Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (47 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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As the attorney’s saga implies, even when African Americans were admitted, their daytime position in many sundown towns could be quite tenuous. In 1923, Benton, Illinois, flirted with barring African Americans during the day. Whites threw a threatening note into the Franklin Hotel, “giving the colored help warning to leave town within a certain length of time,” according to the
Benton Republican.
“The darkies left at once, with the result that the hotel was helpless and Mr. Ross was forced to close down his dining rooms Monday.” The report went on to note, “Benton has never been very friendly to colored people making their homes here, but have never been partial before as to where they would permit them to work and where they would not be permitted to work.” Apparently the movement did not become general, however, and African Americans were able to continue working elsewhere in Benton, so long as they did not stay after dark.
29
During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) set up work camps in various locales to house formerly unemployed young men who worked on projects to better the community, such as sewage systems, state parks, and soil erosion barriers. The projects benefited the community, but sundown towns nevertheless often did not want them if it meant putting up with African American workers. In Richmond, California, just north of Berkeley, whites objected continuously to an interracial CCC camp in 1935; finally the company was replaced with one that was all-white. Yet Richmond was not even all-white, although most of its 270 African Americans in 1940 had to live in North Richmond, an unincorporated area outside the Richmond city limits. In Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles, the CCC tried to locate an African American company in Griffith Park, but park commissioners refused to let them, citing an “old ordinance of the cities of Burbank and Glendale which prohibited Negroes from remaining inside municipal limits after sun down.” Portfolio 18 shows how residents of Mt. Vernon, a sundown town in southwestern Missouri, threatened bloodshed to keep out a proposed black CCC camp.
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Wyandotte, Michigan, went a step beyond Mt. Vernon: it would not accept African American workers even during the daytime, commuting from Detroit. In December 1935, 55 Works Progress Administration men were sent to Wyandotte to build new sewers; 40 were African American. According to the
Wyandotte Daily News
:
F. W. Liddle, director of the work projects in this city, refused to allow the men to go to work on the projects and so informed the director in Detroit. He stated as his reason for refusing to allow the men to work, the feeling in Wyandotte on the part of many against Negroes.... All projects were halted in the city for today.
 
The city’s other newspaper, the
Herald,
claimed that Liddle’s action “was based more on a desire to protect the colored workers than any racial prejudice. Wyandotte has never been a pleasant place for Negroes. In years gone by, colored people who tried to effect a residence here were either compelled or induced to leave town.”
31
During World War II, the War Department grew concerned because a huge defense contractor in East Alton could not hire African Americans. Truman K. Gibson Jr., aide to the secretary of war, reported:
East Alton does not allow any Negroes to come into town. They can’t ride on the public transportation system. The Mayor has said that if they come in, he will not be responsible for their protection. No Negroes live or work in East Alton. I am not entirely unacquainted with the attitude of many downstate cities toward Negroes.
32
 
Even after World War II, many sundown towns and counties continued to exclude black workers. In Grundy County, Tennessee, Dr. Oscar Clements hired four African American bricklayers from Chattanooga. Whites drove them off, saying, “We won’t even allow Negroes to come into Grundy County, much less work here.” A better outcome occurred in Aurora, Indiana, near Cincinnati on the Ohio River. A contractor brought in four African American workers, whereupon “a crowd attacked them and tried to drive them away,” according to historian Emma Lou Thornbrough, “while a citizens’ committee warned the employer to get rid of them. This he refused to do, and the Negroes finished the job for which they were employed, but under police protection.” Unfortunately, this set no precedent: Aurora displayed a sundown sign as recently as the 1960s, and a student at nearby Northern Kentucky University reported that Aurora was still a sundown town as of November 2002.
33
Also after World War II, residents of Greenbelt, Maryland, a sundown suburb outside Washington built by the FDR administration during the Depression, shunned African Americans doing daytime janitorial work, denying them even customary salutations. Some residents tried to keep the local store from selling them food for lunch, but the Greenbelt council dismissed the objections. Whites in Neoga, in central Illinois, tried to keep out black workers even later. Michelle Tate interviewed an elderly African American couple in Mattoon, Illinois; the husband had worked on railroad tracks in various towns in central Illinois.
The woman repeatedly spoke of her fear when he was working in Neoga. The railroad crew traveled places on an old school bus. This is where the men slept at night when they had finished working for the day. He talked of people meeting the bus on the way into [Neoga] and yelling to keep the “niggers” out of their town. He even stated that one time, when they were working in Neoga, a group of white men from Neoga came to Mattoon and broke out all the windows in the bus and tore up the inside, including leaving feces inside.
 
Thus residents expressed their outrage that blacks would be working in Neoga day or night.
34
Night Work in Sundown Towns
 
Night work has long posed special problems for African Americans in sundown towns. A former worker at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland wrote, “Most think that Ashland was such a town,” and noted that theater almost always involves night work. In the 1950s, the Shakespeare Festival “hired their first black actress, and she had to be escorted as she traveled to and from the theatre for safety.” Commonwealth Edison in the sundown town of Pekin, Illinois, was employing African Americans by the mid-1980s, but these workers drew unwanted police attention at least until the mid-1990s, according to an African American in nearby Peoria: “Those who worked the third shift, police would follow you in and follow you out, until they got a sense of where you were going.” Similar harassment was visited upon African Americans working the third shift in the huge Ford plant in Dearborn.
35
Two librarians in Oak Lawn, a sundown suburb southwest of Chicago, told me proudly in 1997, “We had a black woman working here in the library for almost two years, on the front desk, and no one was ever prejudiced to her.” But they agreed it was not prudent for her to work the evening shift. Similarly, an African American college student from the Cleveland area said, “My mom worked in Parma, and they never encouraged her to stay late to get overtime. It was always, ‘Why don’t you come in early.... ’ They didn’t want her in Parma after dark.” Door-to-door selling is especially problematic. An African American woman hired to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door in Mahomet, Illinois, a sundown town just west of Champaign-Urbana, told me, “The company warned me not to be there after dark.” Many African Americans would never consider taking jobs requiring them to be outdoors alone in sundown towns, even in daylight.
36
Economic and Social Ostracism
 
