Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (31 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Some sundown towns invoked labor disputes long after the fact, as an excuse. Miners in Carterville, Illinois, 130 miles south of Pana, faced African American strikebreakers in 1898. Like the mine owners in Pana, Samuel Brush, who operated the biggest mine in Williamson County, just north of Carterville, refused to pay the Springfield scale agreed to by other mine owners with the United Mine Workers. Four-fifths of his workers struck. Brush replaced them with 178 African American miners from Tennessee. Two years of intermittent labor disputes, often marked by violence, followed. On September 17, 1899, some 25 or 30 whites confronted about 15 African Americans at the Illinois Central railroad station and ordered them to get out of town. The blacks started walking up the railroad tracks, with the whites following at a distance. According to historian Paul Angle:
Suddenly one of the Negroes drew a pistol and fired at the group of pursuers. The miners answered with a volley. Several of the Negroes fell; the others ran for their lives. The whites followed, firing at the fugitives. In a few minutes, not a black man could be seen. Five lay dead; the others, some of them wounded, escaped to the safety of the mining camp.
 
To this day, some residents of Carterville explain the town’s sundown policy by referring to the “black scabs.” Historian Herbert Gutman took this position in “The Negro and the UMW.” It turns out, however, that Carterville already was a sundown town
before
the importation of the strikebreakers. As Angle noted, Carterville “had long imposed on the Negro a subhuman status. No colored person was permitted even to enter the town.”
6
On the Knife Edge
 
While black strikebreakers have been wrongly invoked to excuse sundown policies—their actions can never logically justify expelling African Americans who were
not
strikebreakers—nevertheless labor strife does qualify as a catalyst. Often whether a town went sundown came down to such small moments in time as whether a strike was won or lost. If the strikers lost, some striking miners came back to work, joining some of the African American strikebreakers. In the few Pennsylvania towns where African Americans do reside today, “in most cases they are the descendants of strikebreakers,” according to Philip Jenkins, author of a study of the Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania. Other interracial towns resulting from strikebreakers include Coal Creek, Indiana; Braidwood and Danville, Illinois; Waterloo, Iowa; and Weir City, Kansas. If the union was smart, which the United Mine Workers of America often was, it then organized white and black workers so as not to be undercut by black strikebreakers in the future.
7
Sometimes a truly insignificant incident made the difference. Mine owner Joseph Leiter was about to sign with the United Mine Workers in a meeting with UMW leaders in Zeigler, Illinois, in June 1904, a month before the strike. Then, in Allan Patton’s words:
According to local legend, John Wesley Shadowen, one of the local [UMW] union officials, made aloud boast of the union conquest of Leiter.
8
Immediately Leiter threw the pen that he held to sign the agreement into the wall and [threw] the contract at Shadowen. In a loud voice Leiter stated that, “Zeigler will run scab forever!”
 
What if Shadowen had not made his intemperate remark? Then Leiter would have signed with the interracial UMW, and Zeigler might not be a sundown town today.
9
Other events showed how tenuous was the position of African Americans in towns poised on the knife edge owing to the towns’ underlying characteristics. On July 4, 1910, for example, black heavyweight Jack Johnson defeated Jim Jeffries, the “Great White Hope,” in Reno, Nevada. African Americans rejoiced in the victory of one of their own, until they came up against the response of white Americans to Jeffries’s defeat. Whites attacked African Americans in at least 30 American cities. In Slocum, Texas, they killed 20; all others fled. So Slocum became a sundown town in response to a boxing match more than a thousand miles away. This is what historians call “historical contingency”: if Johnson had lost, blacks might have survived in Slocum.
10
Claims to Equality Led to Sundown Towns
 
The real reason that Jack Johnson’s victory led to at least one sundown town and to many attacks on African American neighborhoods was that he demonstrated that blacks could be the equal of whites, at least in the boxing ring. During the Nadir, that was a dangerous claim for an African American to make. Indeed, Johnson boldly maintained that he was socially equal to whites as well, openly dating and marrying white women. Whites have often been unwilling to concede that African Americans might be their equal in wealth, social status, or even more minor skills such as boxing or poker, and their anger at the possibility often triggered sundown towns.
Whites might claim to be upset by problematic African Americans—criminals and ne’er-do-wells—but more frequently they lashed out at those who were industrious and successful, for it was these families whose existence set up a claim to social and economic equality. Such claims underlay the expulsion by white Democrats of about 200 African Americans from Washington County, Indiana, shortly after the Civil War. The earliest victim of the violence was John Williams, “who had acquired a farm and an unusual amount of wealth for a Negro,” in the words of historian Emma Lou Thornbrough. “In December, 1864, he was shot to death in his own dooryard. In 1867 there was another murder, the victim being an inoffensive old man who had aroused the ire of some of his white neighbors by persisting in attending their church, even after he had been warned to stay away.” These and other terrorist actions led to an exodus, and Washington County remained all-white until 1990. To achieve wealth or attend church implied that African Americans were the social equals of whites, which these Indiana whites would not tolerate.
11
In the larger riots for which we have more information, such as the 1908 attempt in Springfield, Illinois, and the 1921 attempt in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to cleanse these cities of African Americans, we can see the same dynamic at work. Margaret Ferguson, an African American trying to avoid the mob in Springfield, pointed out, “There was a great deal of animosity toward any well-established Negro who owned his own house and had a good job.” Rioters there specifically targeted William Donnegan, an elderly African American who had been Abraham Lincoln’s cobbler. His sin, besides his race itself, was that he was prosperous, and also that he had been married to a white woman for over 30 years. The mob cut his throat and hanged him. “They were very busy hurting the prominent,” Ferguson wrote later, “and so of course we were frightened, you see, because we, also, were affluent.” In Tulsa, too, whites particularly targeted successful middle-class families.
12
Sometimes the affront may seem trivial until we recognize that a claim for equality was involved. In Owosso, in central Michigan, on October 4, 1871, African American residents held a party, complete with an Italian band. Some white residents apparently tried to crash it, and the African Americans said they were not welcome, since blacks had been ejected from a white masquerade ball some months earlier.
13
An argument ensued; the blacks ousted the whites and beat them on the street. The white community returned en masse and forced all African Americans
14
out of town.
15
Sometimes direct economic competition between small-business owners engaged in the same trade played a role. In 1892, when whites in Norman, Oklahoma, first drove out their black residents, an African American named Doll Smith, a barber, received a note of warning:
You are hereby notified to leave this town in the next ten days. We are determined that no “niggers” shall live in this town. We give you timely warning to get your things and “git” or you must stand the consequences.
 
