Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (48 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Many residents of sundown towns expressed displeasure with their town’s anti-black policies when they talked with me. Their disapproval seemed sincere, but they never mentioned voicing such sentiments to their fellow townspeople. They seem to feel they have performed as citizens if they disapprove privately, especially if they move away. One result is that everyone thinks the silent majority in their town favors continued exclusion, since no one speaks up. Edmund Burke famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Even today, especially in sundown suburbs, many whites are still afraid of being put down by other whites as “nigger lovers” (though elite suburbanites may not use the term itself), so their anti-racist impulses get immobilized. They do nothing. Their quiescence helps explain why sundown towns and suburbs usually stay all-white for decades.
Harassing Invited Guests
 
Even invited visitors—musicians, athletic teams, or houseguests of private citizens—have been attacked or threatened in sundown towns. African American musicians have often run afoul of sundown rules, partly because their job usually entails working after dark. When students at the University of Oklahoma invited a black band to play for a dance in 1922, residents of Norman left no doubt that the city’s sundown rule applied on campus as well. Here is the account in an African American newspaper:
A gang of ruffians have disgraced this city again in an attempt to maintain the vicious reputation of the city not to let Negroes stay in the municipality after sundown. For many years Norman has had signs and inscriptions stuck around in prominent places which read: “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you in this berg.” Saturday night, when Singie Smith’s Orchestra of Fort Worth, Texas, attempted to play in the dance hall where they were employed by the students of the University, a mob of outlaws stormed the hall and practically wrecked it.
A mob of approximately 500 surrounded the dance hall soon after the dance started and began to throw bricks. They were armed with clubs, guns, and some carried ropes. There was talk of lynching the Negroes, and it was said that several automobile loads of persons went to the city park to prepare for the hanging, telling the rest to bring the “niggers.” Sheriff W. H. Newblock quickly gathered in all available deputies and deputized nearly 100 students of the U of Oklahoma, in order to protect the musicians.
The orchestra was taken to the interurban station and sent to Oklahoma City when the mob grew in strength and it became evident that there would soon be trouble. Fights occurred between the mob and students who formed a bodyguard while the Negroes were escorted to the station.
Negroes are occasionally seen on the streets of Norman in the daytime, but the “rule” that they leave at night is strictly enforced. Several other Oklahoma towns have similar customs.
Several prominent businessmen were seen in the mob here Saturday night.
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Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells of an incident in about 1960, similar in a way to the “prank” in Rogers, Arkansas. In Oakland, county seat of Garrett, the county at the western tip of Maryland, whites threatened an African American jazz man, Les Clifford:
Mr. Les was “up Oakland,” a town full of crackers and rednecks, if ever there was one, located on Deep Creek Lake, 25 or so miles from Piedmont. They hated niggers up Oakland. . . . NIGGERS READ AND RUN, Daddy claimed a sign there said. AND IF YOU CAN’T READ, RUN ANYWAY.
Anyway, Mr. Les was up at The Barn, a redneck hangout, flirting with all the white women, gyrating and spinning those sinuous tones, making that saxophone into a snake, a long, shiny, golden snake. A keg of beer apiece for these rednecks and a couple of hours of Les’s snake working on their minds and their girlfriends’ imaginations was all it had taken. Let’s lynch that nigger, someone finally shouted. And so they did—or tried to, at least. Somebody called the state cops, and they busted down the door just about the time they were going to kick the table out from under Mr. Les and leave him dangling from the big central rafter. They would have given his horn back afterward, they said. To his family, they said.
 
As in Rogers, the men may not really have planned to kill Clifford; Gates’s father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., thought “they were just scaring him.” But as in Rogers, the incident was not entirely in jest. According to Gates Sr., Clifford had been dating a white woman: “That’s what it was all about.” The mock hanging was meant to frighten Clifford from the community to stop the relationship.
