Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (35 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Business leaders could also make a difference. Bronson, in east Texas, expelled its blacks in 1914; only recently, according to Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad, authors of a fine 1998 study of Texas sawmill towns, were African Americans even allowed to
work
at the Bronson sawmill. In Diboll, on the other hand, 40 miles west, the mill owner, T.L.L. Temple, did not want the word
nigger
spoken, and it wasn’t; Diboll remained an interracial town. In Call, Texas, the Ku Klux Klan sent notices to the African American barber and the black dance hall operator in the 1920s telling them to leave town. The management of the local sawmill responded by firing some Klansmen, and Call never drove out its African Americans.
53
Somewhere between 1870 and 1890, John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary during the Civil War, wrote a poem whose full title is “Banty Tim (Remarks of Sergeant Tilmon Joy to the White Man’s Committee of Spunky Point, Illinois).” In it, Hay imagines a meeting of Democrats proposing to expel Spunky Point’s sole African American, Banty Tim, to create a sundown town. One white man, Tilmon Joy, faces them down, preventing a mob from forming and preserving Spunky Point as interracial. Excerpts follow:
I reckon I git your drift, gents—
You ’low the boy sha’n’t stay;
This is a white man’s country;
You’re Dimocrats, you say . . .
 
 
Why, blame your hearts, jest hear me!
You know that ungodly day
When our left struck Vicksburg Heights, how ripped
And torn and tattered we lay . . .
 
Till along toward dusk I seen a thing
I couldn’t believe for a spell:
That nigger—that Tim—was a crawlin’ to me
Through that fireproof, gild-edged hell!
 
The Rebels seen him as quick as me,
And the bullets buzzed like bees;
But he jumped for me, and shouldered me,
Though a shot brought him once to his knees;
 
But he staggered up, and packed me off,
With a dozen stumbles and falls,
Till safe in our lines he drapped us both,
His black hide riddled with balls.
 
So, my gentle gazelles, that’s my answer,
And here stays Banty Tim:
He trumped Death’s ace for me that day,
And I’m not goin’ back on him!
Hay got several things right, including the white supremacy of the Democrats and the anti-racist idealism stemming from shared experience in the Civil War.
54
After World War II, a latter-day Tilmon Joy popped up in New York City in the form of ex-GI Leo Miller. On the East Side, Metropolitan Life had just opened Stuyvesant Town, a huge housing project for returning veterans. Miller was outraged that Met Life excluded black veterans. “The courage and sharp shooting of a Negro machine-gunner saved my life with a dozen other white GIs” in the Battle of the Bulge, he pointed out. “Can any one of us who live in Stuyvesant Town say he may not be my neighbor? I can’t.” Met Life threatened to evict Miller and other white residents who protested its policy, and even after New York City passed a law in 1951 forbidding racial discrimination in “publicly assisted private housing” such as Stuyvesant Town, the company refused to accept applications from blacks, but eventually Miller and his allies won.
55
One man also stood up to the Roosevelt administration in Boulder City, Nevada, one of the eight sundown towns built by the federal government during the Depression. Clarence Newland, owner of the Green Hut restaurant, hired McKinley Sayles, African American, whose pies were “the best you could buy anywhere in the state of Nevada,” in the estimation of Boulder City resident Robert Parker. Townspeople complained to Sims Ely, the czar of the town under the Roosevelt administration, and Ely told Newland to get rid of Sayles.
56
According to Parker, Newland replied, “As long as that Green Hut belongs to me, you’re not telling me who to hire and fire around here.”
57
Maybe behind many an interracial town lies a white person—or several—who stopped a threatened eviction, which, because it did not happen, is now lost to history. I know no way to recover the memory of such events and no way to predict where and when such leaders will occur. We have gone about as far as we can in explaining why certain towns across America went sundown, while others did not.
In some towns, whites failed to stop wholesale evictions but did intercede on behalf of an individual person of color. When white residents of Eureka, California, evicted their Chinese population in 1885, eventually only one Chinese American man, Charley Moon, was left in Humboldt County.
58
When a group of Eureka residents came to Tom Bair’s Redwood Creek Ranch to take his ranch hand, Bair reportedly stood in the road with a gun and told them that they would have to take him first; the men turned around and left. Moon then worked on the Bair ranch for years and “was well liked and respected” ; according to historian Lynwood Carranco, “nobody molested him.” James Wilson likewise protected Alecta Smith when whites drove all other African Americans from Harrison, Arkansas, in 1905 and 1909. According to oral history summarized by David Zimmermann, “Wilson met the mob at his door with a shotgun and told them no one in his home was going to be hurt.” Another white man in Harrison, George Cotton, didn’t go that far, but he did help his black porter escape to safety during the riot, according to Cotton’s grandson. Cotton put “Nigger George” in his buggy at midnight and took him to Eureka Springs—a twelve-hour buggy ride.
59
One man also helped to soften the 1918 expulsion of African Americans from Unicoi County, Tennessee, on the North Carolina line. Like so many other expulsions, this one began with an interracial assault. African American Tom Devert allegedly grabbed a white teenage girl a mile and a half from Erwin, the county seat.
60
Four nearby whites interceded, shooting Devert as he tried to swim across the Nolichucky River with the girl. Whites then tied Devert’s body to a locomotive and dragged it back to Erwin. A large mob gathered, and the entire black population, between 60 and 70 people, was forced to watch as his body was burned. A reporter for the
Bristol Herald
paints a dramatic scene:
Men with pistols, shotguns, and clubs stood before the lined up Negroes to prevent their running away, and as the last cross tie and the last dash of oil was thrown on the heap one of the men is reported to have turned to the cowering crowd and said, “Watch what we are going to do here. If any of you are left in town by tomorrow night, you will meet the same fate.”
 
