Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (45 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Walking could be just as dangerous in the Midwest. A 1905 article in the Fairmont, West Virginia,
Free Press
provides a glimpse of the process by which residents maintained Syracuse, Ohio, as a sundown community:
In Syracuse, Ohio, on the Ohio river, a town of about 2,000 inhabitants, no Negro is permitted to live, not even to stay overnight under any consideration. This is an absolute rule in this year 1905, and has existed for several generations. The enforcement of this unwritten law is in the hands of the boys from 8 to 20 years of age . . .
When a Negro is seen in town during the day he is generally told of these traditions . . . and is warned to leave before sundown. If he fails to take heed,he is surrounded at about the time darkness begins, and is addressed by the leader of the gang in about this language: “No nigger is allowed to stay in this town over night. Get out of here now, and get out quick.”
He sees from 25 to 30 boys around him talking in subdued voices and waiting to see whether he obeys. If he hesitates, little stones begin to reach him from unseen quarters and soon persuade him to begin his hegira. He is not allowed to walk, but is told to “Get on his little dog trot.” The command is always effective, for it is backed by stones in the ready hands of boys none too friendly.
So long as he keeps up a good gait, the crowd, which follows just at his heels, and which keeps growing until it sometimes numbers 75 to 100 boys, is good-natured and contents itself with yelling, laughing, and hurling gibes at its victim. But let him stop his “trot” for one moment, from any cause whatever, and the stones immediately take effect as their chief persuader. Thus they follow him to the farthest limits of the town, where they send him on, while they return to the city with triumph and tell their fathers all about the function, how fast the victim ran, how scared he was, how he pleaded and promised that he would go and never return if they would only leave him alone.
Then the fathers tell how they used to do the same thing, and thus the heroes of two wars spend the rest of the evening by the old campfire, recounting their several campaigns.
4
 
Anywhere that a black man might be unexpected, walking was hazardous. In Sullivan’s Hollow, one of the few sundown communities in Mississippi, white farmers caught an African American on foot early in the twentieth century, tied a bundle of barbed wire to his back, and made him crawl a mile on all fours before letting him leave the Hollow. In Ralls County, Missouri, just south of Hannibal, “even the mere sight of a black man at times could throw Ralls County white women into a panic,” writes historian Gregg Andrews. “Ilasco judge John Northcutt bound over John Griggsby, an African American, to a grand jury in July, 1906, after Etta Hays accused Griggsby of attempted criminal assault.” All Griggsby had done was to step off a train at Salt River and walk in the direction of her house. “Although she admitted that Griggsby never came within fifty yards of her, the judge still held him for the grand jury.” Eventually he was released. Griggsby got off easy: I have other stories of black men being convicted or shot on the spot for the same offense.
5
After a race riot, African American refugees usually faced particular hostility when they fled on foot to other towns, because the rioting was contagious and traveled ahead of them. Roberta Senechal, whose book on the Springfield, Illinois, riot of 1908 is the standard account, writes:
When a lone Springfield refugee appeared on the streets of the village of Spaulding eight miles from the city, he was greeted by a menacing mob of nearly 100 whites. Deputy sheriffs arrived before any harm was done and saw to it that the man moved on. Black refugees sparked hostility outside of Sangamon County, too.... When a small band of Springfield blacks appeared in the village of Greenridge in Macoupin County to beg for food, the residents of the place denied them anything and stoned them out of town.
6
 
Public Transportation Through Sundown Towns
 
After 1940, walking from town to town became uncommon, as most Americans had enough money for public transportation or automobiles. But trains and buses posed hazards too when they stopped in sundown towns, and sometimes merely while passing through. Even Pullman porters, just doing their jobs on trains stopped in stations, were threatened in some towns. According to a leader of the Comanche County Historical Museum, “Whites in De Leon would rope black porters and drag ’em through the streets and put them back on the train, just for meanness.” Porters took to hiding in the baggage car during the time the train was in Comanche County. Eventually the Houston & Texas Central Rail Road asked De Leon to move the town’s sundown sign from the train station, because white residents were using it as a pretext, so De Leon relocated it to the town well. Immediately after the 1899 riot that expelled all African Americans from Pana, Illinois, a traveler passing through observed, “The men have the Afrophobia so badly that the colored porters on the trains crawl under the seats” when they go through Pana. After whites drove African Americans from Pierce City, Missouri, in 1901, according to a reporter,
citizens declare no Negro porters will be allowed to run through here in trains, and it is probable the ’Frisco line will have to change porters at Springfield hereafter. Today a shot was fired into a train, and it is supposed to have been aimed at the porter.
7
 
William Pickens, writing in 1923, told of harassment in the Ozarks: “When trainloads of colored people recently passed through bound from the east to some great convention in Muskogee, Oklahoma, they had to shut the windows and pull down the shades to avoid the murderous missiles that are sometimes hurled especially at ‘a nigger in a Pullman’ ”—by definition “uppity.” In Wheeler County, Texas, in the 1920s, according to Arthur Raper, “as one man put it, Negroes were not even permitted ‘to stick their heads out of the train coaches.’ ”
8
All kinds of dangers might beset the unwary traveler who actually got off at a sundown town. In 1921, an African American had been working in Ballinger, Texas, and took the train home to Teague, in central Texas. “By mistake he took the wrong train and was put off at Comanche in the middle of the night,” according to the
Chicago Defender.
He entered the waiting room of the railroad station, where he was found asleep the next morning by a local police officer. It soon became known that he was in town—the first one to have been seen here for 35 years. Crowds of townspeople gathered around him and among them were many young men and women who never before had seen a man of our Race. For his own safety the man was taken to the county jail and locked up, pending the arrival of the next outgoing train. He was escorted to the station by an armed guard and placed aboard the train.
 
