Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (30 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Meanwhile, state militia arrived in Pana on a train with two Gatling guns. September was marked by daily incidents. African Americans were never safe outside of the mine compound. Whites with clubs chased blacks down alleys and through yards and threw rocks at them. Some blacks went back south on trains. “There was a daily passage of insults, slights, and shoves which led to street brawls and secret means of revenge,” according to Eleanor Burhorn, who wrote a master’s thesis on the event. “Each side antagonized the other.” On October 12, whites rioted at the mine in Virden, 40 miles west, where African Americans were also working as strikebreakers. The union had been tipped off that additional black strikebreakers were on their way. When the four-coach train came through Virden, 600 miners lined the tracks and opened a deadly crossfire killing eleven men, including three St. Louis detective s.
49
On November 15, the Virden owners capitulated to the white miners. Virden has kept out African Americans ever since, although in 2000, it had one black household. On November 25, 1898, Adjutant Gene Reece of the state militia made the wisest analysis of the Pana situation.
To unionize the blacks is most reasonable to establish the [wage] scale. But the probabilities of its being carried out are few. The bitterness that has been engendered by the union’s fight on the Alabama blacks is such, that it is not probable that the blacks would listen to a union man under any circumstances. Then, too, the race question has entered into the fight to such an extent that it is not likely a movement to get these blacks into the union would meet with favor.
 
Racism had poisoned the well, making it impossible for black and white miners to drink from any cup of solidarity. On April 10, 1899, a shootout between blacks and whites killed seven people, including a union miner, three black men, a black woman, and a bystander, and wounding fifteen. In June the Pana mine owners admitted defeat too. They closed their mines, stranding their black miners without even train fare to get out of Pana. Eventually 211 African Americans left to go west, perhaps to Kansas and Indian Territory, and 63 went back to Birmingham. Pana also drove out its other blacks, excepting one or two families, as we have seen, and became a sundown town, complete with signs at the edge of town.
50
Besides Pana and Virden, many other communities trace their origins as sundown towns to a successful strike. Something darker may have happened in Mindenmines, Missouri, where mine operators brought African American strikebreakers to their coal mine in about 1900. Marvin Van Gilder, author of a 1972 history of Barton County, recounts blandly, “Many of them died during their relatively brief residence at the mining camps . . . and a cemetery for the Negro community was established northwest of Mindenmines near the state line.” Van Gilder does not explain why or how “many of them died,” but Mindenmines became a sundown town upon their demise and probably remains so to this day. According to a staff member at Missouri Southern State College who grew up in the town, a black family moved in for a week in about 1987 and left under pressure; another lived there for about six weeks in about 1990 and left after someone fired a gun at their home. In 2000, Mindenmines was still all-white.
51
Most shocking of all may be what happened in Zeigler, which has been a sundown town since a series of coal mine explosions between 1905 and 1909 killed dozens of black strikebreakers. Zeigler is a fascinating town, built in concentric circles by its founder, Joseph Leiter, in 1903, who owned its mine. In July 1904, 268 United Mine Workers (UMW) members walked out of the mine on strike. Leiter ordered them out of Zeigler, which he owned, and proceeded to fortify the town. He had an 8-foot-high wooden stockade built, 800 feet long and 400 feet wide, with a live wire on top, enclosing the mine and adjacent territory. Gun turrets were built at each corner of the stockade, and another adorned the roof of the mine office, located in the center of town. Each had a machine gun, and a searchlight mounted on the mine tipple swept the town at night. Strikebreakers came in by train, but the union was often tipped off and opened fire on the trains before they got inside the fortified area. Most strikebreakers quit as soon as they saw the dangerous conditions facing them. Leiter hired more—Italians and others from Europe and African Americans from Kentucky. The strike continued into the winter of 1904–05. “Night after night guns blazed,” in the words of Zeigler historian Allan Patton, “bullets ricocheted off of buildings, and dynamite blasts rocked the city.” Leiter’s fortress held, however, and by spring, many of the striking miners were seeking employment at other mines.
52
Then on April 3, 1905, the Zeigler mine blew up. Fifty bodies were eventually retrieved, but the remains of some miners were never recovered. The Zeigler mine endured at least three more catastrophes. On November 4, 1908, it had a fire; on January 10, 1909, 26 miners were killed in another explosion; and a third explosion a month later killed three more. Finally Leiter gave up and sold the mine to another owner, who signed with the UMW.
What caused the disasters? The most intriguing account was written in 1953 by Ruby Goodwin, a major figure in neighboring Du Quoin’s black community. In her memoir,
It’s Good to Be Black,
she tells in detail how a black miner “walked boldly up to the office and applied for a job.” He turned out to be “an expert shot firer from upstate” and a union stalwart. “If anyone had been watching they would have seen him climb up the ladder and get into a waiting surrey just a few minutes before the explosion.” Goodwin’s account intrigues because she is both African American and a devotee of the UMW—for decades the only major union that recruited black members—so she is sympathetic to the murder of 50 to 100 African American miners because it preserved an interracial union. Also, no argument can be made with one statement she makes: “The miners knew that the explosion was not untimely. It was timed to perfection.” Unfortunately, neither Patton nor historian Paul Angle, who also treated Zeigler, discuss Goodwin’s account.
53
Oral tradition today in the white community in Zeigler and in the black community in Du Quoin agrees with her, holding that the dead miners were mostly black and that one explosion—the first?—was set by union miners.
54
It is this story that Zeigler residents still told me, in 2002, to explain its all-white tradition.
55
As with ethnicity, labor strife as an underlying cause of sundown towns shares some overlap with politics. Workers—especially union members—were more likely to be Democrats, an alliance that helped make some of them more racist, just as capitalists’ alliance with the Republican Party helped make some of them less racist for a time.
56
Indeed, I would argue that racism as a cultural element in the labor movement was more important in causing a town to go sundown than the presence or absence of black strikebreakers as a specific causal variable. Political scientist John Peterson agrees, pointing out that “African American workers joined unions in large numbers whenever they were treated equally.” Thus union exclusion usually preceded and facilitated the use of black strikebreakers. In 1894, American Federation of Labor (AFL) head Samuel Gompers allowed unions to join his organization that were white-only, and most AFL unions proceeded to go all-white. As they achieved power during the next 30 years, unions shut blacks out of railroad employment, from construction, and in some places from meatpacking, lumber, and mining as well.
57
After 1900, Gompers repeatedly made racist speeches attacking African Americans, and union workers responded. Often sundown towns resulted.
58
Of course, not every union town went sundown. Neither did every Democratic or monoethnic town. Not only did the actions taken by local leaders of both races come into play, but so did happenstance—whether something occurred in a given locale to induce white residents to question the right of African Americans (or another minority) to exist in “their” town. The next chapter will explore these immediate “triggers”—catalyzing incidents, usually of real or alleged black misbehavior, sometimes as inoffensive as a black boxing victory a thousand miles away—that prompted whites in a given community to expel its entire black population.
7
 