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Even when audiences loved their performances, musicians and athletes faced the problem of where to spend the night. This difficulty repeatedly beset barnstorming black baseball teams and the two famous black basketball teams, the Harlem Globetrotters and the Harlem Magicians, whenever they played in sundown towns. The town baseball team of El Dorado Springs, a sundown town in western Missouri, invited a black Kansas City team to play them, but the guests were then denied food and lodging. One man made an accommodation: Dr. L. T. Dunaway locked the team in his second-floor office “and some citizens took food to them,” according to local historian Jean Swaim. African American workers paving U. S. 54 through El Dorado Springs in the 1940s “also had to spend their nights locked in that office.” Swaim does not say whether they were locked in to prevent them from being at large in the town after sundown or to preclude violence against them by local white residents for that offense. Robinson is a small city in southeast Illinois whose main claim to fame is the invention of the Heath Bar. Mary Jo Hubbard, who grew up in Robinson in the 1950s and ’60s, remembers
an incident that took place in the early to mid ’60s that involved a visiting high school basketball team that was not allowed to stay in the hotel and were put up in the local jail overnight while the basketball tournament was going on. I remember my parents being horrified at the time that children spent the night in the jail . . . but it did happen. That should tell you something about the town.
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Even the great contralto Marian Anderson repeatedly had trouble finding a place to sleep. When she sang at Princeton University in 1937, Princeton’s only hotel refused her, as noted in the previous chapter, so Albert Einstein invited her to stay with him; “the two remained friends for life,” according to a 2002 exhibit on Einstein at the American Museum of Natural History. In February 1958, Anderson had the same problem in Goshen, Indiana, when she sang at Goshen College, and had to stay the night in Elkhart, ten miles away, because the Goshen Hotel would not allow a black person to stay there. When Anderson sang in Appleton, Wisconsin, she had to sleep in Neenah or Menasha.
47
Actually, hotels in sundown towns like Goshen and Appleton did not differ from hotels in non-sundown towns like Princeton; between 1890 and about 1960,
most
hotels in America would not let African Americans stay the night.
48
But sundown towns posed additional complications. They had, of course, no African American hotels or other facilities. Hence
no
hotel would have housed Marian Anderson or any other African American. And because there were no African American residents, no black private homes existed to house stranded travelers in an emergency. Finally, Goshen and Appleton would not
allow
an African American to spend the night. That is the difference between Princeton and Goshen: Goshen was a sundown town, while Princeton was not. Hence no Einstein stepped forward in Goshen or Appleton. A professor who might volunteer to host Anderson in Goshen would endanger the singer as well as his or her own family.
49
Scottsdale, Arizona, illustrated the difference in 1959. Twelve years after Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues, the Boston Red Sox recruited their first African American player (they were the last team to do so). When Pumpsie Green joined the team for spring training camp in Scottsdale that spring, he was not housed in the hotel with the rest of the team, nor anywhere else in Scottsdale. The Red Sox claimed all the hotels were full with tourists, so there was no room for one more player, who just happened to be Green! The real reason was Scottsdale: “Blacks could not live there after dark, and so he was sent seventeen miles away to live in Phoenix,” according to Howard Bryant, author of
Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston.
50
When residents of sundown towns did step forward to house African American visitors, they often found the experience unnerving. In 1969, a choir from Southern Baptist College performed in Harrison, Arkansas. “It had a black member,” according to the wife of a couple I spoke with in Harrison in 2002. “We put her up, but we worried lest our house get blown up.” Grey Gundaker, who now teaches American studies at William and Mary, went to junior high school in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a sundown town on Lake Michigan, between 1962 and 1964. He remembers one occasion when the policy was violated at a stable where he worked after school. “When an African American man who drove a horse van came through town and needed a place to stay, the owner of the stable, Larry Bowlin, put him up. . . . Larry told us kids not to tell, that it would be very dangerous for his friend if he were caught.” Left unsaid: it would also be dangerous for Bowlin and his family.
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White residents tried to avoid triggering a town’s sundown sensibility. In 1982, a young woman was planning her wedding in Pinckneyville, Illinois, where she had grown up, a sundown town 60 miles southeast of St. Louis. “I asked a dear college friend, who was also a long-time friend of my husband’s, to be an usher. When going over lists with my mother, she said, ‘Who’s this Roy?’ ” The bride-to-be reminded her mother of a photo of her and Roy, who was African American. “She turned six shades of white and said, ‘You don’t actually think he’ll come, do you?’ I dug in my heels and swore that if he wasn’t welcomed, I’d elope.... I did give in somewhat, though: I agreed to move my 6:30 wedding to 6:00 PM so there’d be plenty of daylight while he was in town.”
