Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (3 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Independent sundown towns range from tiny hamlets such as De Land, Illinois (population 500), to substantial cities such as Appleton, Wisconsin (57,000 in 1970).
4
Sometimes entire counties went sundown, usually when their county seat did. Independent sundown towns were soon joined by “sundown suburbs,” which could be even larger: Levittown, on Long Island, had 82,000 residents in 1970, while Livonia, Michigan, and Parma, Ohio, had more than 100,000. Warren, a suburb of Detroit, had a population of 180,000 including just 28 minority families, most of whom lived on a U.S. Army facility.
5
Outside the traditional South—states historically dominated by slavery, where sundown towns are rare—
probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans.
If that sentence startles, please suspend disbelief until Chapter 3, which will show that Illinois, for example, had 671 towns and cities with more than 1,000 people in 1970, of which 475—71%—were all-white in census after census.
6
Chapter 3 will prove that almost all of these 475 were sundown towns. There is reason to believe that more than half of all towns in Oregon, Indiana, Ohio, the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and diverse other areas were also all-white on purpose. Sundown
suburbs
are found from Darien, Connecticut, to La Jolla, California, and are even more prevalent; indeed, most suburbs began life as sundown towns.
Sundown towns also range across the income spectrum. In 1990, the median owner-occupied house in Tuxedo Park, perhaps the wealthiest suburb of New York City, was worth more than $500,000 (the highest category in the census). So was the median house in Kenilworth, the richest suburb of Chicago. The median house in Pierce City, in southwestern Missouri, on the other hand, was worth just $29,800 and in Zeigler, in southern Illinois, just $21,900. All four towns kept out African Americans for decades.
This History Has Been Hidden
 
Even though sundown towns were everywhere, almost no literature exists on the topic.
7
No book has ever been written about the making of all-white towns in America.
8
Indeed, this story is so unknown as to deserve the term
hidden.
Most Americans have no idea such towns or counties exist, or they think such things happened mainly in the Deep South. Ironically, the traditional South has almost no sundown towns. Mississippi, for instance, has no more than 6, mostly mere hamlets, while Illinois has no fewer than 456, as Chapter 3 will show.
Even book-length studies of individual sundown towns rarely mention their exclusionary policies. Local historians omit the fact intentionally, knowing that it would reflect badly on their communities if publicized abroad. I read at least 300 local histories—some of them elaborate coffee-table books—about towns whose sundown histories I had confirmed via detailed oral histories, but only about 1 percent of these mentioned their town’s racial policies. In conversation, however, the authors of these commemorative histories were often more forthcoming, showing that they knew about the policy but didn’t care to disclose it in print.
Social scientists and professional historians often have done no better in their books. During the Depression, for instance, Malcolm Brown and John Webb wrote
Seven Stranded Coal Towns,
a report for the federal government about towns in southern Illinois. All seven were sundown towns—most still are—yet the authors never mention that fact. In 1986, anthropologist John Coggeshall wrote about thirteen southern Illinois communities; most were probably sundown towns when he wrote; I have confirmed at least five. Yet he never mentions the topic. In
Toward New Towns for America,
C. S. Stein treats Radburn, New Jersey; “the Greens”—Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washington, DC; Greenhills, Ohio, near Cincinnati; and Greendale, Wisconsin, southwest of Milwaukee—planned towns built by the FDR administration; and several other planned communities, all sundown towns, without ever mentioning race. This takes some doing; about Radburn, for example, Stein details the first residents’ occupations, religious denominational memberships, educational backgrounds, and incomes, without once mentioning that all of them were white—and were required to be. Lewis Atherton’s
Main Street on the Middle Border
treats small towns across the Midwest but makes no mention of sundown towns or indeed of African Americans or race relations in any context.
9
Historians and sociologists may have omitted the fact because they simply did not know about sundown towns. For example, several historians assured me that no town in Wisconsin ever kept out or drove out African Americans. James Danky, librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society, whose book on the black press in America is the standard reference, wrote:
I have checked with three of my most knowledgeable colleagues and there is consensus, we do not know of any such towns in Wisconsin. Clearly the Badger State has a full supply of racism, just no such towns or counties. I believe you have found such entities elsewhere, it is just that I think that it is a small category, at least in terms of being formally established.
 
Later, Danky was surprised and intrigued to learn I had confirmed 9 sundown towns in Wisconsin and 194—no “small category”—in neighboring Illinois. Across the northern United States, many social scientists and historians have gone slack-jawed when hearing details of community-wide exclusion from towns and counties in their state, lasting at least into the late twentieth century.
10
Overlooking sundown towns stands in sharp contrast to the attention bestowed upon that other violent and extralegal race relations practice: lynching. The literature on lynching is vast, encompassing at least 500 and perhaps thousands of volumes; at this point we have at least one book for every ten confirmed lynchings. Still the books keep coming;
Amazon.com
listed 209 for sale in 2005. Yet lynchings have ceased in America.
11
Sundown towns, on the other hand, continue to this day.
Sundown towns arose during a crucial era of American history, 1890–1940, when, after the gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, race relations systematically grew worse. Since the 1955 publication of C. Vann Woodward’s famous book,
The Strange Career of Jim Crow,
historians of the South have recognized that segregation became much stricter after 1890. No longer could African Americans vote; no longer could they use the restaurants and public parks that whites used; even streetcars and railroad waiting rooms now put up screens or signs to isolate blacks in separate sections. African Americans were also beset by violence, as lynchings rose to their highest point.
12
However, most Americans have no idea that race relations
worsened
between 1890 and the 1930s. As Edwin Yoder Jr. wrote in 2003 in the
Washington Post,
“Notwithstanding the brilliant revisionist works of the late C. Vann Woodward, few Americans even remotely grasp the earthquake of 1890–1901 that overthrew biracial voting in the South.
13
This backlash against African Americans was not limited to the South but was national. Neither the public nor most historians realize that the same earthquake struck the North, too. Woodward actually did; he wrote in the preface to the second edition of his classic that the only reason he did not treat the worsening of race relations in the North was because “my own competence does not extend that far.” Unfortunately, except for a handful of important monographs on individual states and locales, few historians have tried to fill the gap in the half century since.
14
Thus they missed one of the most appalling and widespread racial practices of them all: sundown towns. While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North (although there were gestures in that direction), they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county.
15
My Own Ignorance
 