Whites would have burned down the black part of Erwin that night “but were dissuaded by General Manager L. H. Phettaplace of the C. C. & O. Railway,” according to the account published in the nearby
Johnson City Daily.
Erwin and Unicoi County went all-white the next day, but Phettaplace may have saved some lives that riotous night. Jon Voight’s character in John Singleton’s film
Rosewood,
who helps several African Americans escape from the white riot that destroyed the black community of Rosewood, Florida, is based on a similar person who in fact existed.
61
This chapter and its precedessor, on sociological causation, are first attempts to address why sundown towns came into being. No one has ever tried to answer such questions before. Everything about sundown towns—that the absence of African Americans was involuntary, how widespread they have been, even the origin myths their residents told themselves—has been mystified and left out of history books over the years. The next chapter tells of that mystification. It explains how most Americans came to be ignorant about even the sheer fact of their existence. It also summarizes the methods I used, so you can assess my claims to have proven that these towns do exist and were all-white on purpose.
8
 
Hidden in Plain View: Knowing and Not Knowing About Sundown Towns
 
Local persons giving quotes to the newspaper should be more careful in the wording of such statements to prevent misinterpretation.... The Chamber, through this committee, [shall] keep a close watch on future news reporting and take any appropriate action should further detriment to the City of Rogers be detected.
—Report of Rogers, Arkansas, Chamber of Commerce after the Rogers newspaper stated in 1962 that Rogers was a sundown town
1
 
 
 
 
B
ARRING AN OCCASIONAL NEWS STORY about an individual all-white town—typically treated as an anomaly—America’s independent sundown towns, numbering in the thousands, have mostly escaped notice until now. Even the origin myths that whites used to explain such towns’ racial policies rarely got written down. Sundown suburbs, equally plentiful and concentrated around major cities, could not escape notice, but their whiteness was often dismissed as “natural,” resulting from market forces. As I tell audiences how sundown towns and suburbs were created, sometimes they gasp audibly, astonished to learn that there are so many sundown towns and suburbs, that these towns were created intentionally, often by violent means, and sometimes that they themselves live in one.
White residents do know the racial composition of their town, of course; it may even be a reason why they chose to move there. But most haven’t thought about
how
it came to be so white; it just seemed natural. Afterward, audience members often come up to tell me that their town or suburb is all-white or was until recently. Now they are curious: could it be that way on purpose? As one person from a sundown town near Champaign, Illinois, put it: “How naive I was growing up! I was in a sundown town and had no clue until now. Sad!”
2
Knowing and Not Knowing About Sundown Towns
 
White Americans encounter sundown towns every day but rarely think about them or even realize that they’re in one. They look like other towns, especially to most non-black people, who often don’t notice the difference between 95% white and 100% white. Motorists driving through Anna, Illinois, might stop to see its famous library, designed in 1913 by Walter Burley Griffith, the Prairie School architect who went on to design Canberra, Australia. Or they might be visiting a mentally ill relative in the Illinois State Hospital. They don’t notice that Anna is a sundown town unless they know to ask. Most sundown towns and suburbs are like that: invisible, until a black wayfarer appears and the townspeople do something about it.
At the same time, whites have nicknames for many overwhelmingly white towns: “Colonial Whites” for Colonial Heights, near Richmond, Virginia; “the White Shore” across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, instead of the West Shore; “Caucasian Falls” for Cuyahoga Falls near Akron, Ohio; “Whiteface Bay” for Whitefish Bay, north of Milwaukee; and so forth across the country to “Lily White Lynwood” outside Los Angeles. Whites make up jokes about the consequences of an African American being found after dark in many sundown towns and suburbs. “Even the squirrels are white in Olney” is a quip about a sundown town in southeastern Illinois known also for its albino squirrels.
3
Such nicknames and jokes show that the whiteness of these towns has registered; whites do understand that the absence of blacks is no accident. Residents of a metropolitan area also know which suburbs are said to be the whitest and which police departments have a reputation for racial profiling. The practice of stopping and questioning African Americans in Darien, Connecticut, for example, was “an open secret in town,” according to Gregory Dorr, who grew up there. Nevertheless, when told that many American towns and suburbs kept out African Americans for decades and some still do, often these same individuals claim to be shocked.
4
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that white Americans know and don’t know about sundown towns. This curious combination of knowing and not knowing seems eerily reminiscent of Europe, 1938–45: surely Germans (and Poles, French, Dutch, etc.) knew that Jewish and Romany people were being done away with—their houses and apartments were becoming vacant and available before their very eyes, after all. Yet many professed shock when told about it afterward. I do not claim that America’s rash of sundown towns is a Holocaust. The murdered probably total fewer than 2,000 and the refugees fewer than 100,000, nothing like the fury the Nazis unleashed upon Jewish and Rom people. Yet there is a parallel question: why have so few white Americans ever heard of sundown towns, even when they live in one?
“Yvonne Dorset,” for example, grew up in Buffalo, Illinois, near Springfield. In 2002 she replied to a discussion at
Classmates.com
: “I graduated from Tri-City [the high school in Buffalo] in 1963. There weren’t any African Americans in my graduating class, but I never thought of it as anything but coincidence. We were brought up to respect all races.” As best I can tell, Dorset has lived in Buffalo from 1945 to now. What would we make of a long-term resident of, say, Heidelberg, Germany, who wrote in 2002, “There weren’t any Jews in my graduating class, but I never thought of it as anything but coincidence”? Buffalo drove out its African Americans on August 17, 1908. The absence of African Americans from Buffalo today is no more a “coincidence” than the near-absence of Jewish Germans from Heidelberg.
5

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