Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (33 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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To her, writing in 1942, it is natural that whites would have the right to decide whether African Americans as a group will be “allowed to remain” after this one event by an obviously deranged man. And after one more interracial crime—eight years later—Comanche County whites snapped.
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To garner support for the 1895 Spring Valley, Illinois, massacre described in the previous chapter, Italian American miners blamed African Americans “for every crime committed in the area,” in Felix Armfield’s words. “Euramerican whites in the town soon sided with the Italian cause.” A Tennessee county historian tells of a similar expulsion based on a wave of thefts and arson but admits that the crimes continued after the African Americans had been driven out. Whites in Wyandotte, Michigan, drove out their African American residents repeatedly, most prominently in 1916. Wyandotte residents treating the 1916 expulsion in the 1940s tried to blame the victims: “Negroes in 1916 era were very low type, ran houses of ill repute, attacked Wyandotte women and children, a real threat to law abiding citizens.” But according to Edwina DeWindt, compiler of “Wyandotte History; Negro,” African Americans posed no threat; city records from the time show no record of white protests about their behavior. Surely the vaguest crime wave of all took place in Chesterton, Indiana, described by the newspaper editor at the head of this chapter: “All kinds of depredations were going on.”
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Catalysts Do Not Explain
 
“Explanations” that blame the origin of sundown policies on criminal characteristics of the excluded group contain two obvious fallacies: collective guilt and circular reasoning. The events described in the Chesterton newspaper neatly exemplify both. When one or more African Americans commit crimes, the entire group is considered responsible and should be punished. And once blacks were gone, since Chesterton subsequently had no major crimes, the paper’s editor knows that the town’s policy “saved this county many a tragedy,” so the townspeople were right to have gotten rid of them. Similarly, once Anna expelled its blacks, it had no more black murderers—even though it never had any to start with, the murder having taken place elsewhere. The “explanation” thus provides continuing justification for a town’s continuing policy of excluding African Americans.
I place quotation markes around “explanation” because these crimes or alleged crimes do not really reveal why a town or county drove out its black population, partly because when a European American committed a similar crime, whites as a group faced no similar repercussions. Moreover, often the catalysts do not hold up even as triggers. The attempted rape and murder of Anna Pelley, followed by the lynching of Will James, do not really explain why Anna-Jonesboro went sundown, for example. For one thing, James may have been innocent. Sheriff Davis thought so: “I questioned him a great deal while we were in the woods together and he insisted all the time that he was innocent. I am very much in doubt whether he is the guilty man or not.” Moreover, both the murder and the lynching took place 30 miles away, not even in the same county.
In Forsyth County, the mob did apparently get the right person, for the white victim identified three African Americans as the perpetrators, one of whom was lynched, the other two convicted. Even so, interracial rape cannot have been the real cause for the subsequent eviction of the entire black population of the county, because Forsyth was one of six adjacent counties in north Georgia that expelled their African Americans at about this time. Indeed, Forsyth was probably the third to do so, after Towns and Union Counties, and I know no claims of black rape or murder as the catalyst for those expulsions. Whites in Dawson County, between Forsyth and Union, expelled their African Americans about when Forsyth did; all were gone by 1920. Parts of Fannin and Gilmer Counties, just west of Union, also went sundown at this time. No claims of rape were ever made, so far as I know, to justify the expulsions of African Americans from Dawson, Fannin, and Gilmer Counties. Surely contagious rioting in the white communities—“Towns County did it; why haven’t we?”—is more likely than any undocumented epidemic of African Americans raping whites in county after contiguous county.
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We cannot conclude that interracial rape was really the cause of the attempted expulsion of African Americans from Springfield either, because it turns out there had been no rape. Mabel Hallam dropped all charges against George Robinson; eventually she confessed that she had had sex with her white lover and had invented the black rapist story to escape blame from her husband and friends. The Pinckneyville rape story is thoroughly vague and conflicts with accounts offered by others in town. The alleged rape in LaSalle-Peru is even vaguer, including no date or names, and implies the towns
had
a black population that whites then drove off in the aftermath of a crime. Either the crime took place before the Civil War or the rise and fall of such a population would have to have been rapid and intercensal, since LaSalle and Peru have been all-white in every census from 1860 to the recent past. I suspect both of these sketchy anecdotes are attempts by whites years later to ascribe the sundown policies to origins that seem plausible but in fact did not take place.
Various catalyst stories were reported to explain and justify the 1907 expulsion of Sikhs from Bellingham, Washington. According to one account, the riot may have started “when a gang of young rowdies who were collected on a corner decided to have some fun with the Hindus.” Another version held that “the Hindus agreed to pay the landlord of a shack in Old Town $15 a month for the place and as a result a white woman who was living there was forced to move. It is reported that she is the one who incited the trouble.” However, underlying conflict between European American and Sikh workers at lumber mills in the city had been festering for some time and was surely more important than any trigger.
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Vague or Mislaid Catalyst Stories
 
