Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (32 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Like Sheridan, Highland Park and University Park, Texas, contiguous “suburbs” entirely surrounded by Dallas, got rid of their black children after 1954. The “Park Cities” already were sundown suburbs allowing no independent African American households, but some of their affluent white families had live-in maids and gardeners. Before the 1954 Supreme Court decision, children of these adults were quietly allowed to attend black schools in Dallas, with tuition paid by Highland Park and University Park. After
Brown,
Park Cities officials realized they would be vulnerable to a desegregation lawsuit. Alderman C. K. Bullard suggested that Park Cities residents who employed African Americans with children be asked to fire them “so that Park Cities would not be confronted with white and Negro children attending classes together.” Most African American families moved out by the late 1950s. Dallas didn’t actually stop accepting black students from the suburbs until 1961. At least one African American servant with children still lived in Highland Park at that point, so her employer, a rich white family, paid rent on a Dallas address for her so that her children could stay in school in Dallas while living with her at their house in the Park Cities.
20
Even before
Brown,
whites in many locales were upset with having to pay taxes to support
separate
schools for African American children. Sometimes they responded by driving black families from their communities. In Case Township, north of Norman, Oklahoma, for example, residents grew alarmed because two white landowners hired three or four black families to farm their land. One resident who signed himself “A Hoodlum” wrote to the Norman newspapers: “Farmers of Case township are as just [
sic
] much against mixing up with niggers as the good people of Norman are and what is more they don’t intend to have their farms taxed to put up Negro school houses.” Eventually the whites burned down one black family’s house but may not have succeeded in driving all the African Americans away. I suspect similar reasoning led to anti-black actions in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee.
21
Around the time of the
Brown
decision, the African American population of at least five counties in Kentucky and Tennessee fell precipitously.
22
Perhaps the black families in these counties moved away voluntarily, but the example of Sheridan raises suspicion. Historian Mary Waalkes has done research on one of the five, Polk County, Tennessee, which abuts North Carolina in the Appalachian Mountains. According to one account, she writes,
Brown
prompted whites there to force black families to sell their farms, “in an effort to rid the county of school children who would have to be integrated into the Polk County system.”
23
The number of African Americans in Polk County—which had been 566 in 1890—fell from 75 in 1950 to just 28 ten years later, and only 4 of school age, among 12,160 inhabitants. Across America, many whites in sundown counties felt blessed to have no black children in 1954; as Esther Sanderson put it in 1974, “Scott County [Tennessee] definitely has no segregation problem for there is not a single negro [
sic
] living in the entire county.” Some other communities in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee may also have gotten rid of their African Americans after
Brown,
as white families reacted to the possibility that unless the few black families in town could be induced to leave, their children might wind up in “our school.”
24
Other Catalysts
 
