Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (55 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Sometimes African American servants even got in trouble while on their employer’s property. In 1948, a graduate student from Panama and his wife came to Norman, Oklahoma, home of the University of Oklahoma, accompanied by their black Panamanian maid. According to a student at the university at the time:
One evening at sundown the maid was hanging clothes out on the line. Apparently someone reported her to the police, because they came and arrested her and took her to the station. She was frightened because she could not speak English and did not know why she was picked up. Her employer . . . got the maid released and, I believe, got the university administration to talk to the police so the maid would be safe from police harassment.
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Surely no one in modern America, outside of prison, has lived more restricted or more fearful lives than these lonely live-in African American servants in intentionally all-white communities. Over time, however, live-in maids, gardeners, and other domestic help became less crucial to the lifestyle of even the rich and famous and certainly of the middle class. Gas, oil, and electric heat eliminated the need to stoke the coal furnace, washers and dryers decreased the work on wash day, and gardening and landscaping got redefined as a hobby rather than a chore, at least in the middle class. We see this change in Darien, for example, which showed 161 African Americans in the 1940 census, 112 in 1960, and just 75 in 1990, always three-quarters female because maids outnumber butlers and gardeners. Similarly, by 1960, the proportion of African American servants in Kenilworth—4.3% in 1930—had fallen to 1.3%, and in 2000, 0.2%—just 4 individuals. Grosse Pointe, Michigan, had 140 African Americans in 1940, 36 in 1960, and just 11 by 1980. These statistics reflect the decline in live-in servants in America, not increased white supremacy in Darien, Kenilworth, or Grosse Pointe.
Hotel Workers
 
Sundown towns often allowed hotel workers after dark. Such porters, waiters, maids, and others don’t exactly violate the sundown rule because they don’t live in a residential neighborhood. In the 1930s and ’40s and possibly later, an African American lived in the basement of the Pacific House hotel in Effingham, Illinois. He made a living driving a team of horses hitched to a coach, supplying rides from the railroad depot to the Pacific House and elsewhere. A man who lived in Miami Beach in the late 1940s and early ’50s, tells that Miami Beach was a sundown town then but made exceptions “for hotel maids and bus boys and Sarah Vaughan!” Like Darien and Beverly Hills, Miami Beach’s African American population was more than three-quarters female and included almost no children. Bill Alley of the Southern Oregon Historical Society tells of one African American man in the 1920s, George Washington Maddox, in Medford, which was otherwise a sundown town. Maddox, a dwarf, shined shoes at the Medford Hotel. In southern Pennsylvania, “for decades Ephrata had but a single black resident—George Harris, a barber, who first came to town as a seasonal employee of the grand Mountain Springs Hotel summer resort in or around 1848,” according to Cynthia Marquet of the local historical society. “He moved here permanently in 1882 and remained until his death in 1904.” Marquet adds, “After Harris died no black persons . . . lived in Ephrata for decades.” In 1960, Ephrata had 7,688 people and no African Americans. I must note that Marquet goes on to add, “In my 18 years at the Historical Society, I have never encountered any suggestion that their presence was forbidden.” However, three residents of nearby communities tell that the Ku Klux Klan recruits in Ephrata and holds an annual march there and that they hear that African American families usually move out
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soon after moving into the town.
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Like servants, the lives of these hotel workers could be remarkably constricted. Indiana writer William Wilson told of his aunt and uncle who ran The Tavern, a hotel in New Harmony, Indiana, in the 1920s, and of “Aunt Minnie’s Lizzie, . . . the only Negro permitted to live in the town. She had a room in the hotel and never went out on the street, day or night.... She must have had a great deal of what we used to call ‘inner resources.’ Certainly she was a finer person than the group of intolerant white people in the town who made it necessary for her to stay indoors.”
