Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (63 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Ironically, it turned out that no one from Martinsville murdered Carol Jenkins. On May 8, 2002, police arrested Kenneth Richmond, a 70-year-old who had never lived in Martinsville, based on the eyewitness account of his daughter, who sat in his car and watched while he did it when she was seven years old. Although many people inside as well as outside Martinsville believed its residents had been sheltering the murderer these 34 years, in fact no one in the town had known who did it. No matter: cognitive dissonance kicked in anyway. Again, if situations are defined as real, they are real in their consequences. Because everyone
thought
the community had closed ranks in defense of the murderer, additional acts of racism in the aftermath seemed all the more appropriate. Today, having intensified its racism for more than three decades in defense of its imagined refusal to turn over the murderer, Martinsville is finding it hard to reverse course. Recently some residents have tried to move the city toward better race relations, so far with mixed results. They organized meetings on race relations, hold an annual dinner, and hired a consultant to help Martinsville get beyond its past. At the same time, Martinsville’s assistant police chief spoke out against gays, Hindus, and Buddhists after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and won a standing ovation at a subsequent city council meeting. And the Council of Conservative Citizens, descendant of the notorious White Citizens Council, has more members in Martinsville than the diversity organization .
68
Stereotyping Other Groups
 
As Martinsville’s assistant police chief demonstrated, residents of sundown towns often do not confine their generalizations and stereotypes to African Americans, although blacks have usually been viewed as the most menacing. Sundown towns are more likely than other communities to oppose additional “theys”—other racial groups, gays and lesbians, unusual religious groups, hippies, and Americans who look different or think or act unconventionally. At East High School in Appleton, Wisconsin, for example, formerly a sundown town vis-à-vis African Americans, conflicts between Hmong Americans and whites were a daily occurrence at the school in 1999, according to reporter John Lee.
69
Quoting a student source, Lee wrote, “Usually it begins with a group of white students taunting an Asian student or his friends with epithets, or pushing them into lockers. He said the white youths ‘pick on anybody that’s different or anybody who hangs around them.’ ” Meanwhile, at nearby North High School, incidents occurred between white students and Mexican Americans. On the day after white students had defaced a Mexican flag at North, white students came to school “wearing Confederate Battle Flag symbols hanging from pockets on shirts and on car antennas,” according to reporter Kathy Nufer. They already owned these symbols, giving the conflict a white supremacy tinge.
70
Residents of several sundown towns have told me that their towns also harass homosexuals. Springdale, Arkansas, made news in 1998 when every candidate for mayor, speaking before members of the Christian Coalition, attacked the “Human Dignity resolution” passed in nearby interracial Fayetteville. One mayoral candidate even proposed posting “No Fags in Springdale” signs at the city limits, reminiscent of the sundown signs that Springdale used to sport about blacks. Of course, many interracial small towns also manifest hostility toward gays and lesbians.
71
Such hostility shows itself more easily in sundown towns, however, with their heritage of inhospitality toward an entire outgroup. On the other hand, not every sundown town is as anti-gay as Springdale. Gays live safely if semi-closeted in Cullman, a sundown town in northern Alabama, for instance, and some more or less came out in June 2000 via a story in
The Advocate,
“the national gay & lesbian newsmagazine.” Conversely, some racially integrated towns and neighborhoods, including New Hope, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, and Mt. Rainier, Maryland, outside Washington, take quiet pride in welcoming even “out” gays.
72
Regarding religious “deviants,” we might first recall that the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic as well as anti-black. And of course most elite sundown suburbs also kept out Jews until well after World War II; some also barred Catholics. In Santa Fe, Texas, a sundown town, Phillip Nevelow, the town’s only Jewish student, said in 2000 that schoolmates had subjected him to two years of anti-Semitic harassment, including threats to hang him, and police charged three students with making “terroristic threats.” Santa Fe’s “reputation for being ‘white only,’ ” in the words of Shelly Kelly, archivist at the University of Houston, surely contributed to the “climate of intolerance” with which his parents charged the school district.
73
Other sundown towns attacked leftists and labor leaders. A decade after Harrison, Arkansas, expelled its African Americans, its large Ku Klux Klan chapter targeted striking railroad workers and in 1923 hanged one striker from a railroad bridge, herded the rest together, and escorted them to the Missouri line. The result was a sundown town so far as organized labor was concerned. The same thing happened in Bisbee, Arizona, known as a “white man’s camp” after it expelled its Chinese miners. On July 12, 1917, Bisbee expelled more than a thousand striking miners, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (“Wobblies”). Across America, working-class whites today complain about getting stopped and harassed by police in elite white suburbs.
74
Some sundown towns give a hard time even to white heterosexuals if they seem “different.” Based on bad experiences in Marlow, Oklahoma, poet Jodey Bateman generalized: “I think the stories of attempts at exclusion of hippies and hitch hikers would make another ‘sundown town’ book.... From this I believe that the ‘sundown town’ syndrome in very small towns is not just racism but a fear of all outsiders who don’t seem respectable enough.” A web post makes the same point about another Oklahoma town:
I am from a small town of 3,500, Stilwell, Oklahoma. I could not wait to get out of that place. The grape vine is as brutal as they get. I find in towns with no cultural diversity there is a cruelty toward folks that are different.... For the longest time there was a sign outside of town that read “Don’t Let The Sun Set On Your Black Ass.”
75
 
