Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (59 page)
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Authors: James W. Loewen
BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Racist language and behavior by athletes and fans begin as early as middle school in some sundown towns.
23
Some situations have grown so tense that interracial middle schools have canceled all future games with sundown schools. Usually this bad behavior takes place at the school in the sundown town. Less often do sundown fans yell racial slurs when they are the visitors, in the minority. Occasionally students in interracial schools engage in belligerent behavior at their home games, aimed at the all-white outsiders. Darla Craft wrote of being a cheerleader of all-white Herrin Junior High School in southern Illinois in 1969–70. “We had a basketball game in Mt. Vernon, where there was racial unrest. As we left the game, we were jumped by a group of African-American girls. I ran, so I wasn’t hurt, but a couple of the girls were pretty banged up.” Around that time, according to a graduate of Pinckneyville High School, a few miles northwest, “the two or three times we played football or basketball against Sparta or Du Quoin [nearby interracial towns] every year [there] were always melees bordering on race riots. I recall hearing of one game at Sparta at which all of our buses’ windows were broken out, and riot police were called in from Carbondale to settle things down.” I remember this period of militance in black culture between 1969 and about 1972, but the danger of what might be called “white racial paranoia” also lurks. The Sparta-Pinckneyville fracas may not have been exactly a race riot, considering that Sparta was at the time just 15% black. Surely white Sparta students had to have participated. Perhaps it was primarily an interscholastic melee with racial overtones.
24
The Talk in Sundown Towns23
Some situations have grown so tense that interracial middle schools have canceled all future games with sundown schools. Usually this bad behavior takes place at the school in the sundown town. Less often do sundown fans yell racial slurs when they are the visitors, in the minority. Occasionally students in interracial schools engage in belligerent behavior at their home games, aimed at the all-white outsiders. Darla Craft wrote of being a cheerleader of all-white Herrin Junior High School in southern Illinois in 1969–70. “We had a basketball game in Mt. Vernon, where there was racial unrest. As we left the game, we were jumped by a group of African-American girls. I ran, so I wasn’t hurt, but a couple of the girls were pretty banged up.” Around that time, according to a graduate of Pinckneyville High School, a few miles northwest, “the two or three times we played football or basketball against Sparta or Du Quoin [nearby interracial towns] every year [there] were always melees bordering on race riots. I recall hearing of one game at Sparta at which all of our buses’ windows were broken out, and riot police were called in from Carbondale to settle things down.” I remember this period of militance in black culture between 1969 and about 1972, but the danger of what might be called “white racial paranoia” also lurks. The Sparta-Pinckneyville fracas may not have been exactly a race riot, considering that Sparta was at the time just 15% black. Surely white Sparta students had to have participated. Perhaps it was primarily an interscholastic melee with racial overtones.
24
The foregoing account of bad behavior at athletic contests in sundown towns is not the whole story. Many sundown towns have repeatedly hosted interracial teams and their fans without incident. However, that’s partly because the visitors choose to overlook the verbal racism they encounter. Even when on their best behavior, many residents of sundown towns routinely say “nigger.” Indeed, another privilege all-white towns confer on their inhabitants is the license to say anything they want about people of color. Perhaps the first thing noticed by visitors to independent sundown towns is their overt verbal racism. During my thirteen years of public schooling in interracial Decatur, Illinois, ending in 1960, I never once heard the word
nigger
in school, on the playground, or said by one of my peers anywhere. But in sundown towns all around Decatur and all across America, the word was in common parlance then and remains the term of choice today. One of the most profound effects of sundown towns is on white rhetoric—on how people in them talk, especially on how they talk about race and about black people.
nigger
in school, on the playground, or said by one of my peers anywhere. But in sundown towns all around Decatur and all across America, the word was in common parlance then and remains the term of choice today. One of the most profound effects of sundown towns is on white rhetoric—on how people in them talk, especially on how they talk about race and about black people.
In 2001, I had a pleasant conversation with a 70-year-old white woman in Sheridan, Arkansas. A year or so earlier, the first African American family to move into Sheridan since blacks were evicted four decades earlier joined her church, Landmark Baptist, the town’s most prominent. She favored their membership and said: “Our pastor, I have to hand it to him. He was young, but he knew what to do. He counseled with the nigger family, so then the niggers knew what they were getting into, and it all worked out.” This woman did not mean
nigger
maliciously; she seemed happy that the family stayed. She was just thoughtlessly using the term she had heard and used all her life. Her sundown town, fifty years behind the times, encouraged that lack of thought. Many sundown town residents are oblivious to other signs of progress in race relations. In 1993, half the class in Highland High School, a sundown town in Illinois east of St. Louis, thought interracial marriage was still illegal, according to a woman who graduated that year.
