Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (36 page)
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Authors: James W. Loewen
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The Unsuspecting Researcher
I don’t mean to be hard on Ms. Dorset. It is all too easy to overlook the sundown nature of an all-white town. I know, because I too was oblivious. Until doing the research for this book, I never noticed most sundown towns. Being white myself and having grown up in an all-white neighborhood, I took most all-white neighborhoods, towns, and even counties for granted, assuming that African Americans simply happened not to live in them. Indeed, the biggest mistake I have ever made in print was about sundown towns, and I made it in my most recent book,
Lies Across America.
In an essay comparing three Arkansas counties, I commended Grant County for being “most hospitable of the three for African Americans.”
I did not notice that Sheridan, seat of Grant County, was a sundown town!
When I was there (too briefly!) in 1996,
6
about 400 African Americans lived in the county, but whites did not allow them to spend the night in the county seat.
7
Lies Across America.
In an essay comparing three Arkansas counties, I commended Grant County for being “most hospitable of the three for African Americans.”
I did not notice that Sheridan, seat of Grant County, was a sundown town!
When I was there (too briefly!) in 1996,
6
about 400 African Americans lived in the county, but whites did not allow them to spend the night in the county seat.
7
Having learned during
this
research that Sheridan was a sundown town during my previous visit, having confirmed that more than 30 other towns and counties in Arkansas excluded African Americans, having identified 50 more as likely suspects, and having found some 472 probable all-white towns in Illinois alone, I now see how naive
I
was.
American Culture Typically Locates Racism in the Souththis
research that Sheridan was a sundown town during my previous visit, having confirmed that more than 30 other towns and counties in Arkansas excluded African Americans, having identified 50 more as likely suspects, and having found some 472 probable all-white towns in Illinois alone, I now see how naive
I
was.
How could we Americans have been so ignorant of sundown towns for so long? Even if we grew up in a place with few sundown towns nearby—Mississippi, for example—how could we not have known that so many thousands of sundown towns formed elsewhere in the United States? After all, students in New Hampshire know about slavery. Why isn’t knowledge of sundown towns part of our living historical tradition?
Our culture teaches us to locate overt racism long ago (in the nineteenth century) or far away (in the South) or to marginalize it as the work of a few crazed deviants who carried out their violent works under cover of darkness. Most high school American history textbooks downplay slavery in the North, so from the start race relations seems to be a sectional rather than national problem. Research shows that white eleventh graders before
and after
taking U.S. history viewed only white southerners as the dominant actors in U.S. racial oppression. American literature likewise puts most overt racism in the South, not the North. In her memoir
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
Maya Angelou characterizes Mississippi with the phrase “Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here, nigger, Mississippi.” Tennessee Williams has the sheriff in
Orpheus Descending,
also set in Mississippi, make a similar reference. But Angelou and Williams would have been more accurate had they used the phrase to characterize California or Ohio. William Burroughs makes the same blunder of locating his sundown town in the South in
Naked Lunch.
Malcolm Ross, a member of the Fair Employment Practices Commission during World War II, recognized Calhoun County, Illinois, as a sundown county in his memoir,
All Manner of Men;
astonishingly, Ross then went on to talk about “the white boys from Calhoun County, and a hundred other counties of the South.” Calhoun County is just 65 miles southwest of Springfield, the capital; it’s not even in southern Illinois. As recently as 2002, Jerrold Packard repeats this stereotype: in
American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow,
he writes, “Some all-white
Southern
towns” placed sundown signs at their city limits.
8
Actually, among the 184 towns that had sundown signs to my knowledge, only 7 were in the traditional South, along with another 52 in places like the Cumberlands and the Ozarks; 125 were northern and western.
and after
taking U.S. history viewed only white southerners as the dominant actors in U.S. racial oppression. American literature likewise puts most overt racism in the South, not the North. In her memoir
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
Maya Angelou characterizes Mississippi with the phrase “Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here, nigger, Mississippi.” Tennessee Williams has the sheriff in
Orpheus Descending,
also set in Mississippi, make a similar reference. But Angelou and Williams would have been more accurate had they used the phrase to characterize California or Ohio. William Burroughs makes the same blunder of locating his sundown town in the South in
Naked Lunch.
Malcolm Ross, a member of the Fair Employment Practices Commission during World War II, recognized Calhoun County, Illinois, as a sundown county in his memoir,
All Manner of Men;
astonishingly, Ross then went on to talk about “the white boys from Calhoun County, and a hundred other counties of the South.” Calhoun County is just 65 miles southwest of Springfield, the capital; it’s not even in southern Illinois. As recently as 2002, Jerrold Packard repeats this stereotype: in
American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow,
he writes, “Some all-white
Southern
towns” placed sundown signs at their city limits.
