Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (46 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Moving vehicles were also targeted in Benton, in southern Illinois, in the mid-1980s: white teenagers threw eggs and shouted “nigger” at African Americans who drove through town after dark.
16
Another way to vex African American motorists was to refuse to sell them fuel. Whites in Slocum, Texas, wouldn’t sell gas to African Americans until 1929. In Mt. Olive and Gillespie, Illinois, this policy was in effect at least through the 1950s. According to historian John Keiser, who grew up in Mt. Olive, African American motorists routinely carried an extra ten gallon tank in their trunk when traveling from St. Louis to Chicago “because no one would sell them gas en route.” A former resident of Pana, Illinois, reported that filling station attendants in that central Illinois town would not pump gas for African American customers as recently as the 1960s. Back then, stations were not self-serve, so “they had to go on to Vandalia or Kinkaid.” To this day, many African Americans still take care to drive through Pana without stopping. Gas stations in Martinsville, Indiana, refused to sell to African American motorists as recently as the early 1990s. As racist as Mississippi was during the civil rights struggle, I lived there for eight years and never heard of a town or even an individual gas station that would not sell gasoline to African Americans. It seems irrational to refuse to sell fuel to a person whom you want out of town, when fuel is precisely what they need to
get
out of town. In the case of Pana, moreover, at least fifteen other nearby towns in all directions were also sundown towns, including Vandalia and probably Kinkaid. If they all similarly refused to sell gas to African Americans, central Illinois would wind up with hundreds of stranded black motorists, hardly the outcome whites intended.
17
“Driving While Black”
 
Harassment has not stopped; on the contrary, it has become official. In many communities police follow and stop African Americans and search their cars when they drive in or out, making it hard for African Americans to work, shop, or live there. The practice has been going on for decades. Jim Clayton, who grew up in Johnston City, Illinois, writes, “In the late 1940s, the police often followed any car containing blacks that turned off Route 37 into town. And there were many such cars on that route because it was a main line from the South to Chicago.” Route 37 is now Interstate 57, but black motorists who stray are still in trouble: 60 miles north, a recent graduate of Salem High School reports that police officers there say on their radio, “Carload of coal coming down X street,” to alert other officers to the presence of African Americans. In Dwight, in northern Illinois on the other interstate highway going to Chicago, police used “NCIC” as shorthand for “New Coon In County,” whom they then harassed out of town, according to an ambulance volunteer there in the 1980s. Florida resident Melissa Sue Brewer wrote about a related alphabetical expression used by police in that state, “NBD,” meaning “Nigger on the Beach after Dark.”
18
Only a few sundown suburbs resorted to the brazen city-limits signs used by some independent sundown towns. Instead, police often provide the first “defense” against African Americans in sundown suburbs. Police harassment, including racial profiling, can be even scarier than private violence, because one can hardly turn to the police for protection. Sundown suburbs near cities with sizable African American populations are especially likely to rely on their police—and the notoriety in the black community they earn—to stay white. Mary Pat Baumgartner pointed this out about “Hampton,” her pseudonym for a New York City suburb: “Since [residents] cannot do away with [arterial] streets altogether, however, they turn to the police to scrutinize those who use them.” Residents of sundown suburbs expect and applaud police harassment of outsiders. As Gary Kennedy, state representative from Dallas, wrote, “Blacks, Chicanos, and even poor whites with older automobiles avoid Highland Park for fear of being hassled by the police.”
19
Gregory Dorr, now a professor of history at the University of Alabama, spent the first 22 years of his life in Darien, Connecticut, a sundown suburb of New York City. He reports,
Darien’s Explorer Post 53 is one of the only volunteer adult-student run ambulance corps in the nation. Well, the “Posties” (as we called them) all had belt-worn pagers that could also double as police scanners. They (and those of us with them) often monitored the police, for giggles and grins and to give friends a warning if cops were called to break up a party. Whenever an African American was spotted in town, most frequently walking or hitching along Route 1 or I-95, the cops were called to check them out. They often stopped these folks, questioned them, etc. About the only black folk not harassed were those who were obviously domestics waiting at the few bus stops along Route 1.
20
 
Recently such racial profiling has become newsworthy, leading to the term “DWB,” “Driving While Black.” Lawsuits or public protests have been lodged against the practice in suburbs in Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, California, and several other states. White Americans sometimes get a sense of the adventure DWB entails when they are passengers in black-driven cars in sundown towns. Consider this account from Vandalia, Illinois, in about 1998:
When I was in high school in the late ’90s, a (white) friend from my high school and I were back seat passengers in a car driven by a friend from a neighboring town, who was black. One of his friends, who was also black, sat in the passenger seat. We ended up driving on the town’s main road, and the two guys got extremely nervous, claiming that every time they drove through Vandalia, they got pulled over by the police for no good reason. One of them said a police officer pulled him over to simply ask, “What’s your business here?” Sure enough, an officer pulled us over and forcefully asked for all of our licenses. He claimed that the driver had taken too long to turn on his headlights, which I didn’t think was the case. As soon as the officer saw our licenses, he got a very embarrassed look on his face, said he was sorry to bother us, and left. He spoke directly to my girl friend and me. Our parents were fairly prominent figures in the town, and as soon as the officer saw our last names on our licenses, he felt embarrassed for stopping us for no real reason. Who knows how the scenario would have played out had those two guys not had the two of us with them.
21
 
