Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (34 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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The contagion of exclusion was even more pronounced in the suburbs. When one suburb, deemed to be prestigious, was all white on purpose, it became the thing to do, and other suburbs hastened to emulate the leader. Soon, almost all of the suburbs around a major city kept out African Americans.
Catalyst Stories as Origin Myths
 
Although catalysts don’t really explain much, they remain important stories nevertheless. Even today, residents of Anna, for instance, cite the story of Anna Pelley’s death to explain why their town has no African American residents. Many residents of sundown towns give similar explanations: they admit openly that their town excludes African Americans and proceed to tell why, relying on the catalyzing incident to justify the practice. Thus the story of the initial incident gets elevated into an origin myth.
Origin myths tell us why we are here as a people or why we are the way we are. Often they tell us how to be, how to behave, and that we are right, even “God’s chosen people.” The Anna myth still functions in these ways, thus helping to keep its sundown policy alive. As late as the 1970s, signs on Route 127 warned, “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in Anna-Jonesboro,” and Anna and Jonesboro still appear to have no black households.
The memory of the rape that triggered the 1912 expulsion from Forsyth County was similarly functioning as an origin myth at least as late as 1987. On January 17 of that year, civil rights leaders from Atlanta marched in the county seat of Forsyth to prove that African Americans had a right to be in the county. They failed: a crowd of more than 500, vastly outnumbering the police officers on hand, pelted the marchers with rocks and bottles. A week later, the civil rights forces numbered 20,000, the counterdemonstrators 1,000, 3,000 police and National Guard members maintained order, and the marchers finished their route. Oprah Winfrey broadcast a live TV show from Forsyth County later in the year. She found the origin myth still very much alive in the minds of some of the residents who attended. One woman said,
I’ve been here all my life. I have—my family goes back four generations.... And I have a fear of black—I did have a fear of black people. And the only reason was because the girl that got killed back in 1912 is related to me.
 
The incident was still current, still troubling this woman 75 years later. Another member of the audience brought the fear of African Americans to the present in a more general form: “If niggers come in here, it’s going to be like Decatur [Georgia], DeKalb County, Fulton County, Atlanta. It’s going to be nothing but a slum area.”
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In some sundown towns, the origin myth has become coupled with an object or location that keeps it salient today. To this day, adolescents in Anna go in groups to pay their respects to Anna Pelley’s tombstone (Portfolio 6)—sort of a rite of passage that keeps vivid and justifies Anna’s all-white nature to the next generation. Other towns have “hanging trees” that remind residents what happened to the last African American who wandered within the city limits. Smokey Crabtree, a longtime resident of Fouke, a sundown town in western Arkansas, used a lighthearted tone in 2001 to convey his amusement at Fouke’s sundown policy and the symbol that helps to maintain it:
As far back as the late twenties colored people weren’t welcome in Fouke, Arkansas to live, or to work in town. The city put up an almost life sized chalk statue of a colored man at the city limit line, he had an iron bar in one hand and was pointing out of town with the other hand. The city kept the statue painted and dressed, really taking good care of it. Back in those days colored people were run out of Fouke, one was even hung from a large oak tree, and there’s a tree that is still referred to as the hanging tree. The man was hung with a necktie and a red handkerchief; a five-dollar bill was sticking out of his pocket for any person wanting to bury the man. The story was that the man had come into Fouke, committed rape among other things, was apprehended and hung. Justice was served. The original “hanging tree” died of natural causes back in the mid sixties. The story has been passed on to another tree that could easily be mistaken for the original tree. My guess is that Fouke will always have a “hanging tree,” the name being passed down from one tree to another, keeping the story alive.
 
Similar stories about hanging trees are in the folklore in Fairfield, Illinois; Crossville, Tennessee; Robbinsville, North Carolina; and other towns. Just as the trees become mythical, so perhaps have the crimes. And just as the trees keep the stories alive, so the stories keep the policy alive.
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Towns with strong and extant origin myths seem harder to “crack” than towns that “merely” passed an ordinance or expelled their African Americans as part of a wave of such actions or that have lost their memory of when and why they went sundown. Origin myths that locate a town’s anti-black policy in labor conflict seem particularly long-lived. While the punishment—total banning of the race from then on—may be severe, at least a substantial part of the out-group committed the strikebreaking offense, and committed it against “us,” the white community, or at least a sizable proportion of it. This may explain why residents of towns with such origin myths seem uncommonly forthcoming about their policy. Origin myths about “black scabs” may also encourage residents to be especially racist toward the next African American who ventures in. Certainly some towns whose origin myths involve black strikebreakers have been particularly vicious toward African Americans for decades afterward. For example, both Pana and Carterville, Illinois, went beyond becoming sundown towns
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to prohibit blacks from shopping during the daytime as well.
Historical Contingency: The Influence of a Single Individual
 
Although the underlying factors discussed in the previous chapter—political history, ethnic makeup, and labor relations—helped to explain which communities went sundown, they did not determine the outcome. Neither did the catalysts described in this chapter. Individuals also made a difference. Thus historical contingency inevitably came into play.
Even after an interracial rape, an interracial claim for equality, or another form of catalyst, the actions of one person who tries to start—or sometimes stop—a mob can make all the difference. Sociologists who study mass behavior know that crowds go through a period of indecision while they test their own willingness to go further and become a purposeful mob. Then there is usually a further testing process: members mill about, individuals shout out suggestions, and would-be leaders take tentative steps and gauge the reaction of the rest. Comanche County, Texas, embodied the process in the 1880s. It had 8,600 people, including 79 African Americans. Unfortunately for all of the latter, on July 24, 1886, an African American named Tom McNeal allegedly killed a white farm woman, Sallie Stephens.
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He was captured the next day, and taken to the farm and hanged by a lynch mob the day after. Comanche County historian Eulalia Wells describes how one man influenced what happened next:
While he dangled, a certain man climbed upon a large stump and spoke: “Boys, this is the second killing of white people by Negroes and it’s more than the people will put up with. I propose we give the Negroes a reasonable time to get out of the county—never allow them to return, and never allow one of color to settle here.”
 