Every sundown town, especially those that expelled their African Americans violently, has its own answer as to why it went all-white. Residents of sundown towns and suburbs rarely refer to the increased racism of the Nadir or to such social and cultural factors as politics, ethnic composition, or labor history. Instead, residents “explain” their town’s policy by telling about the incident that triggered it. We must not accept these trigger stories at face value: sometimes there are competing accounts, and often they are after-the-fact rationalizations detailing acts that may or may not have taken place. Even where an account of the beginning of a town’s sundown policies is accurate, leaving it as the actual cause of its continuing exclusion is far too simple.
The events that triggered mass expulsions were often instances of black misbehavior. Some African American did something wrong, and whites responded by taking it out on the entire group. Such was the case in Anna, Illinois, in 1909. The convenience store clerk quoted at the beginning of this book who confirmed in 2001 the continuing nickname for Anna, “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” also related Anna’s explanation for its policy: “My girlfriend told me how that all got started. A black man raped a white girl, and she’s buried up in the cemetery with a memorial stone, and they hung him.” Her girlfriend is right: residents of Anna do date its sundown status to 1909. On November 8 of that year, Anna Pelley, a 24-year-old white woman, was murdered in Cairo, some 30 miles south. She was found in an alley near her home the next morning, gagged and strangled, her clothing ripped off. Bloodhounds led police to a black-owned house where they later arrested Will James, a deliveryman for the Cairo Coal & Ice Co. That evening a lynch mob gathered in Cairo, but the police chief quieted them by pointing out that the police weren’t sure they had the right man. After all, the evidence against James consisted mostly of the fact that “bloodhounds had sniffed their way to his house,” as a contemporary newspaper account put it. The following Friday, November 11, rumors that James had confessed caused whites again to threaten a lynch mob. The sheriff, Frank Davis, decided to get his prisoner out of Cairo. That evening the sheriff, a deputy, and James “boarded the northbound Illinois Central train to escape the lynch mob.” But whites in Cairo telephoned news of Davis’s flight to Anna, 30 miles north—Anna Pelley’s hometown—where another mob assembled to await his arrival.
25
“It would not do to stay on the train and try to get through Anna with him,” the sheriff later explained. “That was the former home of the girl he was accused of killing, and I knew that the news that we were coming would be telephoned and telegraphed to Anna in time for her friends to collect a mob at the depot that would take him from me. So I had the train stopped at Dongola [ten miles south], and we struck out in the darkness across the country eastward.” The mob now combed the woods around Dongola. Eventually, walking through the night, the prisoner and his guards reached the little town of Karnak, where Sheriff Davis bought sardines, crackers, and soft drinks for the three of them. They didn’t dare stay in Karnak, however, lest they be recognized, so they walked on toward Belknap. There they hoped to catch a 5 PM northbound train on a different railroad and evade Anna and the mob altogether. Unfortunately, a train crew at Karnak had recognized them and relayed their whereabouts back to Cairo. “When we discovered late in the afternoon that a mob was tailing us,” in the sheriff ’s words, “we traveled as fast as we could, in the hope of keeping ahead until dark.... But the pursuers closed in on us, and when we found that we were in greater danger of being seen if we kept on than if we hid where we were, we concealed ourselves in the bushes and waited, hoping that they would pass us by, but they found us.”
26
The mob overpowered the prisoner and his guards and forced them onto a southbound train at Karnak. Word of the capture preceded them. When they reached Cairo, thousands of people, many from Anna and other nearby towns, gathered to watch at the main downtown intersection, spanned by a double ornamental steel arch festooned with hundreds of bright lights. (See Portfolio 5.) A reporter described the scene:
The mob that hanged James was led by women, many of them the wives of influential residents of Cairo. The rope was pulled taut by female relatives of Miss Pelley, aided by several score of their sex. As the Negro was pulled up into the air, these same women sang and screamed in delight.
The men were for the most part spectators until the rope that was strangling the Negro broke and his dying body fell to the ground. Then hundreds of revolvers flashed and 500 bullets crashed into the quivery form of the Negro. The riddled dead man was then dragged through the principal streets of the city to the spot where the Pelley girl was assaulted and slain.
Women applied the torch to the bonfire that had been prepared and into which the body of James was thrown. Ten thousand cheered and danced at the scene.
 
Interestingly, this became an “equal-opportunity lynching,” for the crowd later grabbed another prisoner from the jail, a white photographer accused of killing his wife the previous summer, and hanged him from a telegraph pole at a different downtown location.
27
When the mob members from Anna returned home on a later Illinois Central train, they decided to drive all African Americans from the town—primarily some 30 or 40 men who worked at a local quarry, along with their families. To the best of my knowledge, Anna has been all-white ever since. So has its twin city, Jonesboro. According to oral tradition, “one old lady who had been a slave” was allowed to stay when the other blacks were driven out.
28
Few whites displayed any remorse or even embarrassment at the expulsion of African Americans from Anna-Jonesboro. Most residents of Anna felt they had improved their town by the act; some residents of surrounding towns were jealous. For that matter, most whites were not appalled even by the lynchings. Before burning the body of Will James, members of the mob cut out his heart; then they cut it up and carried the pieces away for souvenirs. Afterward, James’s half-burned head was displayed on top of a pole in a Cairo park, and photographers sold postcards of his hanging. Ministers justified both lynchings from the pulpit. The
Carbondale Free Press
reprinted with approval an editorial in the
Cairo Bulletin,
“In Memory of Miss Pelley,” suggesting
that on November 10 of each year every Cairo man wear a small knot of rope in the lapel of his coat “as a quiet and dignified manifestation of the end of evil doers of any and all races, who outrage or insult pure womanhood. Every white and colored man of the city can thus place himself on record for law and order for a day each year.”
 