8
Actually, among the 184 towns that had sundown signs to my knowledge, only 7 were in the traditional South, along with another 52 in places like the Cumberlands and the Ozarks; 125 were northern and western.
Hollywood perpetuates this stereotype. In
The Fugitive Kind,
the sheriff in a small southern town tells Marlon Brando about a nearby town with a sign saying, “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This County.” He goes on to say, “Now this ain’t that town, and you ain’t that nigger, but imagine a sign saying, ‘Boy, Don’t Let the Sun Rise on You in This County!’”
9
Sudie and Simpson,
a 1984 film starring Louis Gosset Jr., is set in 1940s Georgia. The local town, Linlow, is shown to have a sign: “Nigger!! Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Linlow.” Actually, the sundown syndrome does afflict six counties in Appalachian north Georgia, but otherwise Georgia is almost free of the phenomenon. Danny Glover’s 2000 made-for-TV film
Freedom Song,
an otherwise accurate portrayal of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, shows a sign saying, “Nigger, Read and Run / If You Can’t Read, Run Anyway.” Signs with that wording indeed (dis)graced many sundown towns, but none in Mississippi. Meanwhile, in northern locations where black exclusion actually happened, Hollywood covers it up. Take
Grosse Pointe Blank,
for example, a 1997 John Cusack vehicle. This film not only fails to tell that Grosse Pointe was all-white on purpose throughout the era it depicts, it inserts a black alumnus or two into the major character’s high school reunion.
Hoosiers,
a 1986 basketball movie starring Gene Hackman, similarly obfuscates the racial reality of 1950s small-town Indiana. As one Indiana resident wrote in 2002, “All southern Hoosiers laughed at the movie called
Hoosiers
because the movie depicts blacks playing basketball and sitting in the stands at games in Jasper. We all agreed no blacks were permitted until probably the ’60s and do not feel welcome today.” A cheerleader for a predominantly white but interracial Evansville high school tells of having rocks thrown at their school bus as they sped out of Jasper after a basketball game in about 1975, more than twenty years after the events depicted so inaccurately in
Hoosiers.
I know of only one film treatment of residential exclusion
10
and no image of a sundown sign in any movie set in a northern locale.
11
The Fugitive Kind,
the sheriff in a small southern town tells Marlon Brando about a nearby town with a sign saying, “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This County.” He goes on to say, “Now this ain’t that town, and you ain’t that nigger, but imagine a sign saying, ‘Boy, Don’t Let the Sun Rise on You in This County!’”
9
Sudie and Simpson,
a 1984 film starring Louis Gosset Jr., is set in 1940s Georgia. The local town, Linlow, is shown to have a sign: “Nigger!! Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Linlow.” Actually, the sundown syndrome does afflict six counties in Appalachian north Georgia, but otherwise Georgia is almost free of the phenomenon. Danny Glover’s 2000 made-for-TV film
Freedom Song,
an otherwise accurate portrayal of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, shows a sign saying, “Nigger, Read and Run / If You Can’t Read, Run Anyway.” Signs with that wording indeed (dis)graced many sundown towns, but none in Mississippi. Meanwhile, in northern locations where black exclusion actually happened, Hollywood covers it up. Take
Grosse Pointe Blank,
for example, a 1997 John Cusack vehicle. This film not only fails to tell that Grosse Pointe was all-white on purpose throughout the era it depicts, it inserts a black alumnus or two into the major character’s high school reunion.
Hoosiers,
a 1986 basketball movie starring Gene Hackman, similarly obfuscates the racial reality of 1950s small-town Indiana. As one Indiana resident wrote in 2002, “All southern Hoosiers laughed at the movie called
Hoosiers
because the movie depicts blacks playing basketball and sitting in the stands at games in Jasper. We all agreed no blacks were permitted until probably the ’60s and do not feel welcome today.” A cheerleader for a predominantly white but interracial Evansville high school tells of having rocks thrown at their school bus as they sped out of Jasper after a basketball game in about 1975, more than twenty years after the events depicted so inaccurately in
Hoosiers.
I know of only one film treatment of residential exclusion
10
and no image of a sundown sign in any movie set in a northern locale.