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Some white communities would not abide African Americans even as household servants or hotel workers. When a horse breeder from Kentucky who had bought a farm in Washington County, Indiana, in 1888, brought a black stable hand to care for his horses, there was so much excitement that the stable hand had to be sent back to Kentucky. Five years later, a visitor from Louisville who brought a black cook was forced to send her away because of threats of violence. A wealthy visitor to Utica, Indiana, had a hard time securing permission to bring his carriage driver into the town, because no African Americans were allowed within the city limits. A newspaper in Springdale, Arkansas, itself a sundown town, told of an event in nearby Rogers in 1894: “A hotel in Rogers employs a colored boy to wait on the tables and one night recently some person posted a notice on the gate post warning the proprietor to discharge the boy or steps would be taken to rid the town of his presence. The notice was signed ‘citizens.’ ” Apparently the “boy” left. The River Park Hotel in Wyandotte, Michigan, had African American waiters in 1880 and 1881 “who sang beautifully,” according to a newspaper account, but apparently were later expelled. Seven years later, the manager of the hotel arrived with “a retinue of colored servants,” but whites in Wyandotte expelled them too. In 1880, three African Americans—two barbers and a cook—came to Bluffton, Indiana, the cook to work in a local hotel. Historian Emma Lou Thornbrough writes that all three “received written notices that they must leave, and the proprietor of the hotel who employed the cook, as well as the sheriff of the county, received warnings to get rid of the Negroes.” They did.
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Refugees, Soldiers, Students, and Other Transients
 
Even large numbers of African Americans have sometimes been allowed in sundown towns when they were clearly temporary and when human kindness overrode the sundown rule. Johnston City, Illinois, provided an example during the 1937 flood of the Mississippi River. As its town history recounts:
On January 20 we received word that some 200 [flood refugees] were to be brought here from around Mounds and Mound City. Eventually this number grew to 287, and these homeless people were housed in the Miner’s Hall, the Baptist Tabernacle, [and abandoned stores] . . . About half the refugees brought here were colored, and although the town had the reputation of never permitting a black to remain overnight here, they were welcomed with courtesy and kindness in 1937.
 
Of course, the gesture was easier because the refugees were never perceived as possible residents; from the start, whites understood their sojourn was to be only temporary. “When the danger of flooding had passed, the black people were transferred to Wolf Lake,” the account concludes, “the white refugees to Anna.”
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During World War II, Camp Ellis in west-central Illinois had some African American troops. According to a local lawyer, “Lewiston—an all-white community—opened its restaurants, taverns, theaters, and other public places to African-American servicemen.” Lachlan Crissey, the local state’s attorney at the time, wrote, “The attitude adopted by most of the people there was, ‘Well, they’re soldiers, the same as our boys, and if they are shot they bleed and die the same way.’ Therefore, the Negro soldiers are free to enter the restaurants, stores, taverns, picture shows, and other public places.” Other sundown towns around Lewistown were not so hospitable; as Crissey went on to say, “This was the exception, and not the rule.” Again, everyone in Lewistown knew that the soldiers were never going to stay there permanently.
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Many towns that would never let them stay in houses permitted African American and African college and prep-school students to live on campus. Again, it helped that townspeople knew the students were only temporary. In the 1960s, missionaries of the United Brethren Church in Christ recruited students from Sierra Leone to attend Huntington College in Huntington, Indiana, the college for that denomination. The town let the Africans live on campus; indeed, they could even get haircuts in town, while African American students could not. Pretty much the same thing happened at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, a sundown town founded by “conservative and lily-white Swedes in 1869,” in the words of reporter Matt Moline, except at Bethany the Africans were from Kenya rather than Sierra Leone and were Lutheran rather than Brethren. Similarly, African students attended Chapman College in Orange, California, in the 1960s, according to history professor Harold Forsythe, one of the first African Americans to attend Chapman. They were perhaps among the first blacks allowed to spend the night and told Forsythe, “It was a tough town in which to live.”
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Darien, Connecticut, has no college, but beginning in the early 1980s, its public high school let a few African American girls, mostly from Harlem, attend under the aegis of A Better Chance (ABC), a program that sends minority teenagers to prep schools and affluent suburban high schools to prepare them to enter elite colleges. To avoid the long commute from New York City, the girls live in a group home in Darien, but again, whites know there is no chance that they might stay after they graduate from high school.