Smith did leave, and nine months later, when whites forced the black residents of nearby Lexington to flee, a white barber, George Elkins, played a leading role. In Lexington, according to the
Guthrie [Oklahoma] News,
“Negro men were tied up and beaten, and Negro women outraged.” Federal District Court indicted twenty whites, but the cases were continued for a year and finally dismissed.
16
In November 1920, African Americans in Ocoee, Florida, west of Orlando, made a still more serious claim to equality: they tried to vote. A Republican judge, John Cheney, facilitated their registration, which outraged white Democrats, who dominated much of Orange County. The “Grand Master Florida Ku Klucks” sent the following notice to Judge Cheney:
If you are familiar with the history of the days of Reconstruction which followed in the wake of the Civil War, you will recall that the “Scallawags” [
sic
] of the North, and the Republicans of the South proceeded very much the same as you are proceeding, to instill into the Negro the idea of social equality. You will also remember that these things forced the loyal citizens of the South to organize clans of determined men, who pledged themselves to maintain white supremacy and to safeguard our women and children.
And now if you are a scholar, you know that history repeats its self, and that he who resorts to your kind of a game is handling edged tools. We shall always enjoy WHITE SUPREMACY in this country and he who interferes must face the consequences.
 
On election day, two prosperous African American landowners in Ocoee, Mose Norman and Julius Perry, went to the polls. Democratic officials turned them away. Norman returned later with a shotgun, insisting that he be allowed to vote. “An altercation ensues,” in the words of Bianca White, co-director of a documentary film on the incident, “and Mose Norman is pistol whipped and sent away a second time. Mose Norman is never heard from again.” Colonel Sam Salisbury then organized a lynch mob to punish Norman and Perry for trying to vote. By nightfall, white residents of Ocoee, joined by more than 250 Klansmen from around the state, collected in the town and attacked its black neighborhoods. More than 300 African Americans fled for their lives “into the orange groves, swamps, and neighboring towns.” Many were burned in their homes or shot as they fled them. Twenty-five homes, two churches, and a Masonic lodge were incinerated; the death toll was between 8 and 60. Perry’s body was found hanging from a light pole the next morning. For nearly a week deputized Klansmen held the city. They divvied up the land owned by African Americans and sold it for $1.50 an acre. Ocoee stayed all-white until 1981.
17
Until 1921, residents of Montlake, then a small coal mining town, now a suburban area near Soddy-Daisy in East Tennessee, drew their water from a centrally located spring, “the only one available for general use,” according to an article in the
Chicago Defender,
the nation’s premier black newspaper. As segregation drew stricter during the Nadir, whites grew less willing to countenance the equality of status implied by sharing a spring. “The prejudice of the whites had made them try to keep any one but themselves from using the spring,” in the
Defender
’s words. “On several occasions individuals have had fights over the water, and, in a number of instances, the whites have been worsted. It is felt that this condition led to the circulation of reports that if anything should happen again the whites were going to band together to force the other residents from their homes.” At this point a black girl, eight-year-old Jewel Flipper, went to the spring for water. Four white girls apparently stopped her. An altercation ensued, and in the aftermath, whites drove out the entire African American population—some 60 miners and their families. “After driving them out the whites guarded the streets, went into the cabins and took all of value, and kept any one from entering the town by way of the roads.” Decades later, according to oral history, Soddy-Daisy sported a sign that said “Niggers’ Fun, Look and Run.”
18
Threat of School Desegregation Led to Sundown Towns
 
School desegregation presented a similar claim of equality. We saw that school desegregation was involved in Hermann, Missouri, which proved unable to find a stable equilibrium between the equality implied by common schooling and the stigma of total exclusion. Segregation embodies the idea that African Americans are an inferior people with whom whites must never have equal social contact. For that reason among others, in 1954 the United States Supreme Court struck down the system of racial segregation in American education.
Brown v. Board of Education
ordered schools to desegregate, clearly as a first step toward ending segregation in all aspects of public life. Towns as far north as Topeka, Kansas; Washington, D.C.; and southern Illinois struggled to comply, while whites in Deep South towns struggled
not
to comply.
Sheridan, Arkansas, coped with
Brown
by getting rid of all its African Americans. Shortly after the 1954 edict came down from the Supreme Court, the all-white Sheridan school board voted to comply, a constructive step taken by only two other towns in Arkansas. Sheridan had been operating an elementary school for African Americans but was busing its black high school students to adjacent counties. The decision to desegregate led to a “firestorm of protest” in the white community, in the words of a Sheridan native, which led to a new meeting the next night at which the school board unanimously reversed itself. Thereafter, as told in Chapter 4, Sheridan’s entire black community was induced to leave town, leaving Sheridan all-white on purpose. Thus Sheridan, which would have been one of the most racially progressive towns in Arkansas if its initial school board decision had stood, instead became one of the most backward.
19

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