52
Occasional acts of violence greeted visitors and hosts in these situations, showing that Bowlin’s fear and Schwarz’s rescheduling were justified. In September 1946, for example, a white army officer allowed a black army officer to stay overnight in his home in West Lawn in southwest Chicago, according to reporter Steve Bogira. “The two had served together in the war, and the black officer was visiting from out of town. Word got out in the neighborhood, and soon a mob was stoning the home, smashing windows, and yelling, ‘Lynch the nigger lover.’ ” Chicago was not a sundown town, of course, but West Lawn was a sundown neighborhood.
53
The Importance of the City Limits
 
Carnival, circus, and railroad workers—who carry their accommodations with them—make plain the difference between sundown towns and towns with no sundown policy but whose hotels were white-only. Sundown towns told black people not to spend the night even when no hotel was involved. Little towns such as Niantic and Villa Grove in central Illinois forced African American railroad workers to move their work cars beyond the town limits at night. A retired miner who has lived his entire life in Zeigler, in southern Illinois, said in 2002, “Nigra [
sic
] employees would be working with the carnivals, and they had to leave [Zeigler] by sundown.” Having spent time in Zeigler, I suspect they didn’t leave, because all the surrounding towns are also sundown towns that would have been no better. Probably they simply hid in their carnival vehicles for the night, but they probably moved them beyond the city limits.
54
To be sure, some rural areas have also been closed to African Americans. In his 1908 classic
Following the Color Line,
Ray Stannard Baker wrote, “A farmer who lives within a few miles north of Indianapolis told me of a meeting held only a short time ago by 35 farmers in his neighborhood, in which an agreement was passed to hire no Negroes, nor to permit Negroes to live anywhere in the region.” Later in this chapter we will learn of the lynching of a white farm owner near Lamb, Illinois, who would not dismiss his black farm employee. Much less violent measures were employed at least as recently as 2001 to ensure that rural land is not sold to an African American.
55
More often, the rules have been looser beyond the city limits. In 1925 in Price, Utah, for example, a white mob twice overpowered the sheriff and hanged Robert Marshall, an African American accused of murdering a white deputy, Marshall being not quite dead after the first hanging. In the aftermath, Price became a sundown town. Four years later, another African American, Howard Browne Sr., was able to settle with his family outside Price, but Price itself, in Browne’s words, “was off-limits to blacks.” In the 1940s and ’50s in Colorado, migrant Mexican beet-field workers were housed in adobe colonies or “colonias” outside of towns, according to a survey of Colorado race relations by the University of Colorado Latino/a Research and Policy Center. After the season, when the colonias closed, some had to winter in Denver slums, unable to live inside the city limits of the towns where they had worked.
56
For a while in the 1930s, an African American man was allowed to live at the Perry County Fairgrounds at the edge of Pinckneyville, taking care of the horses. Greenup, Illinois, seat of Cumberland County, some 40 miles west of Terre Haute, Indiana, had a similar policy. Indeed, a longtime resident said that the Cumberland County Fairgrounds was deliberately left out of Greenup’s incorporated boundaries because African Americans sometimes stayed there. That way African Americans going to the fair, caring for livestock, or working for the ride operators could stay at the fairgrounds without violating the town’s sundown ordinance. An exception was likewise made for two men at the Clark County Fairgrounds in Martinsville, fifteen miles east, in the 1950s. As a former resident wrote, “The rule was, ‘Better not catch ’em here after dark—oh, except for Russell and Rabbit.’ ” Martinsville was nicer than the Chicago suburb Arlington, according to labor historian Mel Dubofsky: “As I recall, Arlington, Illinois was one of your ‘sundown towns’ into the 1960s. Blacks could work at the track but they could not appear on city streets after dark nor sleep anywhere but at the stables.”
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