Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (9 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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“From house to house in the colored section they went,” conclude Froelich and Zimmermann, “sometimes threatening, sometimes using the lash, always issuing the order that hereafter, ‘no Nigger had better let the sun go down on ’em.’ ”
30
Three or four wealthy families sheltered their African American servants, who stayed on for a few more years. Then in 1909, another African American was charged with a crime—armed robbery, possibly also including rape—and had to be spirited out of town to avoid a lynch mob. “This mob proved the last straw for even the most resilient of the 1905 survivors,” in Zimmermann’s words. “Fearing for their lives, most of Harrison’s [remaining] black residents fled town the night of January 28.” Harrison remained a sundown town at least until 2002.
31
African Americans, Not Racism, Become “the Problem”
 
Harrison exemplifies how the increasing racism of the Nadir led to the expulsion of African Americans. How were northern whites to explain to themselves their acquiescence in the white South’s obliteration of the political and civil rights of African Americans in places such as Harrison? How could they defend their own increasing occupational and social discrimination against African Americans?
The easiest way would be to declare that African Americans had never deserved equal rights in the first place. After all, went this line of thought, conditions had significantly improved for African Americans. Slavery was over. Now a new generation of African Americans had come of age, never tainted by the “peculiar institution.” Why were they still at the bottom? African Americans themselves must be the problem.
They
must not work hard enough, think as well, or have as much drive, compared to whites.
32
The Reconstruction amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) provided African Americans with a roughly equal footing in America, most whites felt. If they were still at the bottom, it must be their own fault.
33
Ironically, the worse the Nadir got, the more whites blamed blacks for it. The increasing segregation and exclusion led whites to demonize African Americans and their segregated enclaves. African Americans earned less money than whites, had lower standing in society, and no longer held public office or even voted in much of the nation. Again, no longer could this obvious inequality be laid at slavery’s doorstep, for slavery had ended around 1865. Now “white Northerners came to view blacks as disaffected, lazy, and dangerous rabble,” according to Heather Richardson. “By the 1890s, white Americans in the North concurred that not only was disfranchisement justified for the ‘Un-American Negro,’ but that he was by nature confined to a state of ‘permanent semi-barbarism.’ ”
34
To this day, public opinion polls show that many nonblack Americans—especially those who live in towns that have few African Americans whom they might get to know as individuals—still believe these generalizations, at least when they are phrased more politely. To be sure, the theme of African Americans as problems doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Whites forced out African American from major league baseball not because they couldn’t play well, but because they could. Whites expelled black jockeys from the Kentucky Derby not because they were incompetent, but because they won 15 of the first 28 derbies. They drove blacks out of the job of postal carrier so they could do it themselves, not because blacks couldn’t do it. The foregoing seems obvious, but when it comes to housing, even today, deep inside white culture as a legacy from the Nadir is the sneaking suspicion that African Americans
are
a problem, so it
is
best to keep them out.
35
History, Popular Culture, and Science Legitimize the Nadir
 
During the Nadir, America took a wrong turn, North as well as South. In fact, we took perhaps the wrongest turn we have ever taken as a nation, a turn so wrong that we have not yet been able to comprehend all that it has done to us. In these years white Americans who never met an African American became racist anyway, because stereotypes of white superiority resonated throughout American culture. Historians played a major role. After the final overthrow of Reconstruction in 1890, historians converted the era into a tale of oppressed whites, beset by violence and corruption. As Harvard’s Albert Bushnell Hart put it in 1905:
Every [southern] legislature had Negro members, and some of them a Negro majority.
36
Most of these Negroes were ignorant men who were controlled by two classes of whites, called “scalawags” (southern Republicans) and “carpetbaggers” (northern men who had gone down South to get into politics). Taxes were increased, debts run up, and the extravagance and corruption of some of the legislatures surpass belief.
 