According to Billy Bob Lightfoot, a Comanche County native who wrote a master’s thesis on its history, that “certain man” was Green Saunders, who proceeded to denounce African Americans as “by nature evil.” Following his suggestion, the mob then rounded up the African American community in nearby De Leon and ordered them “to come out and bury the corpse,” in Lightfoot’s words. The crowd then gave the blacks who were burying McNeal’s body “the warning to pack up and get out within ten days or be killed. Take what they could, leave what could not be sold or carried, but be across the county line by sunset on August 6, 1886.” That evening the mob visited every black resident in Comanche County with the same message. Whites posted a sign at the train station in De Leon: “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on Your Head in This Town.” Armed white vigilantes then went door-to-door throughout Comanche County. The expulsion was followed by “a lucrative business in souvenirs carried on by an itinerant peddler who sold ‘authentic remains of the last Negro buried in Comanche County and pieces of the rope used to hang him with!’ through the county as late as 1889,” according to Lightfoot. Comanche County then kept out African Americans—and possibly Mexican Americans—for more than a century, but had Saunders not spoken, or had he been a force for tolerance, another outcome might have ensued .
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What if just one person had voted differently in Hermann, Missouri? Then Hermann would have admitted black children to its school, which would have put it on a trajectory toward equal rights for African Americans rather than a descent into policies of racial exclusion. Similarly, we have seen that Sheridan, Arkansas, was poised to make the progressive decision to desegregate its schools. Then, owing to the energy, wealth, and racism of one man, it flipflopped and got rid of its entire African American population.
One individual cannot carry the issue without at least some support from a larger public, however. Having it both ways, the same whites in Wyandotte who blamed the bad behavior of African Americans for their 1916 expulsion also condemned the leader of the riot, one Carl Juchartz, “a town character of irresponsible actions and mental capacity unable to even formulate good speaking English.” Certainly some individuals are more racist than others, and I’m sure Juchartz led the way. No other whites stopped him, however, and many joined in. The key question is, do those whites willing to keep out African Americans sense that they have at least tacit backing from the police and public? If they do, it only takes a few of them, unfettered by others, to create or maintain a town’s racist reputation.
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Contingency Again: The Positive Influence of an Individual
 
Two adjacent articles in the June 17, 1902,
New York Times
show how individuals can cause similar events to lead to very different outcomes, outcomes that then persist for decades. The first is headlined “Bitter Race War Threatened”:
French Lick and West Baden and the valley in which the two famous Indiana health resorts are located bid fair to furnish the next scene of Indiana lawlessness. Both places and the entire length of the valley are threatened with a race war more vicious and more bitter than any that has occurred in the State within the last ten or fifteen years.
Already, reports from the two resorts state, whites have posted notices ordering the Negroes to make a hasty evacuation. The notices, tacked to trees and placed in conspicuous places about the grounds of the two prominent hotels, are adorned with skull and crossbone decorations, underneath which is written the ultimatum. All the waiters at the hostelries have received letters, some signed by the words “White Cap,” . . . declaring that if they do not take their departure at once they will be horsewhipped. Some, in fact, were threatened with death. The Negroes are terror-stricken, and many have already obeyed the injunction. Many others, however, having been assured protection, are remaining at their posts.
 
Immediately below this story, another dispatch, “Race War in Illinois,” tells of a similar event 125 miles west, in southeastern Illinois:
Another attack was made last night on the home of the Rev. Peter Green, pastor of the African Methodist Church at Eldorado. The crowd told Mr. Green to leave town in 24 hours, under penalty of death. He defied the mob and stood at his gate with a shotgun, threatening to shoot the first man who molested him.
The anti-Negro crusade has at last aroused the respectable white element, and an effort will be made to induce the colored people to reopen the Normal and Industrial School.
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Eldorado did force out its black preacher and all his congregation, and the school never reopened, “the respectable white element” to the contrary. No governing official, from the town through the county to the state, took any action. According to Robyn Williams, a nearby teacher, Eldorado sported a sundown sign until the 1980s. In about 1990, according to someone who was then a resident, a white couple in Eldorado who adopted a biracial child “had sewage thrown on their lawn” and other problems and left town shortly thereafter.
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The next paragraph in the French Lick article, in contrast, tells that the governor has instructed his secretary “to notify him immediately upon receipt of any startling information from the valley.” Perhaps for that reason, forced eviction of African Americans from the French Lick area did not take place, and French Lick and West Baden Springs have African American populations to this day.
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Another public official who did the right thing was Governor Arthur Weaver of Nebraska. In Lincoln in 1929, a mob of whites drove 200 African Americans from the city after a white policeman was shot. Weaver ordered “that those persons driven out must be permitted to return, and that if any further difficulties ensued, martial law would be instituted.” Lincoln stayed interracial.
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