Initially, I too thought sundown towns, being so extreme, must be extremely rare. Having learned of perhaps a dozen sundown towns and counties—Anna and Edina; Cicero and Berwyn, suburbs of Chicago; Darien, Connecticut, a suburb of New York City; Cedar Key, Florida; Forsyth County, Georgia; Alba and Vidor, Texas; and two or three others—I imagined there might be 50 such towns in the United States. I thought a book about them would be easy to research and write. I was wrong.
I began my on-site research in Illinois, for the simple reason that I grew up there, in Decatur, in the center of the state. Coming of age in central Illinois, however, I never asked why the little towns clustered about my home city had no black residents. After all, I reasoned, some communities are not on major highways, rivers, or rail lines; are not near African American population concentrations; and have not offered much in the way of employment. Probably they never attracted African American residents. I had no idea that
almost all
all-white towns and counties in Illinois were all-white on purpose.
The idea that intentional sundown towns were everywhere in America, or at least everywhere in the Midwest, hit me between the eyes two years into this research—on October 12, 2001. That evening I was the headliner at the Decatur Writers Conference. It was an interesting homecoming, because at the end of my address, I mentioned my ongoing research on sundown towns and invited those who knew something about the subject to come forward and talk with me. In response, a throng of people streamed to the front to tell me about sundown towns they knew of in central Illinois. Moweaqua (2000 population 1,923, 0 African Americans) was all-white on purpose, two people said. Nearby Assumption (1,261, 0 African Americans) was also a sundown town, except for its orphanage, Kemmerer Village, and the few African American children there often had a hard time in the Assumption school because of their color. An Illinoisian who “grew up on a farm just west of Decatur and attended high school in Niantic,” a hamlet just west of Decatur (738, 0 African Americans), wrote later, “I had always heard that it was against the law for blacks to stay in Niantic overnight. Supposedly, when the railroad section crew was in the area, they would have to pull the work train, with its sleeping quarters for the section hands, out on the main track for the night.” Another person confirmed the railroad story, and two others agreed separately that Niantic kept out black people, so I had to conclude that Niantic’s population was all-white not because it was so small, but because African Americans were not permitted. Still others came down with information about De Land, Maroa, Mt. Zion, Pana, Villa Grove, and a dozen other nearby towns.
That evening in Decatur revolutionized my thinking. I now perceived that in the normal course of human events, most and perhaps all towns would
not
be all-white. Racial exclusion was required. “If they did not have such a policy,” observed an African American resident of Du Quoin, Illinois, about the all-white towns around Du Quoin, “surely blacks would be
in
them.” I came to understand that he was right. “If people of color aren’t around,” writes commentator Tim Wise, “there’s a reason, having something to do with history, and exclusion. . . .”
16
Though mind-boggling to me, this insight proved hardly new. As early as 1858, before the dispersal of African Americans throughout the North prompted by the Civil War, the
Wyandotte Herald
in Wyandotte, in southeastern Michigan, stated, “Wyandotte is again without a single colored inhabitant, something remarkable for a city of over 6,000 people.” Even then, the
Herald
understood that a city of over 6,000 people was “remarkable” for being all-white. We shall see that a series of riots and threats was required to keep Wyandotte white over the years.
17
Later, after slavery ended, African Americans moved throughout America, making it “remarkable” even for smaller towns to be all-white. The anonymous author of
History of Lower Scioto Valley,
south of Columbus, Ohio, writing in 1884, recognized this in discussing Waverly, a sundown town since before the Civil War:
In 1875 a local census showed Waverly to have 1,279 inhabitants.... It will be seen that the fact of Waverly’s not having a single colored resident is a rare mark of distinction for a town of its size. And what makes the fact more remarkable, there never has been a Negro or mulatto resident of the place.
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Sundown Towns Are Recent
 
In 1884, it was “a rare mark of distinction” for a town the size of Waverly to be all-white. A few years later, however, beginning around 1890 and lasting until at least 1968, towns throughout Ohio and most other states began to emulate the racial policy of places like Wyandotte and Waverly. Most independent sundown towns expelled their black residents, or agreed not to admit any, between 1890 and 1940. Sundown suburbs arose still later, between 1900 and 1968. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was no longer rare for towns the size of Waverly to be all-white. It was common, and usually it was on purpose.
So sundown towns are not only widespread, but also relatively recent. Except for a handful of places such as Wyandotte and Waverly, most towns did not go sundown during slavery, before the Civil War, or during Reconstruction. On the contrary, blacks moved everywhere in America between 1865 and 1890. African Americans reached every county of Montana. More than 400 lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. City neighborhoods across the country were fairly integrated, too, even if black inhabitants were often servants or gardeners for their white neighbors.

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