Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (37 page)

Read Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism Online

Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
2.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Only a handful of local histories treat the exclusion of African Americans (or Chinese or Jewish Americans) from their community or county forthrightly. Most—like Anna’s—do not. The overt racism that led to sundown suburbs has been especially mystified. In 1961, for example, on the occasion of its 35th anniversary,
Life Newspapers,
serving the west Chicago suburbs, published a 150-page special issue, featuring an article, “Cicero . . . the Best Town in America,” that contained not a word about the 1951 race riot that made Cicero nationally notorious. This is all too typical of the publications put out by local newspapers and historical societies. The result is not happy for today’s researcher.
17
One might imagine that priests and preachers might chide their congregations about their un-Christian attitude toward people of color, but clergy, like local historians, avoid controversy by not saying anything bad about their town. In 1960, a Baptist minister in Vandalia, Illinois, told of a nearby town: “When I was pastor in Pinckneyville, they had an unwritten rule that no Negroes should be in town after sundown. No Negro could live in the community.” The minister was right about Pinckneyville but ignored the same rule in Vandalia, where he was living. A still more heroic omission comes in the
Proceedings
produced by the annual Valparaiso University Institute on Human Relations from 1950 to 1968, an interracial Lutheran group that often focused on concerns of race relations—but never in Valparaiso. Valparaiso was a sundown town from at least 1890 until the early 1970s. The 1951 conference passed a resolution about the Cicero, Illinois, riot of that year, condemning Cicero’s all-white policy. In later years, the conference printed articles favoring integrated housing, discussed black-white issues in Chicago, Cleveland, and other American cities, and passed resolutions against apartheid in South Africa—but never said a thing about Valparaiso. Even the 1966 conference, “Where You Live,” never once mentioned that they were meeting in a sundown town. Yet many speeches and papers were by faculty members and the president of Valparaiso University, who had to know this. For that matter, all participants of color had to be housed on campus because they could not spend the night elsewhere in the city. If the conference and the college had taken a stand
in Valparaiso,
they might have accomplished something. It is not clear that their resolutions had any impact on Cicero, South Africa, or Cleveland. Such studied ignorance has a payoff: one need not do anything. If forced to recognize that they speak in sundown towns, the Pinckneyville minister and Valparaiso professors might feel the need to criticize and try to change their communities. This could be risky: even tenured professors can be let go, and Baptist churches can hire or fire their ministers at any time.
18
Often residents of sundown towns have gone beyond merely covering up their communities’ exclusionary policy to laud their towns as particularly democratic. The centennial history of Pekin, Illinois, published in 1949 by the Pekin Chamber of Commerce, contains this paragraph:
Pekin has no social divisions. There are no special neighborhoods in Pekin, either social, economic, religious, or racial. It is this Democracy or Near-Equality which frequently first impresses strangers in our city.
 
Yet Pekin has been notorious as a Klan center ever since the 1920s. It has also long been one of the larger sundown cities in the United States. African Americans across the United States remain in awe of its fearsome reputation even today. In a certain ghoulish sense, the book is accurate, of course. Just as various German cities can boast today that they have no Jewish ghetto, Pekin can brag that it has no black neighborhood. Likewise, in 1942, writing the history of his hometown, Libertyville, an all-white and probably sundown town northwest of Chicago, Lowell Nye said,
Perhaps the one factor most evident to the newcomer who observes Libertyville’s population is its unusually pure American quality.... It is an American town that is genuinely American; its basic stock can be identified with no one nationality. Taken as a whole, it is a happy tolerant society.
 
