Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (53 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Berch’s daughter Almarion also witnessed the shooting, at the age of two. She confirmed in 2004 what the last paragraph implies: that nothing was done about the crimes.
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As far as I have been able to learn, nothing was done about the 1922 lynching of J. T. Douglas in Hardin County in southeastern Illinois, either. Also unlike most victims of lynching in America, Douglas was white, a landowner, and prominent in the community. Unlike most (though not all) victims, he was not accused of a serious crime such as murder or rape. His offense? He broke the sundown “law” of that part of Hardin County by letting an African American live on his farm. According to the nearby Golconda
Herald-Enterprise
:
FARMER SHOT TO DEATH NEAR LAMB, HARDIN CO. WAS ATTEMPTING TO PROTECT COLORED MAN WHO LIVED AS TENANT ON FARM
 
One of the most brutal murders that was ever committed in Southern Illinois was the shooting to death of J. T. Douglas, a prominent farmer residing near Lamb, in Hardin county, Thursday night shortly after midnight.
J. H. Douglas, this city, reports that his uncle had a colored hired man living on his farm and that some people of the locality had protested against him keeping the fellow and had warned him that trouble would result if he was not sent away. The murdered man did not heed the warning and his hired man stayed on.
Thursday night about midnight, a mob, composed of parties unknown, went to the house of the colored man and began shooting into the house. Mr. Douglas, from his home about a quarter of a mile away, heard the shooting and hastened to the scene. Just as he was about to enter the house, after calling to the Negro, he was shot dead.
The murder has caused great excitement and indignation in Hardin county, and every effort will be made to find out who composed the mob and did the shooting. Several are suspected and arrests no doubt will soon follow.
 
I could not find news stories of any arrests.
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White suburbs have largely avoided being tagged with the reputations for unsavory behavior that plague independent sundown towns. As we have seen, suburbs have used a variety of subtler methods to achieve all-white status, including clauses in their founding documents, unwritten policies of their developers, formal acts by suburban governments, restrictive covenants embedded in deeds, realtor steering, and redlining by lenders or insurers. Many suburbs seem too genteel to resort to violence and intimidation. This aura may be undeserved, however. Some suburbanites who would never attend a Klan meeting contacted their nearest klavern in time of need. As Stetson Kennedy, who famously infiltrated the KKK in the 1940s, put it, “The Klan has long served as an unofficial police force for maintaining racial zoning.” When the William and Daisy Myers family moved into Levittown, Pennsylvania, in 1957, crosses burned throughout Levittown. Whites painted “KKK” on a neighbor’s house because members of the family who lived there had not joined the mob. Leaders of the “Levittown Betterment Committee” contacted the Klan and other hate groups to get help in driving the Myerses out. Nearly 100 Levittowners signed to form a local klavern.
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Most suburbs have not relied on outsiders. When African American families managed to move into formerly all-white neighborhoods despite all the preventive measures taken by the suburbs, residents themselves typically resorted to shunning, threats of violence, and violence itself. In fact, violence in sundown suburbs and neighborhoods has been, if anything, even more widespread than the attacks on blacks in independent sundown towns. The Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities, beginning around 1915 and continuing into the 1960s, struck many white suburbanites as a threatened “invasion” of their neighborhoods and led to, in Meyer’s words, “thousands of small acts of terrorism” by whites determined to keep the newcomers out. Between 1917 and 1921, for example, whites firebombed the homes of 58 African American families that tried to move into white neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. “Rather than cresting in the 1920s,” Meyer concluded, “the most vicious and extensive violence occurring in the North during the two decades following World War II.” In Chicago during just the first two years after World War II, whites bombed 167 homes bought or rented by African Americans in white neighborhoods, “killing four persons, permanently crippling eight, and injuring scores of others,” Stetson Kennedy summarized.