25
nigger
maliciously; she seemed happy that the family stayed. She was just thoughtlessly using the term she had heard and used all her life. Her sundown town, fifty years behind the times, encouraged that lack of thought. Many sundown town residents are oblivious to other signs of progress in race relations. In 1993, half the class in Highland High School, a sundown town in Illinois east of St. Louis, thought interracial marriage was still illegal, according to a woman who graduated that year.
25
One of the chief ways that white Americans have progressed in racial conduct in the fifty years since the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision is in their rhetoric. Words may be shallow, the change may only lie on the surface, but surfaces do matter. People typically relate to each other on the surface, after all. Surface surely matters to African Americans, who take deep offense at whites’ use of
nigger.
For that matter, civilized rhetoric is a first step toward civilized behavior. The Civil Rights Movement initiated half a century of conflict and change that has proven difficult but humanizing. Sundown towns have deliberately sidestepped this adventure in healing, through which we are still working our way. Sheridan itself went sundown in 1954, in direct response to
Brown.
nigger.
For that matter, civilized rhetoric is a first step toward civilized behavior. The Civil Rights Movement initiated half a century of conflict and change that has proven difficult but humanizing. Sundown towns have deliberately sidestepped this adventure in healing, through which we are still working our way. Sheridan itself went sundown in 1954, in direct response to
Brown.
Not just in speech, but also on paper, sundown town residents offend. While they don’t write
nigger,
authors typically use
Negro
—often uncapitalized—or the still more ancient
colored people,
even in works intended as serious history and written as late as the 1980s and 1990s. The rest of America left these terms behind decades ago in favor of
black
and
African American.
Writers in independent sundown towns simply haven’t bothered to keep up with this progression. When they quote the occasional African American permitted to live in their town as exceptions, often they use dialect. Ralph Rea, for example, historian of Boone County, Arkansas, quotes Alecta Smith, allowed to remain after the expulsions of 1905 and 1909: “Aunt Vine often said that she was ‘the best niggah evah bawn, cuz all de rest was run off.’ ” Of course, just about all Americans pronounce
’cause
“cuz.” “Cuz” is correct. But no one writes
cuz
when a white person uses
’cause.
Moreover, whites and blacks from a given part of Arkansas pronounce
ever, born,
and most other words about the same. To put Smith’s words in dialect is simply to otherize her, to make her speech different from and inferior to whites’ use of language. By even the narrowest definition it is racist, for it treats one group differently and worse than another when they pronounce the same word identically. Such dialect was also antique, even back in 1955.
26
nigger,
authors typically use
Negro
—often uncapitalized—or the still more ancient
colored people,
even in works intended as serious history and written as late as the 1980s and 1990s. The rest of America left these terms behind decades ago in favor of
black
and
African American.
Writers in independent sundown towns simply haven’t bothered to keep up with this progression. When they quote the occasional African American permitted to live in their town as exceptions, often they use dialect. Ralph Rea, for example, historian of Boone County, Arkansas, quotes Alecta Smith, allowed to remain after the expulsions of 1905 and 1909: “Aunt Vine often said that she was ‘the best niggah evah bawn, cuz all de rest was run off.’ ” Of course, just about all Americans pronounce
’cause
“cuz.” “Cuz” is correct. But no one writes
cuz
when a white person uses
’cause.
Moreover, whites and blacks from a given part of Arkansas pronounce
ever, born,
and most other words about the same. To put Smith’s words in dialect is simply to otherize her, to make her speech different from and inferior to whites’ use of language. By even the narrowest definition it is racist, for it treats one group differently and worse than another when they pronounce the same word identically. Such dialect was also antique, even back in 1955.
26
It is striking when well-meaning whites say
nigger
as a matter of course. More often, whites in sundown towns do not mean well. In 1966, when Gordon Wright and his family moved into Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the first African American family to do so, they endured months of the slur. Adults yelled, “Nigger, go back down South.” The Kiwanis Club bus taking children to a park during the summer slowed at the Wright residence so the kids could lean out and yell the epithet. When school started in the fall, the safety patrol boys called the Wright children “niggers” on their way to school.