In her 1938 autobiography,
A Peculiar Treasure,
novelist Edna Ferber made a similar assertion about Appleton, Wisconsin: “a lovely little town of 16,000 people; tree shaded, prosperous, civilized. Creed, color, race, money—these mattered less in this civilized, prosperous community than in any town I’ve ever encountered.” This is an extraordinary claim about a sundown town. Ferber, who was Jewish, may not have encountered anti-Semitism in Appleton, but she could not have failed to notice its complete absence of African Americans, and she had to know that their absence was by design. As historian James Cornelius put it, “When I went to Lawrence University [in 1978], that’s one of the first things I learned, that Appleton was a sundown town.” “Color, race” made the
key
difference in this “civilized, prosperous community,” and in Pekin, and probably in Libertyville. Surely these authors protest too much.
19
These exuberant proclamations of equalitarianism in sundown towns exemplify not only base hypocrisy but also what sociologists call “herrenvolk democracy”—democracy for the master race. White Americans’ verbal commitment to nondiscrimination forms one horn of what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal famously called “The American Dilemma.” Blatant racism forms the other horn. In elite sundown suburbs, this dilemma underlies what we shall later term the “paradox of exclusivity.”
Silence on the Landscape
 
Having written a book on how America’s historic sites and historical markers mostly omit or distort embarrassing facts in our past, I was eager to see what the historical markers in sundown towns say about their racial policies. Most say nothing. From west to east: Tacoma, Washington, expelled its Chinese population on November 5, 1883, but the landscape is silent on the matter. Richland, Washington, created by the U.S. government to house workers producing our atomic bombs, was established as a sundown town and enforced that policy for years, but its landscape is equally silent. Whites drove Chinese Americans from all except a single town in Wyoming, but one cannot learn this on the Wyoming landscape. The extensive state marker for Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, totals more than 300 words, yet never mentions the town’s 1930 expulsion of almost all its African Americans. The historical marker for Mariemont, Ohio, a sundown suburb adjoining Cincinnati, states:
Ground was broken for Mariemont by Mary M. Emery, the village’s founder, on April 25, 1923. This planned community was designed by eminent town planner John Nolen and twenty five of America’s leading architects. As part of the “garden city movement,” Mariemont was influenced by English models....
but contains not a word on Mariemont’s policy of exclusion, started by Emery. A Pennsylvania state marker tells of the town of Wehrum, now abandoned, but fails to tell how its white residents forced out all African Americans on a cold February day in 1903; “the Negroes had to find shelter wherever they could,” according to a newspaper account. And so it goes, across the nation to Darien, Connecticut, whose glaring lack of candor I critiqued in
Lies Across America.
20
I know just four exceptions.
21
Nevada City, California, recently erected a memorial telling of their expulsion of Chinese Americans. An Idaho state historical marker tells of the lynching of five Chinese men in Pierce in 1885 and the expulsion of all other Chinese from that area. A monument in the cemetery of Pierce City, Missouri, commemorates the 200 African Americans killed or driven from that town by white residents in 1901. An indoor exhibit in the museum in Greenbelt, Maryland, admits that Greenbelt was founded during the Depression for whites only, although the town’s lengthy historical marker says nothing on the matter.
22
Otherwise, the sundown towns of America, hundreds of which used to boast of their policy with signs and billboards at their corporate limits, now hide that fact on their landscape.
23
Local Newspapers Don’t Say a Thing and Vanish if They Do
 
Like centennial histories and historical markers, small-town and suburban newspapers like to present only the sunny side of their community to outsiders. Early in the sundown town movement, many communities were so racist that their newspapers happily published full accounts of the actions their white citizens were taking against their African American neighbors, sometimes even including editorial exhortations before the events. Later, after civic leaders realized that these acts might strike outsiders as reprehensible, the accounts sometimes vanished. Harrison, Arkansas, for example, drove out its African Americans in 1905 and 1909. This was no trivial event, according to Jacqueline Froelich and David Zimmermann, whose article is the definitive treatment of these riots:
The ethnic cleansing of Harrison . . . is arguably the most important event in the town’s social history—devastating the lives of those African American citizens for whom Harrison had been home, encouraging the use of violence to force social change and protect local interests, and petrifying the town’s approach to race for many years to come.
 