Neither editor saw any irony in using a symbol of a lynching rope as a celebration of “law and order.” A public subscription was taken up to purchase an extraordinary tombstone for Pelley (Portfolio 6).
29
Interracial Rape as Catalyst
 
Anna is hardly the only community to use rape or murder as an excuse to drive out or keep out all African Americans. Residents of many sundown towns explain their communities’ all-white status by invoking incidents that embody the familiar “African American as problem” ideology, but with specific local details about what blacks did wrong
here.
Ever since, to justify the continued vigilance and sometimes brutal actions required to maintain a town or suburb as an all-white community, whites summon up the long-ago alleged misbehavior of the victim class. Interracial rape was the excuse for the 1912 expulsion of African Americans from Forsyth County, Georgia, for example. On September 10 of that year, alleged rapist Edward Collins, an African American, was shot in the Forsyth County jail by a lynch mob. Several other African Americans, allegedly his accomplices, were threatened with lynching, but officers spirited them to Atlanta for safety.
30
The mob then turned upon the African American community. Between September 10 and the end of that year, according to the Forsyth county historian,
notices were given to all the Negro population to leave the county.... A few persisted in staying and were promised protection by their landlords. A few houses were dynamited and burned and then the whites were notified to get rid of their Negro tenants or have their houses and barns likewise burned. This accomplished the removal of the rest of the blacks.
 
The African American population in Forsyth County plummeted from 1,100 in 1910 to 30 in 1920 and 17 in 1930.
31
Many other expulsions and attempted expulsions followed allegations of interracial rape. The 1908 riot that swept Springfield, Illinois, for example, began after Mabel Hallam, a white woman, claimed that George Robinson, a black man, had raped her. The black community was driven out of Pinckneyville, Illinois, in about 1928; one explanation extant in Pinckneyville today states that a black man raped a white woman, so the whites got a bus, loaded all the blacks on it, and took them to East St. Louis. Unconfirmed oral history in LaSalle-Peru, twin cities in northeastern Illinois, holds that they have been all-white since the lynching of a black man who raped an Irish American woman.
32
Black “Crime Waves” as Catalyst
 
If not rape, often sundown towns and counties invented black crime waves by African Americans to “explain” why they drove out their black populations. When Green Saunders referred to “the second killing of white people by Negroes” as the reason for driving all African Americans from Comanche County, Texas, he was conflating two very different African American criminals, eight years apart, to create a menace. In about 1878, Mose Jones, an old ex-slave, had been living with his wife, child, and stepdaughter on the T.J. Nabers farm. According to Eulalia Wells, “Mose did the morning chores about the kitchen” and also worked at the stable. “Mose was apparently one of the most humble of Negroes in town. It was characteristic of him that when he met white people he at once held his hat against his breast and bowed and spoke with deep humility.” But after his wife died, “Old Mose” snapped. First he tried to marry his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. He then killed the stepdaughter, his own daughter, the Nabers’ two young boys, “and but for Mrs. Nabers being a light sleeper would have murdered her and her husband.” He set fire to the house and fled. “By daybreak about 200 men were searching for Mose,” Wells goes on. “He was found about six miles east of town on the other side of Indian Creek—and was shot.” Wells then writes a telling paragraph:
Everyone thought that Old Mose was the only mean Negro in town—so the others were allowed to remain. The Negroes kept coming into the county during the next few years and soon a large settlement of them located in the northeastern part of the county.
 

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