11
Placing a sundown sign in fictional Linlow is one of the ways Hollywood connotes southernness, and Tennessee Williams, Danny Glover, and Maya Angelou may have followed the same convention. It’s too easy, though, and it’s inaccurate. Placing sundown towns in Dixie where they don’t occur only encourages Americans to overlook them in the North where they do. In the North, whites don’t expect to see such overt racism, so they don’t. In her autobiography
My Lord, What a Morning,
Marian Anderson goes along with this convention. She tells of staying in some hotels that made an exception for her, since she was performing in the town’s fine-arts series, but would not house any other African Americans. But she speaks only on the South in this regard. This simply does not describe the facts of her accommodations. On many occasions she could not stay the night in white hotels in the North. In northern sundown towns, she could not stay anywhere, even in private homes. Anderson’s autobiography never hints at any problem in the North, however. She even tells how Albert Einstein put her up in Princeton without ever mentioning that he volunteered to do so after the only hotel in town said no. Perhaps she didn’t want to alienate white northerners who might be potential allies to change southern segregation. The Civil Rights Movement also picked on the “legally” segregated South for the same reason, as Scott Malcomson points out: it made a better target. Ironically, although the NAACP itself was born in the aftermath of the 1908 attempt by white residents to drive all African Americans from Springfield, Illinois, it rarely attacked sundown towns in the North or even acknowledged that they existed.
12
My Lord, What a Morning,
Marian Anderson goes along with this convention. She tells of staying in some hotels that made an exception for her, since she was performing in the town’s fine-arts series, but would not house any other African Americans. But she speaks only on the South in this regard. This simply does not describe the facts of her accommodations. On many occasions she could not stay the night in white hotels in the North. In northern sundown towns, she could not stay anywhere, even in private homes. Anderson’s autobiography never hints at any problem in the North, however. She even tells how Albert Einstein put her up in Princeton without ever mentioning that he volunteered to do so after the only hotel in town said no. Perhaps she didn’t want to alienate white northerners who might be potential allies to change southern segregation. The Civil Rights Movement also picked on the “legally” segregated South for the same reason, as Scott Malcomson points out: it made a better target. Ironically, although the NAACP itself was born in the aftermath of the 1908 attempt by white residents to drive all African Americans from Springfield, Illinois, it rarely attacked sundown towns in the North or even acknowledged that they existed.
12
Even within northern states, whites assume the southern or backward sections have the sundown towns. Literally scores of Illinois residents have said, “Oh, yes, in
southern
Illinois,” when they learn what I am studying. “Yes,” I reply, “and central Illinois, and northern Illinois, and especially the Chicago and Peoria suburbs.” They are shocked. The guidebook to a 1995–97 exhibit at the Indiana State Historical Museum,
Indiana in the Civil War,
came to the same easy conclusion for that state: “Some small towns and rural areas, especially in southern Indiana, developed reputations for hostility and intimidation, causing blacks residing there to leave and discouraging newcomers.” Certainly that happened in southern Indiana, but similar intimidation and hostility were also visited upon African Americans in small towns and rural areas around Indianapolis, in the northeast quarter of the state, and just south of Lake Michigan, resulting in sundown towns just about everywhere. Pennsylvania residents aren’t surprised to learn that very rural areas such as Warren and Potter Counties are all-white, perhaps on purpose, but are shocked to see the number of all-white towns in the densely settled river valleys of eastern Pennsylvania.
13
southern
Illinois,” when they learn what I am studying. “Yes,” I reply, “and central Illinois, and northern Illinois, and especially the Chicago and Peoria suburbs.” They are shocked. The guidebook to a 1995–97 exhibit at the Indiana State Historical Museum,
Indiana in the Civil War,
came to the same easy conclusion for that state: “Some small towns and rural areas, especially in southern Indiana, developed reputations for hostility and intimidation, causing blacks residing there to leave and discouraging newcomers.” Certainly that happened in southern Indiana, but similar intimidation and hostility were also visited upon African Americans in small towns and rural areas around Indianapolis, in the northeast quarter of the state, and just south of Lake Michigan, resulting in sundown towns just about everywhere. Pennsylvania residents aren’t surprised to learn that very rural areas such as Warren and Potter Counties are all-white, perhaps on purpose, but are shocked to see the number of all-white towns in the densely settled river valleys of eastern Pennsylvania.
13
The lack of concern our society pays to racism in the North can also be seen in our culture’s stress on lynching as a topic of study, rather than sundown towns, and its particular attention to Southern lynchings. Most studies of lynchings focus solely on the South. The databases themselves show this bias: the principal list, from Tuskegee Institute, includes only nine Southern states (those that seceded, minus Virginia and Texas) plus Kentucky, and Project HAL (Historic American Lynchings), whose list of lynchings some consider the most complete, also includes only the same ten states. Yet controlling for the smaller size of the black population outside the South, lynchings were recorded about as often in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and California as in Southern states. Indeed, we simply have no idea how many lynchings occurred in the Midwest or Northeast because of scholars’ concentration on the South. Certainly three of the most famous lynching photographs come from the Midwest—Omaha in 1919, the triple hanging in Duluth in 1919, and the twin hangings in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. The result of this overemphasis is an inability of Northern scholars to perceive the racism in their own communities, at least before African Americans moved north in the Great Migration that began around 1915. Even as late as the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the South has simply been viewed as the venue where race relations played out in America.
