Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (64 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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When students from Pana High School, in central Illinois, do go on to college, “it’s mostly to Eastern or to the community college in Mattoon,” according to a former Pana resident. Eastern Illinois University, formerly Eastern Illinois State Teachers College, is located in Charleston, 50 miles east of Pana and almost as white. Mattoon is closer still. Although the University of Illinois, a world-famous institution, is only about an hour from Pana, few students make the drive even to check it out, and fewer still enroll; school personnel cannot recall any who chose the Chicago campus of the university. Students who venture out of state don’t venture far either, and afterward, most return to Pana. “They like the small-town life,” a recent high school graduate explained. It isn’t just preference for the known, however, but also fear of the unknown. “My sister is actually frightened,” said a woman who years ago moved to much larger—and interracial—Decatur. “Frightened of cities, frightened of anything she’s not familiar with.” Such fear marks many small-town residents, but in sundown towns the fear of African Americans looms foremost. Young adults in Pana granted me a certain respect upon learning that I grew up in Decatur: “It’s pretty rough over there, isn’t it?” Actually, it isn’t—they just
think
it is, believing Decatur to be heavily black.
83
When high school graduates from independent sundown towns do break out, it can be scary for them. Chantel Scherer, a 1988 graduate of Sullivan High School in central Illinois, put it this way:
I remember growing up in Sullivan where ALL outsiders were made to feel unwelcome.... I love where I grew up, but yes, this unrealistic living situation had its implications when those of us who lived there grew up and moved away. I remember being afraid of all the different people when I was 17 and a freshman at college. There were over 30,000 students representing a huge variety of people.
84
 
Many people have told how coming from a sundown town made it awkward when they tried to play a role in the larger society. For example, a recent graduate of Granite City High School in southwest Illinois said that his teachers would warn students before field trips to St. Louis, “Don’t tell people you’re from Granite City, and for God’s sake don’t tell people you’re from an all-white high school!” Of course, such an admonition could only make them
less
at ease in St. Louis, and their resulting parade of emotions—shame, fear, self-consciousness, discomfort—may provide additional reasons not to venture out next time.
85
The apprehension of residents of independent sundown towns about the outside world often prompts them to inflate their town beyond reason, perhaps to convince themselves they aren’t missing much and made the right choice. “They think they’re in the middle of the world,” my Decatur informant said, characterizing her Pana relatives. “They don’t know how small and how backward they are.” Deep down, this ethnocentrism is defensive and carries with it an element of soclexia. Deep down, residents of independent sundown towns know they do
not
live at the center of the universe. Their put-downs of the outside world are only a flimsy shield against that knowledge. Here is an obvious example, from someone using the identity Goneaviking, posted to the online discussion site alt.flame.niggers in May 2001:
Do you want some pictures of niggers hanged in the town square or what, like Fouke, Arkansas, for the “Nigger Don’t Let The Sun Set On Your Ass” [sign] in that town? . . . Lots of loggers and farmers down there richer than any nigger in the USA. 80 acres of pine 50 years old = 1,000,000 dollars. 23,000,000 niggers = pure shit.
 
In fact, Oprah Winfrey by herself probably has more net worth than all 814 residents of Fouke combined. In some part of his or her mind, Goneaviking surely knows that.
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Young people who do break out of the cocoon get derided for it by those back home. A student at the University of Illinois, Chicago, told how her friends back in her sundown hometown asked her, “Why would you go there?” She pointed out that Chicago was world-famous for architecture and music, among other things, but that persuaded no one. Friends of another student were more blunt: “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into? There’s colored people down there!” “Why would you want to live in Washington, D.C.?” inquired hometown friends of Kathy Spillman, from Tonawanda, a sundown town near Buffalo. They seem to have no idea, Spillman noted, that the Smithsonian museums, concerts at the Kennedy Center, theater all over town, and restaurants featuring cuisines from around the world might actually interest someone. Spillman has no patience when these queries cross the line into overt racism. “People from Tonawanda ask me, ‘How do you live with all those niggers down there?’ I reply, ‘I like having sex with them!’ ”
87
Many parents in independent sundown towns are content to have their children stay close to home. “They don’t seek opportunities to go to cultural events,” Susan Penny said about residents of Oblong, Illinois. “They don’t leave town except to go to sporting events.” They don’t expose their children to different milieux on vacations, instead choosing places such as Branson, Missouri, where the entertainment will be familiar and the audiences white. According to Penny, they don’t even try ethnic foods.
88
Elite Sundown Suburbs Limit Their Children in Other Ways
 
Young people in working-class sundown suburbs behave much like their compatriots in independent sundown towns. They stay close to home, unless service in the armed forces breaks through to enlarge their horizons, racially and occupationally. Young people in elite suburbs such as Beverly Hills, California; Edina, Minnesota; and Darien, Connecticut, display behavior that is both much the same and much different compared to that of their counterparts in independent towns and working-class suburbs. These young people have grown up with a sense of entitlement. The world is their oyster, and they intend to harvest its pearls. Their parents, especially their fathers, mostly don’t work in town but in corporate headquarters in the central city or suburban office parks. Their jobs take them across the country or across the world. Their frequent-flier miles take their families for vacations across the country or around the world. Parochial they aren’t.
Yet parochial they are. Families like these can go to Bali and never meet a Balinese family, because they stay in the Sanur Beach Hyatt. Like the residents of Pana or Tonawanda, young people from elite sundown suburbs cannot conceive that another place might be superior to their own hometowns; unlike the residents of Pana or Tonawanda, they are not secretly defensive about that. They are truly ethnocentric, which makes it hard for them to learn from other races and cultures. There is also evidence from social psychology that students who discuss issues in multiracial classes “display higher levels of complex thought” and are thus better prepared for college.
89
The residential segregation by occupation that marks elite sundown suburbs limits their offspring in another way: it enhances social distance. Since most of the people who work in these suburbs cannot afford to live in them—not just the maids and gardeners but also the teachers and police officers—these adults are not really available to children growing up there as any kind of positive role models. Many children in elite suburbs end up not only ignorant of such human activities as carpentry but subtly disdainful of them. They never encounter people in the working class on a plane of social equality. This limits their own occupational horizons and prompts them to feel that they have failed if they don’t make it into an elite white-collar occupation.
90
Sundown Towns Collect Racists
 