27
nigger
as a matter of course. More often, whites in sundown towns do not mean well. In 1966, when Gordon Wright and his family moved into Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the first African American family to do so, they endured months of the slur. Adults yelled, “Nigger, go back down South.” The Kiwanis Club bus taking children to a park during the summer slowed at the Wright residence so the kids could lean out and yell the epithet. When school started in the fall, the safety patrol boys called the Wright children “niggers” on their way to school.
27
Kathy Spillman grew up in North Tonawanda, a sundown town near Buffalo, New York, in the 1970s and ’80s. “The
nicest
word I learned was
colored. Nigger
was the typical term,” she told me. “I learned to hold my breath when blacks walked by, because I was taught they smell bad.” Roger Horowitz, now at the Hagley Museum in Delaware, lived in Marquette Park, a sundown neighborhood in Chicago, where “there was and is the casual assumption in bars that you can tell ‘nigger jokes.’ ” Two thousand miles southwest, in Indian Wells, California, Richard Williams and his famous tennis-star daughters Venus and Serena experienced
nigger
at the Pacific Life Open in March, 2001, after Venus pulled out of the tournament with knee tendinitis, conceding her match to Serena. “Accusations surfaced that their father, Richard, was fixing his daughters’ matches and that the sisters didn’t want to play each other,” according to an account in
USA Today.
“In Serena’s final match two days later against [Kim] Clijsters, the charged-up crowd unleashed its wrath on her, booing Serena’s every move.” According to Richard Williams, “When Venus and I were walking down the stairs to our seats, people kept calling me ‘nigger.’ ”
28
Sundown Humornicest
word I learned was
colored. Nigger
was the typical term,” she told me. “I learned to hold my breath when blacks walked by, because I was taught they smell bad.” Roger Horowitz, now at the Hagley Museum in Delaware, lived in Marquette Park, a sundown neighborhood in Chicago, where “there was and is the casual assumption in bars that you can tell ‘nigger jokes.’ ” Two thousand miles southwest, in Indian Wells, California, Richard Williams and his famous tennis-star daughters Venus and Serena experienced
nigger
at the Pacific Life Open in March, 2001, after Venus pulled out of the tournament with knee tendinitis, conceding her match to Serena. “Accusations surfaced that their father, Richard, was fixing his daughters’ matches and that the sisters didn’t want to play each other,” according to an account in
USA Today.
“In Serena’s final match two days later against [Kim] Clijsters, the charged-up crowd unleashed its wrath on her, booing Serena’s every move.” According to Richard Williams, “When Venus and I were walking down the stairs to our seats, people kept calling me ‘nigger.’ ”
28
It isn’t just
nigger,
of course. In Pinckneyville, the sundown town in southwestern Illinois, “one of the town’s beloved teachers, Doc Thomas, used to openly make racial slurs in the classroom,” according to Ron Slater, who graduated from Pinckneyville High School in 1966. “An example of a Doc Thomas comment that sticks in my mind was as follows: ‘Well, boys and girls, we have a track meet with Sparta this Friday. Don’t think we have to worry though, as it is supposed to be cold, and you know those jungle bunnies don’t run so well when it is cold.’ ” Such a wisecrack, coming casually from the person in charge, can make quite an impact on a classroom. Certainly no defense of African Americans, no opposition to such witticisms, will likely be attempted by a student.
29
nigger,
of course. In Pinckneyville, the sundown town in southwestern Illinois, “one of the town’s beloved teachers, Doc Thomas, used to openly make racial slurs in the classroom,” according to Ron Slater, who graduated from Pinckneyville High School in 1966. “An example of a Doc Thomas comment that sticks in my mind was as follows: ‘Well, boys and girls, we have a track meet with Sparta this Friday. Don’t think we have to worry though, as it is supposed to be cold, and you know those jungle bunnies don’t run so well when it is cold.’ ” Such a wisecrack, coming casually from the person in charge, can make quite an impact on a classroom. Certainly no defense of African Americans, no opposition to such witticisms, will likely be attempted by a student.
29
Sundown town rhetoric descends to its lowest point when speakers try to be funny. A recent graduate of Darien High School, the elite Connecticut suburb of New York City, noted that Darien’s whiteness “allowed for the kids to joke and to maintain racist stereotypes. A lot of my friends came in with racist jokes, and you never had to worry about it.” Many racial jokes considered funny in sundown towns are simply wretched. Consider this quip, told to Ray Elliott when he was teaching in the public schools of Robinson, Illinois, a sundown town near Terre Haute, Indiana, in the mid-1980s. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he walked into a restaurant and saw some friends. One said to him, “If they would’ve killed four more of the sons of bitches, you could’ve had the whole week off, Elliott!” Real hatred slinks below the surface of that “joke,” the same attitude toward King that Linda Dudek remembers from one of her best friends in second grade in Berwyn, Illinois, a sundown suburb just west of Chicago: “That nigger had it coming,” the little girl said the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and Dudek continues, “That was pretty much the attitude that prevailed at my grammar school.”