In an ironic sense, the police are not to blame, for in a way, they’re only doing good police work! As a Glendale, California, police officer explained to resident Lois Johnson, officers stopped any African American person after dark “because they did not live there.” The police never could have stopped white motorists because
they
did not live there—the officers would find that out only
after
they stopped them. In sundown towns African Americans by definition “should not be there,” hence are suspicious.
22
Sometimes these practices die hard. A communications company in Carmel, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis that had been all-white until the 1980s, employed a number of African Americans in the mid-1990s. By this point, Carmel had about 250 black residents in a total population of some 30,000. After DWB complaints, including a successful lawsuit against the city’s police department, Carmel created special tags for black employees of the company, visible to police officers, to identify those black drivers as acceptable. Thus
they
—unlike all other African American motorists—would be safe from unprovoked stops. Carmel was no longer all-white, but apparently its police had not gotten the message.
23
Sundown During the Daytime
 
A few towns, including Effingham; Owosso; Buchanan County, Virginia; Burnside, Kentucky, according to oral history; Pollock, Louisiana; Arab, Alabama; Carterville, Gillespie, and East Alton, Illinois; and in some years Syracuse, Ohio, did not allow African Americans within their city limits even during the day. During World War II, historian Herbert Aptheker saw a sign at the edge of Pollock, “Nigger Stay Out of Pollock.” Aptheker characterized Pollock as “somewhat unusual for it forbade black people into the town—period.” Michelle Tate, who interviewed residents of several Illinois sundown towns, reports that Gillespie, a city of about 4,000 near St. Louis, had a similar sign at the edge of town into the early 1960s. “Even after the sign was removed, it was still an unwritten rule that black people entering this town would not be tolerated, day or night.” The signs at the edge of Buchanan County, in western Virginia, said the usual—“Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in This County”—as remembered by a white man who grew up nearby, but “blacks were afraid to go to Grundy,” the county seat, day or night, according to an African American who grew up not far away in West Virginia in the 1940s. He worked for an upholstery shop in Bluefield, and “when we went to Grundy, I had to get out of the cab and get in the back under a tarp with the furniture until we got to the house.” Then he got out and helped deliver the furniture. “Then I had to get back in the back under the tarp until we got back to Tazewell [County], and then I could get back in the cab.”
24
Towns such as Martinsville and Pana that would not let African Americans buy gas thus intimidated them from further shopping, even during the day. In sundown suburbs, black shoppers have long been a concern. In 1956, Dearborn resident George Washabaugh wrote his mayor to complain, “More and more niggers are beginning to shop in our shopping centers, and I wish there was some way we could stop this.” In 2005, shopping is still an issue in some majority-white suburbs. Mall managers don’t want their shopping centers to get identified as “too black,” which can prompt whites to shop elsewhere. Malls have died in response to the presence of young African Americans—even in solidly white middle-class areas—because white shoppers flee black youth. Also, a mall can easily lose its cachet; then cutting-edge retailers move to trendier locations. Suburban city officials also know that shopping malls often desegregate first, leading to white uneasiness that can fuel white residential flight. Today some suburbs do what they can to discourage African Americans from visiting their malls: persuading public transportation agencies not to service the malls with bus routes from black neighborhoods, surveiling African American shoppers and making them uneasy, and having police follow black motorists.
25
Many towns that might tolerate an occasional African American during the day, shopping or buying gas, drew the line at full-time workers. This was especially true if they had to stay the night, even if it was known to be for a short period of time. A white man named J. J. Wallace invited a black carpenter into Norman, Oklahoma, in 1898 to do construction work. The mayor and other whites beat up Wallace because of it and ran the African American out of town. Wallace sued the government, arguing lack of protection, but the court concluded that neither it nor the state could be expected to do anything about local sentiment—even though the mayor helped lead the attack. Unfortunately, this case set an important precedent that shielded sundown town governments from legal consequences when they failed to stop whites who attacked African American workers and their white employers, according to law professor Al Brophy.
26
The following clipping shows an example of the kind of terror that African American workers often encountered in sundown towns. It is from Rogers, Arkansas, probably between 1910 and 1920.
A Bentonville contractor was building one of the first brick business houses here and he brought with him a colored man to carry the mortar hod, figuring that no white man would want to do such heavy, menial labor. A group of young men were gathered in the Blue saloon when the Negro entered, probably looking for his employer. The group seized the Negro and began telling what they were going to do with him. A well had been started at the rear of a business house but after going down some feet, the work was halted and the hole covered with planks.
It was suggested they drop the Negro in the old well after they had hanged him but others objected on the ground that the odor from the ones already planted there was becoming objectional to the neighborhood. As some of the men pulled aside the planks to investigate, the ones holding the trembling Negro loosened their grip on their victim.
It was the chance for escape he had been seeking, and in a matter of seconds he was just a blur on the horizon—and he never did return to Rogers. It was just another of the incidents that gave all colored people good excuses for not stopping here.
 
The incident was meant to be funny, for had the men been serious, they could easily have apprehended the runaway via auto or horse. Yet the prank was not entirely in jest, for it accomplished the disemployment of the man, surely one of its aims.
27
An attorney not only is a hired worker but is necessary for court to proceed. Nevertheless, in Platte City, Missouri, north of Kansas City, a black attorney defending two clients “was met at the front door [of the courthouse] by a mob of white men” in December 1921, according to a report in the
Chicago Defender.
“The leader of the mob had a handkerchief bound around his mouth. Pointing an automatic revolver at [W. F.] Miles’s head, he ordered him to turn around and leave town. Miles, his life in danger, did as he was bid.” The sheriff and a deputy overtook him and brought him back to the court. The attorney then
explained to the judge that he was being threatened in connection with the defense of the McDaniels and asked the court that note of the matter be made in the court record. The judge upbraided him for making any such charge before the jury.... Following this the court admonished Miles to have his clients change their pleas from not guilty to guilty. Miles did so and they were immediately sentenced to three years in the penitentiary. Miles persuaded the sheriff to protect him until he should reach Kansas City.
28
 

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