In Oneida, Tennessee, in about 1940, the police were not so helpful, according to local historian Esther Sanderson, writing in 1958:
One Negro hobo got off a freight train in Oneida; police and civilians started toward him and he started running. His bullet-riddled body was brought back out of the woods in about an hour. One young pilot from Scott County in World War II who saw the Negro after he was killed remarked on his return from the War, “You know, as I watched the blood flow from the wounds of the dead and dying Negroes on our transport planes, I thought of that old Negro who was killed in Oneida.”
9
 
Some sundown towns allowed African Americans traveling by train or bus to wait in the stations but venture no farther, even during the day. So far these examples have antedated World War II, but some towns, including Effingham, Illinois, as noted at the head of the chapter, continued to enforce this practice much more recently. David Blair reported that this rule worked a special hardship on black Greyhound bus drivers in Effingham in the mid-1960s. His father worked in the bus station cafeteria.
He would sometimes give black bus drivers a two block ride to the Brentwood Hotel.... White bus drivers could just walk over to it from the station, but black drivers had to call a cab and then wait longer for the cab to show than the walk would have been. My father would offer to give them a lift since he was white. To my knowledge he was never hassled because of it but the black drivers would ask if he was aware that there could be problems just in giving them a two block lift.
 
Effingham and a few other towns enforced this policy even during the daytime. Many towns did after dark.
10
Taxis are another form of public transportation, but until recently, taxi drivers in sundown towns simply refused to pick up black would-be fares. The same refusals still affect taxi service in many urban all-white neighborhoods today. One exception was Ray Pettit, who ran the Liberty Cab Company in Waverly, a sundown town in southern Ohio, until his death in the 1960s. His granddaughter, Jeanne Blackburn, remembers her mother’s stories “about how my grandfather would transport blacks out of the city limits, should they be in town too late to make it on their own, so they would not be punished.” Of course, his assistance, while kind and even possibly lifesaving, did not challenge the sundown law but enforced it.
11
Automobile Travel Through Sundown Towns
 
The advent of private automobiles made life a little safer for African American travelers, but not much. Often, bad things have happened to motorists of color whose vehicles broke down. In Memphis, Missouri, near the Iowa line, around 1960, according to a librarian who grew up there,
a black family stopped on the edge of town with car trouble. Some local men gathered quickly to “stop the agitators from wrecking the town.” Even though they found an innocent family instead, they saw fit to “scare them out of town.” It was a “get your car fixed and go” confrontation. I heard that one of the white men even shot a “warning shot” over the car just to make his point clear.
 
She went on to emphasize that many whites in Memphis, including her family, “found their behavior to be mean, ridiculous and embarrassing,” “especially considering that the black family members did not seek to stop in Memphis but were there because their car broke down.” But no one stood up for the black family at the side of the road at the time.
12
Unlike Missouri, whites in Bonneau, South Carolina, didn’t miss when they used a shotgun to warn African Americans to clear out fast. A black church group had rented a bus and driver from a white-owned company. As told in the August 17, 1940,
Pittsburgh Courier,
a national African American newspaper:
According to the Rev. Mr. [Robert] Mack, the bus developed motor trouble and was driven into a filling station at Bonneau and left by the driver with consent of the operator while another bus was being secured from North Charleston. Leaving Bonneau at 10 o’clock for the second bus, the driver returned at midnight.
As passengers were transferring to the second bus eight white men drove up and ordered the excursioners to “get out here [
sic
] right quick. We don’t allow no d——n n————rs ’round here after sundown.” The excursioners, the white driver, and the station operator tried to explain the emergency to no avail. A second car drove up with eight more white men who began firing on the group with shotguns. Having no weapons, the excursioners fled into nearby woods. Many were still missing when the bus left at one Monday morning.
 
Four church members and the white driver were wounded by the shotgun blasts.
13
In Owosso, Michigan, an ultimatum from an officer of the law terrified a stranded motorist: local historian Helen Harrelson recalls overhearing him frantically phoning relatives in Flint, 25 miles to the east, and saying, “ ‘The police have given me half an hour to get out of town.’ ” But sometimes police intervention in sundown towns, while fearful, ironically resulted in better service. Residents of Pinckneyville, Illinois, and Harrison, Arkansas, tell how police helped to get parts or have a car towed to the nearest interracial town. “The blacks were very grateful,” my Harrison informants concluded, for the sundown violation was thus avoided. In Arcola, Illinois, according to a then-resident, service was even better: when a black family’s bus broke down there on a Sunday, police got a mechanic to open his garage and fix the problem that day, so they could leave Arcola.
14
And in Martinsville, Indiana, located on the highway between Indiana University and Indianapolis, police until recently would carry African American student hitchhikers to the other side of town, thus preserving the racial purity of the town as well as the welfare of the hitchhiker.
15
“Keep moving” was the refrain, no matter why African Americans stopped. Local historian Jean Swaim tells of a shameful incident in Cedar County, Missouri: “Even a busload of black choir members who saved the lives of four El Dorado Springs teenagers by pulling them from a burning car were then turned away.” In Mena, Arkansas, African Americans did not even have to stop to get in trouble. Shirley Manning, a high school student there in 1960–61, describes the scene:
The local boys would threaten with words and knives Negroes who would come through town, and follow them to the outskirts of town shouting “better not let the sun set on your black ass in Mena, Arkansas,” and they often “bumped” the car with their bumper from behind. I was along in a car which did this, once, and saw it done more than once.
 

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