30
30
Labor historian Ramelle MaCoy remembers this joke, taught by his civics teacher in an all-white high school,
about a black hobo who got off a freight train in an Alabama town unaware of the “N——, Don’t Let The Sun Set on You Here” signs at the town lines. A gang of whites beat him soundly before asking, “If we let you go will you catch the next train out of here?” “If you let me go I’ll catch that one I got off of!”
Telling such a joke in a sundown town classroom lends it a special relevance, an edge. The teller assumes, almost always correctly, that no one will object, and sharing such jokes bonds teller and audience into a racial in-group. Of course, one does not need to be in a sundown town to hear such jokes; almost any all-white environment will do.
31
31
On one occasion I found that
I
had told a side-splitting joke in a sundown town. I was telling a volunteer in the Grant County Museum in Sheridan, Arkansas, about sundown towns in other states and mentioned what the name of the sundown town in southern Illinois, Anna, is said to stand for: “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.” He laughed uproariously. People from multiracial towns, including white people, don’t think it’s funny.
32
“InI
had told a side-splitting joke in a sundown town. I was telling a volunteer in the Grant County Museum in Sheridan, Arkansas, about sundown towns in other states and mentioned what the name of the sundown town in southern Illinois, Anna, is said to stand for: “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.” He laughed uproariously. People from multiracial towns, including white people, don’t think it’s funny.
32
This
Town You Must Call Them ‘Negroes’ ”
An incident from New Market, a sundown town in southwestern Iowa, shows that whites do know to behave better in interracial situations. In about 1986, African American John Baskerville went to a high school play there. In Baskerville’s words:
One of the characters was the black maid of the murder victim who found the body, so she had to testify. When the young girl acting as the black maid appeared on stage, we were all shocked.... The young white girl appeared in BLACKFACE! She had very black make-up with white lips and bugged-out eyes and dressed like Hattie McDaniel in
Gone With the Wind,
head scarf and all.... After the play, the young girl who played the part tried to hide from us. . . . She was so embarrassed because she knew that it was inappropriate and hadn’t expected us there.
33
Sundown town residents also know that
nigger
is an offensive term. I asked “Susan Penny,” who grew up in Oblong, a sundown town in southeastern Illinois, in the 1970s and 1980s, “Did you hear the word
nigger
when you were growing up?” “Are you kidding?” she replied.
nigger
is an offensive term. I asked “Susan Penny,” who grew up in Oblong, a sundown town in southeastern Illinois, in the 1970s and 1980s, “Did you hear the word
nigger
when you were growing up?” “Are you kidding?” she replied.
I never knew they were called anything
but
“niggers”! I must have been seven years old, and my mother drove us to Terre Haute, my brother and me. And my brother and I were in awe because there were two things that we had never seen in Oblong: black people and nuns! And I said “nigger,” and my mother corrected me, “When we’re in
this
town you must call them ‘Negroes.’ ”
The admonition shows that Penny’s mother knew full well that African Americans do not appreciate the term; for that matter, she probably knew that some white people in interracial towns don’t like it either. So she knew to correct her children’s verbal behavior “in
this
town,” Terre Haute, where it might earn them disapproval. She also knew that nobody cared in Oblong, so she did not bother to correct their word usage in Oblong. This is a vivid example of a privilege white towns confer on their residents: unlike other Americans, they need not think twice about the terms they use to refer to other groups or the jokes they tell about them. Similarly, the suburbanites in Indian Wells know that
nigger
is offensive. They also know they can get away with it at an almost all-white tennis venue in an almost all-white town.
34
In the 2000 census Indian Wells had just 15 African Americans among its 3,816 residents.
35
this
town,” Terre Haute, where it might earn them disapproval. She also knew that nobody cared in Oblong, so she did not bother to correct their word usage in Oblong. This is a vivid example of a privilege white towns confer on their residents: unlike other Americans, they need not think twice about the terms they use to refer to other groups or the jokes they tell about them. Similarly, the suburbanites in Indian Wells know that
nigger
is offensive. They also know they can get away with it at an almost all-white tennis venue in an almost all-white town.
34
In the 2000 census Indian Wells had just 15 African Americans among its 3,816 residents.
35
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