When a town goes sundown, the exclusionary mind-set stays for a long time and festers and generalizes. Whites in sundown towns speak authoritatively not only about African Americans, but also about leftists, Muslims, poor whites, union members, or welfare mothers—based on little or no firsthand experience with members of the class. Surely African Americans, Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, Seventh Day Adventists, gay Americans, lesbian Americans, hippie Americans, poor Americans, and mildly nonconforming Americans cannot all be “the problem.” Hence being unwelcoming to every one of those groups obviously cannot fix the problem.
Abraham Lincoln understood the threat to our democracy posed by anti-black prejudice and the likelihood that this sentiment would metastasize to attack other groups. In 1855 he wrote a letter to his lifelong friend Josh Speed, a clause of which has become famous:
As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
76
 
Surely Lincoln was right. Surely exclusion itself—not African Americans, not all these other groups—was and remains the problem. Readers might consider if
they
would feel comfortable in a typical sundown town—in Appleton, Wisconsin, say, before it cracked, or Stilwell, Oklahoma. The answer for nonwhites is obvious, but whites too can be at risk if they say the wrong thing, bring home a partner of the opposite sex who is of the wrong race, or
horribile dictu,
bring home a partner of the right race but the same sex. Even if they avoid these transgressions, would whites feel comfortable raising children in a sundown town where the only thing worse than having children who just don’t fit in might be having children who
do
?
Inculcating Prejudice in the Next Generation
 
Cognitive dissonance also helps explain how young whites wind up racist as they mature. Racism is not genetic, of course. Sundown towns help to maintain it. Many sundown towns chose American history textbooks that paid little attention to African Americans and Native Americans for as long as they could. They also preferred the old “Dick and Jane” readers in which all the characters were white. In the early 1970s, when textbooks became more multicultural, the head of the Follette Publishing Company observed, “The day of the all-white textbooks is just about over. The big publishers won’t fool with them any more, and all-white towns like Cicero, Illinois, just won’t be able to get them in the future.”
77
Despite the efforts of adults, childhood is not a straitjacket, and it is certainly possible for a white child to grow up in a sundown town and not become racist, or to transcend that racism through later life experiences and education. John Wooden, the famous UCLA basketball coach, grew up in notorious Martinsville, yet coached such famous African American basketball players as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Sidney Wicks. Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie opposed racism after he left Elwood, his Indiana sundown town (although he never did anything about it while he lived there). Nevertheless, teachers who try to convert white young people in sundown towns to an anti-racist position fight an uphill battle, at best succeeding one student at a time. All the while, when whites do not go to school with blacks and do not live with blacks—and everyone in town knows this results from whites’ choices and policies—it is hard for children to conclude that blacks are OK. Logically, they may infer quite the opposite.
Sometimes having been a sundown town can poison the atmosphere even after a school goes majority nonwhite. In 1991, Pam Sturgeon, who is Anglo and was president of the school board in Hawthorne, California, another Los Angeles suburb, said, “When I went to Hawthorne High, Hawthorne was a sundown town. All blacks had to be out of town by sundown or be in jail.” By 1991, Hawthorne High was majority black and Hispanic, with considerable conflict between those groups. The teaching staff was still largely Anglo, including many holdovers from its all-white days, and some of them contributed to the problem by refusing to teach works by such authors as Richard Wright and Maya Angelou. Sturgeon referred to the sundown legacy: “A lot of adults in my age group are fighting that bigotry within themselves.”
78
These considerations are perhaps clear for the classic independent sundown town like Martinsville or Sheridan. But if it is unhealthy to bring up children in such obviously racist environments, is it somehow healthier to raise them in sundown suburbs like Hawthorne before it desegregated, or worse yet, in such elite sundown suburbs as San Marino? There the social structure implies that it is correct to distance oneself not only from African Americans, but also from the white lower, working, and middle classes. Can that be good for children to learn? Yet every year thousands of white parents move
to
rather than
from
sundown suburbs, and they do so “for the children.” It would be far better to raise children in towns that do not declare in their very demography that “white is right.”
To some white parents, all this is obvious. A new homeowner in a former sundown county outside Atlanta said that many houses in her community were going up for sale “because the community is becoming more racially mixed and the white people are moving further south. The funny part is that I have been wanting to move because I can’t stand the thought of my future children growing up around such racism and narrowmindedness. So I suppose their moving is making my life easier.”
79
Independent Sundown Towns Limit the Horizons of Their Children
 
Independent sundown towns have another effect on their residents that has nothing to do with race, at least not directly: they narrow the horizons of children who come of age within them. It is an axiom of American small-town life that “youth goes elsewhere to become somebody.” Young people in independent sundown towns typically hold ambivalent feelings toward the outside world. Some decorate their bedrooms with posters of Michael Jordan (formerly) or Serena Williams (currently) or even a black rapper if they feel rebellious. They are very aware that the outside world differs from their circumscribed little world; indeed, like their parents, high school and college students from all-white towns and suburbs exaggerate the differences and routinely estimate that the population of the United States is 20 to 50% black.
80
So they are wary of the outside world and not sure they want to venture out there.
81
For the most part, most high school graduates in independent sundown towns don’t venture far. One of the first things I noticed in conversations with young people in these towns was their circumscribed aspirations. “Basically, they didn’t go anywhere,” a woman from Anna, Illinois, said about graduates from Anna-Jonesboro High School. Bill Donahue followed the high school students from Nickerson, a sundown town in central Kansas, when they took their class trip to Washington, D.C., in 2002. “There were a few Nickerson kids who yearned for a broader existence,” he reported. “For many students, though, the Washington trip would be . . . a first and last hurrah.” He talked with their teacher, Gary McCown, who said “with sad resignation” that he didn’t expect much worldly ambitions from students in Nickerson. “They look at what their parents do and what’s offered around Nickerson—mostly service jobs—and they think, ‘It’s not a bad life. It’s pleasant. You can walk into the grocery store and be greeted by people you know.’ ”
82

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