14
14
Inadvertently, I generate this same mistake in conversation: over and over I tell historians and social scientists about my research, and they assume I’m studying the Deep South. Even when I correct them, the correction often fails to register. I tell a sociologist friend that I’ve just spent months researching sundown towns in the Midwest. Ten minutes later he has forgotten and again assumes I have been traveling through the South.
A Conspiracy of SilenceDeliberate suppression has also played a role in keeping sundown towns hidden. This seems to be true in Myakka City, Florida, a small town twenty miles inland from Sarasota. By 1920, African Americans had built two churches and made up more than a third of the town’s population. “But just 20 years later,” according to
Tampa Tribune
reporter Roberta Nelson, writing in 2001, “blacks had vanished from Myakka City.” Myakka resident Melissa Sue Brewer wrote, “Myakka City ‘historians’ have erased all mention of African-Americans.” Suppressing the memory was hard because the expulsion apparently took place in the late 1930s, recent enough that oral history can still be done. Nelson interviewed one white woman, Marilyn Coker, who moved to Myakka City when she was eight; her late husband, a Myakka native,
Tampa Tribune
reporter Roberta Nelson, writing in 2001, “blacks had vanished from Myakka City.” Myakka resident Melissa Sue Brewer wrote, “Myakka City ‘historians’ have erased all mention of African-Americans.” Suppressing the memory was hard because the expulsion apparently took place in the late 1930s, recent enough that oral history can still be done. Nelson interviewed one white woman, Marilyn Coker, who moved to Myakka City when she was eight; her late husband, a Myakka native,
remembered when the Negroes left, and how upset everyone was about it. The [white] people were upset that they were made to leave town. It was a vigilante kind of thing. Most of the people who lived here were not a part of it. But, all of a sudden, one day they were all gone.
Of course, not all white people were upset; some were the “vigilantes.” Other Myakka City old-timers remembered specific African American individuals, such as “Preacher Harper, who was ordered to leave on short notice and denied time to sell off his hogs and chickens.” Oral history on the disappeared black community may yet bring the full story to light.
15
15
“It just breaks my heart to see my town appear in your book,” said a librarian in West Frankfort, Illinois, in 2002, a feeling I heard repeated in many other sundown towns. This sentiment causes many residents who are ashamed to be living in all-white communities to hide the nature of their community from outsiders. Residents of sundown towns who are pleased to be living in all-white communities may not want to talk openly about it either, lest their open racism become the target of legal action or scorn. Either way, residents usually cover up, especially in print. Commemorative histories, in particular, rarely treat embarrassing facts or controversial topics. People don’t want to publish anything negative about their own town, especially in the coffee table book that marks its centennial. Consider
One Hundred Years of Progress,
published in 1954 in Anna, Illinois. You will recall that whites in Anna drove out all African Americans in the city in 1909, and the town has been sundown ever since. This 446-page book provides a history of every organization in town, down to the local Dairy Queen. Yet it contains no mention of African Americans, the murder and lynching that led to their banishment, the expulsion itself, their continuing exclusion, or the nickname that confirms Anna’s notoriety. These facts are hardly obscure; everyone in town knows them; I confirmed the nickname in my first conversation in the city. Published in the year when the U.S. Supreme Court had just declared segregation illegal, the book can hardly have omitted these facts by accident. The anonymous authors had to have known that to say openly that Anna was now known as “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed” would no longer reflect credit on their town.
16
One Hundred Years of Progress,
published in 1954 in Anna, Illinois. You will recall that whites in Anna drove out all African Americans in the city in 1909, and the town has been sundown ever since. This 446-page book provides a history of every organization in town, down to the local Dairy Queen. Yet it contains no mention of African Americans, the murder and lynching that led to their banishment, the expulsion itself, their continuing exclusion, or the nickname that confirms Anna’s notoriety. These facts are hardly obscure; everyone in town knows them; I confirmed the nickname in my first conversation in the city. Published in the year when the U.S. Supreme Court had just declared segregation illegal, the book can hardly have omitted these facts by accident. The anonymous authors had to have known that to say openly that Anna was now known as “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed” would no longer reflect credit on their town.
16
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