Thus far we have discussed effects sundown towns and suburbs have on people who live in them. Yet these communities not only create racists, but also attract whites who already believe in white supremacy. Ever since they began advertising themselves pridefully as all-white in the early 1900s, sundown towns have attracted people who want to live in all-white communities. Families have moved to Marlow, Oklahoma, “because there were no blacks in the schools there”; to Bishop in southeastern California, from Los Angeles, “because they don’t want to deal with ‘those people’ anymore”; and to Cullman, Alabama, from Birmingham, “to avoid integration.” Kelly Burroughs, a 1988 graduate of Havana High School in western Illinois, wrote in 2002:
I lived in Havana all my life and knew of no [African Americans] that lived there, and yes the rumor that you heard was a wide known fact amongst the community, that niggers were not welcome to purchase or live in our town. As to that holding true today I don’t know, I no longer live there, but if you find out please let me know so I can move back.
 
Burroughs went on to explain, “I would like to see more all white communities.... Would I like to live in an all white community, hell yes.”
91
Once racist whites congregate in sundown suburbs or towns, they tend to keep them all-white. Newcomers usually join in happily. As noted previously, a series of violent incidents by whites kept African Americans out of Wyandotte, Michigan, an independent sundown town that was becoming a suburb of Detroit around World War I. The largest single expulsion took place in the late summer of 1916. City assessor F. W. Liddle blamed that riot partly “on the influx of Detroiters who feeling the penetration of Negroes in Detroit sought Wyandotte real estate on the basis of their past knowledge of the [anti] Negro attitude in Wyandotte.”
92
Retirees are free to choose new communities in which to live, unencumbered by the need to commute to work. Often they select towns because they are all-white. One of the selling points for retiring to the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks has long been their racial composition. A 1972 survey of residents of Mountain Home, Arkansas, found that many were retirees from northern cities, especially Chicago, and chose Mountain Home partly because it was all-white. According to a 1980 article on Polk County, Arkansas, “It is not an uncommon experience in Polk County to hear a newcomer remark that he chose to move here because of ‘low taxes and no niggers.’”A store manager in the late 1990s in the Rogers, Arkansas, mall confirmed: “It was not uncommon for folks moving down here from the Chicago area to retire to openly remark that one attraction of the Rogers area was that there were no blacks.” A resident of Pana, Illinois, told that white Chicagoans also move there to retire, knowing its anti-black tradition, and have “radically racist ideas.”
93
Florida is of course the nation’s premier retirement destination, and northern newcomers—not just retirees—deserve much of the “credit” for that state’s extraordinary residential segregation. Carl Fisher, founder of Miami Beach, exemplified those outsiders. According to historian Alan Raucher, Fisher “was appalled by Jim Crow practices in Florida, but he excluded from his developments both blacks and the ‘wrong class’ of Jews.” The influx of northern retirees after World War II hardly opened communities in Florida to African Americans. On the contrary, Florida wound up with the highest levels of residential segregation in America. Recall D, the Index of Dissimilarity, which can vary from 0 (perfect integration) to 100 (complete apartheid). By 1960, Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Lakeland, Miami, Orlando, St. Petersburg, and West Palm Beach each had a D greater than 96, close to total apartheid. Scoring 98.1, Fort Lauderdale was the most segregated city in the nation. In contrast, Pensacola and Tampa—Florida cities that were not primarily destinations for northern retirees—scored closer to the southern average of “only” 90.9.
94
Racist Organizations Favor Sundown Towns
 
Sundown towns provided fertile recruiting fields for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and still do today. This might seem absurd: why would whites living in places that face no possible “threat” from other races mobilize to protect white supremacy? Again, cognitive dissonance supplies the explanation: living in all-white towns encourages people to support organizations advocating that kind of social structure. Whitley County, Indiana, had about 100 African Americans in 1880 but just 4 by 1920. In 1923, a Ku Klux Klan leader spoke at a large rally in the county seat: “I want to put all the Catholics, Jews, and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft.” According to Kathleen Blee, author of
Women of the Klan,
“the crowd applauded wildly.” In overwhelmingly white towns across America in the 1920s, the Klan held parades and rallies that drew the largest single gatherings these towns have had to this day.
95
(Portfolio 22 shows an example .)
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Down through the years, Klan leaders have often located in sundown towns. In Indiana in 1923, the Ku Klux Klan attempted to purchase Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, a sundown town, to be its official college. The Klan never came up with the money to complete the deal, however.
97
Edwin DeBarr, leader of the Oklahoma Klan, made his home in Norman, another sundown town, where he headed the School of Pharmacy at the University of Oklahoma and was the university’s first vice president. A headquarters of the Illinois KKK was Pekin, also a sundown town. Today’s Ku Klux Klan, much less centralized than the 1920s version, has one headquarters in Harrison, Arkansas, “up in the Ozark Mountains,” in the words of
The Economist,
“a part of Arkansas from which blacks vanished almost entirely in the early 1900s, and to which few have returned.” For a time another Klan center was in Ross, Ohio, a distant suburb of Cincinnati; the first African American family moved into Ross only around 2000. Other KKK groups have set up shop in sundown towns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, and other states.
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