Ford, the Oak Lawn library, and Commonwealth Edison were demonstrating some boldness merely by hiring African Americans to work in sundown towns. After all, one way to keep out African Americans is to refuse to employ them; independent sundown towns have often followed that route. Nick Khan hired an African American to work at his motel in Paragould, in northeast Arkansas, in 1982. He was warned not to do it but defied the warning.
37
The 2000 census showed 31 African Americans in Paragould, among more than 22,000 people, but white residents I spoke with in 2002 knew of no independent black households.
38
I asked Khan why so few black adults lived in Paragould. “They don’t get jobs,” was his reply. Himself a Pakistani American, he added, “Nobody would hire
us.
We are only here because we own the property.” I told Khan about the remarks of a woman who went to her high school reunion at Paragould High School in 1997 after living out of state for four decades. She saw that the town was still all-white in 1997, as it had been 40 years before, and asked how this could be. “Oh, we have a committee that takes care of that,” she was told. “They don’t
need
a committee,” Khan replied. “If black people come in, they will find that they’re not welcome here. No one will hire them.”
39
When employers defy community sentiment and do hire African Americans, they then face a form of secondary boycott. During the summer of 1982, for example, the Shell station in Goshen, Indiana, hired a young black woman, the adopted daughter of a white Goshen couple. Within a month, business dropped off so precipitously that she had to be let go. Even owning the property may not suffice: in the 1970s, a black couple bought a gas station in Breese, a sundown town in southwestern Illinois. “I never heard of anyone harrassing or threatening them, people just didn’t buy gas there,” explained Stephen Crow, a 1976 graduate of Breese High School. So of course they had to leave. Nick Khan survived in Paragould only because his clientele came from outside the town.
40
In Medford, a sundown town in southwestern Oregon, whites used another ploy, unwillingness to sell. In 1963, they refused to let an African American family buy groceries, according to former Medford resident Elice Swanson. “They moved out of the valley in about 6 months.” Dyanna McCarty told of an incident she saw herself, when she was in seventh grade in Arcola, a central Illinois town of 2,700, in 1978. There had been talk in town that a new family was moving in. “They had two small kids (this news excited me, new babysitting opportunities) and the husband worked in Mattoon,” she wrote.
Later in the week I was in the school office . . . when I saw a black woman at the secretary’s desk. She looked angry. I overheard that her children could not get registered for school until all their records got transferred. I also overheard lots of conversation regarding not knowing what happened to the records and blaming the mail service, etc. It didn’t dawn on me what was happening until a few days later, after school at my grandfather’s shop, which was located across the side alley from the Bi-Rite Grocery store. The same woman I had seen in the office at school pulled up to the Bi-Rite and got out of her car with her two kids. She went to the front door and there was a
closed
sign on it and the doors were locked. She looked around, as I did, because the parking lot was full; people inside looked to be shopping. I met her gaze and in a brief instant, I had an epiphany. The light bulb was so bright, I thought I was blinded. I was so angry. I took her across the alley and she met my grandpa; they talked in hushed tones while I played with the kids. I overheard them talking about where she could get some things, he offered her gas, he had his own above ground tank, and he gave her the names and locations of some Amish friends of his that could supply her with milk, eggs, meat, etc.
They were there one day and a couple of weeks later they were gone. I don’t blame them for leaving in the middle of the night.... Business slowed at my grandfather’s shop for awhile, but it picked back up with time; he was the only auto body shop in [town].
41
 
It was a good thing her grandfather’s position was secure, because whites who befriended black newcomers often found themselves ostracized, socially and economically. In her remarkable memoir,
The Education of a WASP,
Lois Mark Stalvey tells how her white neighbors in suburban Omaha in the early 1960s broke off friendships with her and ultimately got her husband fired, simply because she tried to help a black couple buy a home in their all-white neighborhood. They moved to Philadelphia.
42
Many white liberals in sundown towns and suburbs worry about social ostracism, so their anti-racism never gets voiced beyond the confines of home. Here is an example from Cullman, a sundown town in northern Alabama. “The first time I remember seeing a Confederate flag (flying on a car in Birmingham), I asked what it was, and Mother told it was waved by troublemakers who believed in being hateful to colored people,” wrote a Cullman native about her childhood.
During the Civil War centennial celebrations when my friends’ parents dressed up and went to balls, my parents informed us that the Southern side had nothing to be proud of. In 1963 Mother insisted that we watch the March on Washington on television and kept saying, “This is history. This is history.” . . . At the same time, my parents made it clear that my sister and I were not to repeat their most liberal sentiments to just anyone: “There are some things we just don’t talk about outside the home.”
 
Virginia Cowan writes of living with her mother-in-law for three months in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, in 1952:
On the outskirts of town, I saw a big white sign with black letters that said, “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on your black ass in this town.” I couldn’t believe it.... I stayed in Barnsdall three months. I never saw a black, ever. When they were talked about, it was always “those niggers” or “those uppity niggers.” I cringed every time I heard that word. If someone I knew used it, I just walked away. Mom had asked me please not to make waves. She had to live there, after I left. So, I kept my mouth shut.
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