Catalysts and Origin Myths
 
About forty years ago Negroes began to settle in this township in numbers, and it was not long before they became a nuisance. Stealing was rife and all kinds of depredations were going on. Ned Harrigan, who lived here at the time, says that the whites met at the . . . school building, and decided to clear the country of the blacks. A notice was served on the offenders giving them 24 hours to get out of town, and by noon the next day every Negro shanty was empty, and that was the last that was ever heard of them.
—
Chesterton Tribune,
1903, explaining why and how that northern Indiana town went all-white
1
 
 
 
 
M
OST RESIDENTS of the typical sundown town are not good sociologists and never invoke factors such as those given in the previous chapter—political ideology, ethnic makeup, and the like—to explain their town’s racial policy. For that matter, the underlying sociological causes do not flatly determine the outcome in a given community. Not every Democratic town expelled its African Americans, although Democratic towns did so far more often than Republican towns. Not every monoethnic town kept blacks out, although monoethnic towns did so more often than multiethnic towns. Not every town with strong white supremacist labor unions drove out
all
its African Americans, although many did. However, as racism intensified during the Nadir, the position of African Americans in towns marked by any or all of these three factors grew so tenuous that the least disturbance—an incendiary remark by a demagogic white politician, news of the next town getting rid of its blacks, a criminal act by a black resident—might set off an expulsion.
What residents of a sundown town often
do
recall is the immediate “reason” why its African Americans were expelled—the trigger. These events play the role of catalysts. If the underlying conditions are right, just as a catalyst in a chemical reaction provides a surface or “hook” enabling the reaction to proceed more rapidly, so the triggering incident provides an excuse or justification for the expulsion or prohibition of African Americans.
In most towns that had African Americans and then had none, some account of this triggering event persists in the local culture to explain their absence. This story then gets raised to the level of myth and becomes used not only as the sole reason for the original expulsion but also to justify the town’s continuing exclusion of African Americans.
Labor Strife as Excuse
 
One underlying cause—organized labor and racialized labor strife—is often cited by residents as the cause of their town’s sundown policy. In some towns, however, black strikebreakers were not the real reason for a town going sundown, but only the pretext. This may have been true in Linton, Indiana, for example, which barred all African Americans after a coal company attempted to use black strikebreakers. In the summer of 1903, union miners made a “riotous attack upon the colored waiters at Linton,” according to a newspaper account. Linton put up a sundown sign, and all of Greene County, of which Linton is the seat, went sundown, according to a history teacher who grew up in nearby Vincennes. A black family tried to move into the county in the late 1940s, she said, and “was burned out. No one black would ever
dare
live in Linton,” she told me in 2002, and as of the 2000 census, 5,774 people lived in Linton, but there was not one black household.
2
“The colored waiters” had nothing to do with any strikebreakers, however—indeed, nothing to do with mining. White coal miners in Linton were hardly in competition with waiters, so the motivation for the 1903 “riotous attack” wasn’t economic. The mining strike seems just an excuse for a more general policy.
3
As in Linton, workers in Austin, Minnesota, expelled not only black strikebreakers, but all African Americans. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, according to Andrew Kirchmeier, professor at nearby Ripon College, unions had an agreement with the city, not the employers, to keep African Americans out of town as a matter of municipal policy. Perhaps unions in each city felt that the easiest way to guarantee that black strikebreakers would never trouble them again would be to give their town a reputation for being inhospitable to all African Americans. Or perhaps workers were simply acting on their racist beliefs, shared by their political and labor leaders.
4
Moreover, unions did not have to be racist to succeed, so it is fallacious to “credit” black strikebreakers with causing a town to go sundown. Labor had examples of nonracist practice, such as Du Quoin, Illinois, where the United Mine Workers organized an interracial union. There, when managers tried to engage blacks as strikebreakers, unionized African Americans were on hand to dissuade them. The town stayed interracial, the mines stayed organized, and Du Quoin has long been an oasis of racial tolerance compared to its neighboring communities, most of which are sundown towns. It even elected a black alderman in 1918. Thus racism did not flow automatically as a result of social class or union membership.
5

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