Most sundown towns were not hospitable even to transients. The response of Elco, in southern Illinois, to majority-white but interracial religious meetings was typical. In 1923, William Sowders, founder of the Gospel Assembly Churches, established a camp meeting at Elco. He continued to lead religious revivals there for eighteen years, but Elco residents were upset because Sowders allowed people of all races to attend these meetings. In 1941, World War II and local opposition caused him to abandon the Elco camp meeting.
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Having a Protector
 
Now we move to the “real” exceptions: African Americans who lived on their own in towns that did not allow African Americans to live on their own. Some sundown towns made exceptions not just for live-in domestics, hotel workers, and students, but for an actual independent African American household or two. This pattern was more common in the nontraditional South—Appalachia, Texas, and the like—than in the North or West. In areas where slavery had existed before 1865, elderly black couples made use of the “faithful slave” stereotype, so beloved of whites seeking to defend the “peculiar institution” in their minds, to persist in otherwise all-white communities. Often they became locally famous and were remembered decades later with affection.
When whites drove out African Americans from all or parts of six counties southwest of Fort Worth, Texas, in 1886, for example, they made exceptions for a handful of old ex-slaves in Hamilton County, including “Uncle Alec” Gentry and “Aunt Mourn” Gentry, both about 80 years old. “When released from slavery, they were taken to Hamilton County by their former master and given a patch of ground and log cabin. They have lived there ever since,” in the words of the Hamilton’s centennial county history,
Parade of Progress.
Portfolio 19 shows “Uncle Alec,” bent over obsequiously. Even in northern communities with no tradition of slavery, aged ex-slaves were sometimes the only African Americans allowed to stay when towns went sundown. According to local historian Terry Keller, when Anna, Illinois, drove out its African Americans in 1909, they exempted “one old lady who had been a slave.” In the quote at the head of this chapter, Laurel Boeckman makes clear the exceptional position of individuals such as these. Many counties and towns in Appalachia, Arkansas, Texas, and the Midwest show a slowly diminishing number of African Americans between 1890 and 1930 because they did not allow new blacks in, and their “Uncle Alecs” and “Aunt Mourns” gradually died or left.
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Even though they lived independently, ex-slaves who remained in sundown towns typically had white protectors—often their ex-owners. Protection was important. “Doc” Pitts, the only African American in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was the trusted servant and groom of Judge Silas Lamoreaux, President Cleveland’s general land commissioner. When the judge returned home to Beaver Dam, he brought Pitts with him to care for his horses. Initially he existed under the protection of Beaver Dam’s leading citizen, but after the death of his employer, Beaver Dam allowed Pitts to remain. A town history published about 1941 referred to Pitts as “the town’s black.” After Pitts’s death, Beaver Dam had no black resident. When whites in Corbin, Kentucky, drove out their African Americans in 1919, they missed “Nigger Dennis,” “the Mershons’ ‘man,’ ” according to historian Hank Everman, referring to one of the wealthier families in town. During the 1919 riot, “the Mershons and Dr. Siler hid him for several days while other blacks fled Corbin.” Dennis stayed on, and so did “the beloved ‘Aunt Emma’ Woods,” in Everman’s phrase, “a fine cook, laundress, and cleaning lady,” and possibly Dennis’s mother. In 1930, whites tried to lynch three African Americans in Ste. Genevieve, in the Bootheel of Missouri. Frustrated by state troopers, the whites turned their wrath on the entire black population. The only African Americans to stay were the extended family of the custodian of the Catholic Church, who was shielded by the priest.
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Even with defenders, some sundown towns were too dangerous. During the 1886 eviction of African Americans from the counties southwest of Fort Worth, Matt Fleming, who owned a butcher shop in Comanche County, “offered the services of his shotgun and himself to protect his two colored employees . . . if they wanted to stay,” according to Comanche County historian Billy Bob Lightfoot. They left anyway, “ ‘to keep you from getting into trouble, Mr. Fleming.’ ” Of course, the employees may also have mistrusted their chances for survival with only one protector against the wrath of the community. “One of the town’s doctors refused to have his Negro maid driven from her home,” continues Lightfoot, “but a visit from the mob made the girl [
sic
] insist that she be allowed to go to Dublin. The doctor finally gave in and drove the girl across the line himself.”
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