the words of Pana historian Millie Meyerholtz, “striking union coal miners and imported Negroes engaged in a pitched battle on the main street. One hundred shots were exchanged.” Five blacks and one bystander were hurt; no one was wounded in the union ranks. Both sides then raised the ante. Miners from nearby towns—“heavily armed,” according to Meyerholtz—poured into Pana. Hundreds went east, to intercept a train carrying 60 black miners from Indiana.
The train was flagged down two miles west of Tower Hill by a large company of armed men whose faces were covered by handkerchiefs. The masked men boarded the train and at point of gun, forced men, women, and children to unload. They marched them along the track to Tower Hill. The purpose was to place them on another train and send them back south.

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