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Some of the most severe and most important violence occurred in the West Lawn neighborhood of Chicago. In 1946, an African American couple, Theodore and Ida Turner, tried to occupy an apartment in Airport Homes, temporary apartments that the Chicago Housing Authority was building for veterans near Midway Airport. A mob of West Lawn residents drove them out, along with two other African American families and a Jewish couple that had befriended them. “No black ever again attempted to move into Airport Homes,” wrote Steve Bogira. Indeed, as historian Arnold Hirsch put it, “Chicago Housing Authority policy was made in the streets.” Thirty-five years later, West Lawn and adjacent communities were still more than 99.9% white, containing 113,000 whites and 111 blacks in the 1980 census.
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Restrictive covenants kept African Americans out of most white suburbs until well after World War II. A new wave of violence struck after their legal demise. “We must refuse to sell to colored people whether the covenants are valid or invalid,” shouted a leader of the Woodlawn Property Owners, trying to keep a Chicago neighborhood all-white in October 1953. “If the colored people were convinced that life in Woodlawn would be unbearable, they would not want to come in.” That was in a sundown neighborhood in an interracial city. In sundown suburbs, it was often worse. After Oak Park, Illinois, failed to keep out Percy Julian’s family, as described in “Sundown Suburbs,” his home “suffered both bomb and arson attacks in 1950 and 1951,” in the words of Arnold Hirsch. Whites in nearby Cicero have repeatedly used violence to repel African American would-be residents. “The first Negro family to enter the middle-class Chicago suburb of Deerfield,” according to housing expert James Hecht, “moved out of their rented apartment after windows were broken and excrement was smeared on the front walls of the house.”
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By no means have the Chicago suburbs been unique. Meyer tells of the campaign whites in the Los Angeles suburb of Maywood mounted in 1942 to force out two African American families. “Keep Maywood White” was the headline in the
Maywood-Bell Southwest Herald.
In nearby Fontana, where African Americans could only live outside the city limits on a floodplain, whites firebombed the O’Day Short family when they bought a house in town, killing Mr. and Mrs. Short and their young children in December 1945. No one was ever convicted of the bombing, and Fontana remained all-white into the 1960s. On the opposite coast, whites in Oceanside, Long Island, threw a bomb through the dining room window of one of its few black-owned homes in 1967. This made an impact: the owner put his home up for sale, and as of 2000, Oceanside still had just 184 African Americans among its 33,000 residents.
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Violence to keep communities all-white may have peaked in the 1980s. In 1985 and 1986, the Klanwatch Project counted 45 cases of arson or cross burning and “hundreds of acts of vandalism, intimidation, and other incidents” aimed at “members of minority groups who had moved into mostly white areas.” In 1989 alone, Klanwatch listed 130 cases, and that was surely an underestimate, since the Chicago Commission on Human Rights recorded an average of 100 racial hate crimes each year between 1985 and 1990 in neighborhoods undergoing “racial transition” just in that city.
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Developing a Reputation
 
The best way to stay all-white, many communities concluded, was to behave with such outrageous hostility to African Americans who happened by or tried to move in that a reputation for vicious white supremacy circulated among African Americans for many miles around. Historian Emma Lou Thornbrough told that sundown towns built anti-black reputations in Indiana during the Nadir. By 1900, for example, Leavenworth, “the county seat of Crawford County, had the reputation of being the most ‘anti-Negro’ town on the Ohio River. Captains of riverboats were said to discipline African American crewmen by threatening to put them off the boat at Leavenworth. By 1900 there was only one Negro resident in Crawford County.” Today, African Americans as far away as Florida and California know and spread the reputation of Pekin, a sundown town in central Illinois. Achieving a similar notoriety is the rationale for the otherwise irrational refusal of gas stations in some sundown towns to sell gasoline to African Americans. After all, most motorists do have enough gas to get to the next town, and they will carry with them the message that Pana, Martinsville, and other towns that had this policy are to be avoided at all costs.
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Often the first thing said to an African American in a sundown town was to ask if he knew the reputation of the town. Even “pet Negroes,” as local whites sometimes referred to them, were in trouble as soon as they ventured beyond the specific town or part of town where they were known. Aaron “Rock” Van Winkle, “born a slave” and “owned by Peter Van Winkle,” whose son-in-law was a state senator from Rogers, Arkansas, was “in Rogers on business,” according to an article in the 1904
Rogers Democrat.