Nevertheless, despite their importance, or rather because of it, the riots were never talked about in Harrison. “Conspicuously missing from the files of the
Harrison Times
newspaper were issues that were printed near the time of the two events,” according to David Zimmermann, who had to reconstruct them from other sources. The same thing happened in Tulsa. During that city’s now-notorious 1921 race riot, whites attacked Tulsa’s African American community on the ground and from the air: six airplanes dropped dynamite bombs to flatten homes and businesses. As Portfolio 10 shows, rioters made a concerted attempt to drive all African Americans out of Tulsa. Although they failed, they did pull off the largest race riot in American history. Later, the newspapers for the period mysteriously (and now famously) disappeared. The riot became, said one resident, “something everybody knew about but nobody wanted to discuss.”
24
Sometimes coverage was stifled from the start. Jim Woodruff, a resident of Springfield, Illinois, and a student of its 1908 race riot, tells how Springfield’s newspapers downplayed the riot in anticipation of the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday the next year. According to historian Arnold Hirsch, major white riots in Chicago after World War II got very little coverage in that city’s newspapers, partly at the behest of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, which was trying to prevent whites in other neighborhoods from engaging in copycat riots of their own. The riot in suburban Cicero, July 10–12, 1951, did get covered, but not for the first two days. Only after the National Guard was called out on July 12 and after the story made the local TV news did the
Tribune
and
Sun-Times
publish anything about that now infamous event. The advent of television did not end the suppression everywhere, however. In 1972, a realtor who wanted to expose the anti-Semitism of La Jolla, California, had to go to Tijuana, Mexico, to be interviewed, because no San Diego television station would touch the story.
25
Since then, sundown towns have become still more secretive, as most public officials and newspaper editors have come to realize that a town cannot legally keep out would-be residents on account of race. The newspaper editor of Anna, Illinois, said he had considered doing a story or series of stories on Anna’s racial makeup and its history several years ago but had been warned off the topic by local businessmen. Not just omission but denial sometimes results. In 2002, I elicited an apparent example of attempted containment by a small-town paper. I spent a day in Villa Grove, Illinois, south of Champaign-Urbana. As we saw, until recent years Villa Grove had sounded a whistle at 6 PM every evening to warn African Americans to get out of town. My last interview of the day was with the editor of Villa Grove’s weekly newspaper. By then, eleven of eleven interviewees had verified that Villa Grove is or at least was a sundown town.
26
Therefore I was blunt:
“Hello, I’m Jim Loewen. I grew up over in Decatur, and now I’m doing research on all-white towns that are all-white on purpose, including this one.”
The editor nodded.
“I understand you have, or used to have until recently, a whistle on your water tower that went off every evening at 6 PM”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Tell me the story about that whistle,” I asked.
“I don’t know any story about that whistle,” he replied.
“OK,” I said, and started to make my farewell. Nine of eleven interviewees had already confirmed the story, and I saw no reason to question him further.
As I turned to leave, his secretary asked me, “You mean the story that that was the signal for blacks to be out of town?”
I nodded and replied, “Yes, that story.”
“I never heard that story!” she said.
27
 
Chambers of Commerce Stifle Coverage
 
Suppression was general in northern Arkansas. “There is almost a total absence of available written material on the black communities,” complained sociologist Gordon Morgan in 1973, trying to write the history of African Americans in the Ozarks. “Some white towns have deliberately destroyed reminders of the blacks who lived there years ago.” In Rogers, in northwest Arkansas, the foresighted staff of the Rogers Historical Museum saved evidence of the process of historical repression at work. After the 1962 Fats Domino concerts in Rogers, the
Rogers Daily News
noted this progress in a front-page editorial:
The city which once had signs posted at the city limits and at the bus and rail terminals boasting “Nigger, You Better Not Let the Sun Set on You in Rogers,” was hosting its first top name entertainer—a Negro—at night!
 

Other books

Emerald Garden by Andrea Kane
Crossfire Trail (1953) by L'amour, Louis
Vanishing Acts by Phillip Margolin, Ami Margolin Rome
Cold Hit by Linda Fairstein
29 by Adena Halpern
Whistleblower by Alysia S. Knight