If catalysts do not provide satisfying explanations of why towns keep African Americans from living in them, some accounts of the original expulsion or prohibition have grown so vague over time that they can barely function even as catalysts. Tonawanda and North Tonawanda are located at the western end of the Erie Canal. Many African Americans have lived in the area, especially in Buffalo to the south and Niagara Falls to the north, and blacks always worked on the canal boats; such centrally located towns could not have been all-white for decades by accident. As late as 1990, Tonawanda had just 28 African Americans among 17,284 people, while North Tonawanda had 56 among 35,000. It turns out that both were sundown towns. Law professor Bill Kaplin grew up there in the 1940s and ’50s and learned only that “some black man allegedly did something bad” long ago; whites then drove out all African Americans and forbade them to live there after that. Kathy Spillman, who grew up in North Tonawanda two decades later, could not recall even that much, although she knew the towns kept out African Americans. Some old-timers in the Tonawandas may remember when and how African Americans were forced out, but it’s not a living memory shared by the community as a whole.
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Sometimes alternative catalyst stories compete. On Halloween night, 1919, whites in Corbin, Kentucky, a railroad town of about 3,400, forced their African Americans out of town after two white switchmen lost all their money in a poker game with black track layers. To cover their losses, the switchmen said African Americans had robbed them. A mob formed “and searched the city for Negroes,” according to the account in the
Lexington Herald.
The Negroes who felt the fury of the mob in the greatest degree were a gang of about 200 Negroes working on the Louisville and Nashville grade for ten months at South Corbin, where the railroad company is making big improvements. Crowds went to restaurants and other public places, caught all the Negro employees they could, and drove them singly or in gangs at the point of guns to the depot. Many Negroes were beaten, and 200 were driven out of town.
 
At gunpoint whites then forced almost the entire African American population onto railroad cars and shipped them to Knoxville, Tennessee. But residents of Corbin haven’t found this origin story satisfying over the years, so they make up new ones. One woman volunteered that four black men were lynched for attacking a white woman. One man, interviewed for Robby Heason’s gripping 1990 documentary about Corbin as a sundown town, said that he really didn’t know what to believe for sure, because “I have heard that story a hundred times since I’ve been in Corbin, and it’s been told to me about a hundred different ways.”
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Usually even such vague or conflicting accounts still suffice as catalyst stories, because they make reference to black misbehavior. Implicitly, most African Americans are thought to share this characteristic, which is why “we” must exclude them. However, residents of some sundown towns have completely forgotten why they ever expelled African Americans. In 2002, residents of Crossville, Tennessee, knew theirs was a sundown county and had had a black population until about 1905, but they had lost any oral tradition to explain exactly how and why their African Americans were forced out. Other communities have even forgotten that they ever had any African Americans, let alone that they expelled them. Many suburbs display this amnesia, especially those that reopened to blacks more than a decade ago. Chamblee, Georgia, for example, has experienced such international and diverse immigration as a booming suburb of Atlanta that only one-third of its residents in 2000 were born in the United States; still fewer were born in Georgia, and only a handful in Chamblee. The result is that today’s residents have no memory that Chamblee became a sundown town after World War II and was all-white in 1970—let alone why. For at least two decades, Chamblee has been thoroughly multiracial and multiethnic, so the town has no reason to maintain an account of why it is or was all-white.
Contagion as Catalyst
 
Some towns went sundown simply because a neighboring town did so. The neighboring event served as a catalyst of sorts, but actually it shows the absence of a catalyst. The only cause required to set off an expulsion seemed to be envy of a neighboring town that had already driven out its African Americans. In southwestern Missouri, for instance, newspaper editor Murray Bishoff believes that Monett’s prosperity after it threw out all its African Americans in 1894 likely contributed to Pierce City’s copycat riot seven years later. Bishoff thinks Pierce City in turn became a model for other nearby towns in Missouri and Arkansas. After whites expelled African Americans from Corbin, Kentucky, in 1919, a copycat mob rioted a few months later in Ravenna, 70 miles north, and forced Ravenna’s black railroad workers out; Ravenna remained all-white into the 1990s.
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As we saw with Anna, a lynching in one town might trigger an expulsion in another. Lynchings typically inflamed white opinion, not against the crime but against the victim class, and often this animus crossed state lines. After the 1931 lynching of Raymond Gunn in Maryville, in northwest Missouri, white passions were inflamed in small towns in northeastern Kansas more than 50 miles distant. In 1920, a huge mob hanged three African American circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota, believing they had raped Irene Tusken, a white woman. In reality, whether she was raped by anyone is doubtful. Nevertheless, in the aftermath, the acting chief of police of neighboring Superior, Wisconsin, declared, “We are going to run all idle Negroes out of Superior and they’re going to stay out.” His decree was hardly limited to “idle Negroes”; all African Americans employed by a carnival in Superior were fired and told to leave the city, even though they were working, and the overall black population of Superior tumbled from 169 in 1920 to just 51 ten years later. Such edicts again show black communities balanced on a knife edge, for no one even bothered to claim that its members did anything to provoke retribution
here.
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Sometimes epidemics of expulsions or sundown ordinances washed like a wave across entire subregions. In 1886, for example, after whites rioted and drove out African Americans from Comanche County, Texas, nearby residents picked up on the idea, so a broad area of about 3,000 square miles in north-central Texas drove out their African Americans at this time, including all or part of at least four counties. No grievous crime of rape or murder was alleged in those counties to provide a catalyst or excuse; the expulsions were merely copycat actions. We have seen that whites rioted and drove out African Americans from county after county in northern Arkansas and southwestern Missouri around 1900, and in northern Georgia around 1910. Portfolio 13 tells of an outbreak of expulsions in southern Indiana. I suggest that future investigations may unearth similar epidemics wherever a chain of all-white towns or counties nestles nearby.
41
If rioting was contagious, so too were quieter methods of achieving sundown status, I believe. These days, municipalities deliberately copy each other’s ordinances on many topics, rather than inventing them from scratch. I suspect municipalities copied each other’s ordinances in the past as well. If Monticello, the seat of Piatt County, Illinois, passed a sundown ordinance, which an attorney there says it did, then trustees of De Land, a smaller town in Piatt County, would want to keep up with the times, and did, according to its officials—and so on, across the Midwest and the nation. I must admit, however, that while the foregoing seems logical to me,
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it is entirely speculative.

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