“In a joking way one of our citizens said to him: ‘See here, Rock, you know that sundown don’t want to find a Negro in Rogers.’ ” The newspaper went on to relate the quip with which “the old Negro” reproached the white man. Nevertheless, the white man’s statement, while perhaps said “in a joking way,” was also flatly true. Both he and Van Winkle would have known that it was not to be challenged directly and that saying it was a warning, the first step in enforcement.
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Some places have built national reputations as sundown towns. From east to west, these would include Darien, Connecticut; the Levittowns in New York and Pennsylvania; Forsyth County, Georgia; Cuyahoga Falls and Parma, Ohio; Dearborn, Grosse Pointe, Warren, and Wyandotte, Michigan; Elwood, Huntington, and Martinsville, Indiana; Cicero, Pekin, Pana, and Franklin and Williamson counties, Illinois; Cullman, Alabama; the Ozarks as a region; Idaho, statewide; Vidor and Santa Fe, Texas; and several suburbs of Los Angeles.
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Especially in the African American community, these reputations endure. “This colored person in Florida knew of Pana, Illinois, and its reputation,” a woman who grew up in Pana related, “and that astonished me.” Virginia Yearwood, a native of Pierce City, Missouri, reported that African Americans with whom she worked in the 1970s in California knew about Pierce City’s anti-black policy.
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Reputations are even more important within metropolitan areas. A 1992 Detroit area survey showed that 89% of white respondents and 92% of blacks thought that residents of suburban Dearborn “would be upset” if a black family moved in. As a result, only 37% of African Americans rated Dearborn a “desirable” place to live, compared to 66% of white respondents. Of the black respondents who ranked Dearborn “undesirable,” 78% cited the racial prejudice of its residents as their reason. Many residents of sundown suburbs such as Dearborn are happy that African Americans consider their town undesirable. Then less enforcement is required to keep it white. Moreover, a reputation as overwhelmingly white is part of a suburb’s claim to social status. At the same time, residents of Dearborn don’t want their city’s reputation to get out of hand. While they are proud to be from an all-white community, at the same time they know enough to be ashamed. To put this another way, many whites want their town or suburb to have a certain notoriety in the African American community for unfriendly police and unwelcoming residents, so long as this can be accomplished without giving the town a black eye, as it were, in the white community.
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Sometimes reputations can get out of hand. Tamaroa, a town of about 800 people in southern Illinois, excluded African Americans perhaps around 1900. I did not find anyone who claimed to know how or when. But every person I talked with from Tamaroa or near Tamaroa knew that the town had become infamous as “the rock throwers” some time later. A member of the historical society in nearby Pinckneyville, also a sundown town, told how African Americans from the nearby interracial town of Du Quoin occasionally walked along the railroad tracks to go north. As they passed through Tamaroa, white youths would throw rocks at them. On one occasion the stoning got out of hand and they killed a man. A woman who grew up in Tamaroa, now living in a senior center in Du Quoin, confirmed this account: “They stoned one to death.” She was indignant at her town’s resulting notoriety: “People all around call us ‘rock throwers,’ but that was so long ago!” The Pinckneyville historian suggested that Tamaroa’s reputation didn’t rest on that one incident: another African American tried to run through on the railroad right-of-way but was grabbed and castrated, and a third was hung. Asked how he knew about these incidents,
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he replied, “Several residents of Tamaroa told me those stories. One man told me he witnessed the hanging. They took him down and burned him on a brush pile.”
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In a sense Tamaroa’s notoriety is unwarranted, however, because the town does not differ from hundreds of other sundown towns. Indeed, the generic nickname for slingshot across the United States in the first half of the twentieth century was “nigger shooter.”
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Moreover, white reactions to this day to an African American in a “white neighborhood” anywhere in America often include fear and hostility. In the 1970 feature film
Watermelon Man,
African American director Melvin Van Peebles depicted a comical example: police in a white suburb respond to phone calls from homeowners frightened by African American actor Godfrey Cambridge, a white suburbanite who has suddenly turned black during the previous night. Cambridge is merely jogging the same route he did the day before, when he was white. As David Harris noted more recently, jogging through white neighborhoods remains problematic, not only in the movies, but also in real suburbia.
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