Such interpretations so distorted the historical record that by 1935 black scholar W. E. B. DuBois lamented, “We have got to the place where we cannot use our experiences during and after the Civil War for the uplift and enlightenment of mankind.”
37
Even today, these interpretations from the Nadir still distort high school American history textbooks, including their portrayal of such men as John Brown and Ulysses Grant.
38
During the Nadir, minstrel shows came to dominate our popular culture. They had been invented before the Civil War but flourished after 1890. In our electronic age, it is hard to imagine how prevalent minstrel shows became. “By the turn of the century,” in the words of historian Joseph Boskin, “practically every city, town, and rural community had amateur minstrel groups.” Minstrel shows both caused and reflected the Nadir. As black poet James Weldon Johnson put it, minstrel shows “fixed the tradition of the Negro as only an irresponsible, happy-go-lucky, wide-grinning, loud-laughing, shuffling, banjo-playing, singing, dancing sort of being.” James De Vries, who studied Monroe, Michigan, in this era, wrote that minstrel shows portrayed African Americans as “the complete antithesis of all those qualities of character valued as important and worthwhile by white Americans.” In small towns across the North, where few blacks existed to correct this impression, these stereotypes provided the bulk of white “knowledge” about what African Americans were like.
39
In the twentieth century, movies gradually replaced minstrelsy and its offspring, vaudeville. Unfortunately for race relations, the first grand epic,
The Birth of a Nation,
released by D. W. Griffith in 1915, right in the heart of the Nadir, was perhaps the most racist major movie ever made. It lionized the first Ku Klux Klan (1865–75) as the savior of white southern civilization and fueled a nationwide Klan revival. Near the end of the Nadir, in 1936,
Gone with the Wind
sold a million hardbound books in its first month; the book and the resulting film, the highest-grossing movie of all time, further convinced whites that noncitizenship was appropriate for African Americans.
40
Also in the new century, Social Darwinism morphed into eugenics, which provides the ultimate rationale for blaming the victim. Not only are the poor at the bottom owing to their own fault, they cannot even be helped, eugenics tells us, because the fault lies in their genes. Anthropologists measured average brain sizes of people around the world and concluded that whites’ brains were larger. According to historian Richard Weiss, “Organized eugenics got its immediate impetus at a meeting of the American Breeders Association in 1904”—and we are not talking about dogs. In 1909, Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot, denounced “any mixture of racial stocks.” He and Madison Grant agreed that white Anglo-Saxons deserved to be on top, but both worried that they might not stay there unless they took steps to keep other races out, which is why Grant wrote
The Passing of the Great Race
in 1916. Margaret Sanger, patron saint of birth control, was another stalwart believer in eugenics who admitted, “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” In the 1920s, the
Saturday Evening Post
began to quote and commend Grant’s ideas. Grant, a stalwart in the American Breeders Association and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, framed a bill restricting immigration that reached Congress in 1924.
41
Anti-Semitism increased as well. During World War I, the U.S. Army for the first time considered Jews “a special problem whose loyalty to the US was open to question.” Along with other government agencies (and the Ku Klux Klan), the Military Intelligence Department mounted a campaign against Jewish immigrants that helped convince Congress to pass Grant’s restrictive immigration bill in 1924. In the 1920s and ’30s, many state legislatures passed sterilization laws for people of “dubious stock.” These people included isolated rural folk, interracial people, the poor, and those with low IQ test scores.
42
IQ tests and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) came to the fore at this time, as the handmaidens of eugenic theory. In 1910, Henry Goddard began administering intelligence tests as indicators of fitness for citizenship to would-be immigrants at Ellis Island. Around that time Louis Terman modified Alfred Binet’s IQ test into the Stanford-Binet IQ Test. Robert Yerkes developed the U.S. Army’s “alpha test” and used it during World War I. Carl Brigham produced the SAT in the early 1920s. Each of these psychometri-cians believed that intelligence was innate, some races had more than others, and white Anglo-Saxons came out on top. Their tests “proved” as much—blacks, Jews, Slavs, and Italians did poorly. Brigham later underwent a dramatic but little-publicized change of heart, concluding that test scores mostly reflected social background and experience, but the damage had been done.
Other branches of social and biological science chimed in. E. A. Ross, president of the American Sociological Association, Henry F. Osborn, the paleontologist who named
Tyrannosaurus rex,
and zoologist Louis Agassiz claimed that their respective sciences proved that blacks were inferior. Physical anthropologists who believed that the “black race” evolved earlier than the “white race” concluded that blacks were therefore more primitive, while those who believed that blacks developed later than whites also concluded that blacks were more primitive, being “closer to the ape.”
43
The Nadir Continued to About 1940
 
From 1913 to 1921, Woodrow Wilson was president; he was surely the most racist president since Andrew Johnson. A southerner, Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist who used his power as chief executive to segregate the federal government. If blacks were doing the same tasks as whites, such as typing letters or sorting mail, they had to be fired or placed in separate rooms or at least behind screens. Wilson segregated the U.S. Navy, which had not previously been segregated; now blacks could only be cooks, firemen, and dishwashers at sea. He appointed southern whites to political offices previously held by African Americans. His legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government stayed segregated into the 1950s and beyond.
44
Triggered by the astounding success of
The Birth of a Nation,
the Ku Klux Klan rose again after 1915, only this time the Klan was national, not southern. It dominated state politics for a time in the 1920s in Oregon, Colorado, Oklahoma, Indiana, Georgia, and Maine, and had great influence throughout rural and small-town America. In some communities, especially towns that had already driven out their African Americans, the KKK targeted white ethnics, such as (Catholic) Italians, Poles, or Jews. Klan support was another reason why Congress passed and President Coolidge signed the 1924 immigration act to restrict newcomers from just about everywhere except northern and western Europe.
It’s hard to date the end of this terrible era precisely. According to W. E. B. DuBois, “The election of 1928 probably represented the lowest point to which the influence of the Negro in politics ever fell in the United States since enfranchisement.” He thus implies that politically at least, things got better after about 1930. The idea that whites had every right to bar nonwhites from “white” occupations and communities hardly died in 1930, however, and the Nadir hardly ended in that year.
45
On the contrary, another group faced its own crisis in the 1930s, as the 1930 census reclassified Mexican Americans from white to nonwhite. This helped make the 1930s a mini-nadir for Chicano-Anglo relations. Several California towns followed up on the census reclassification by segregating Chicanos from Anglos in their public schools. During the Depression, the United States by official policy deported thousands of Mexican workers and their families, including many Mexican Americans, to Mexico. According to a survey of race relations across Colorado published by the University of Colorado Latino/a Research and Policy Center in 1999, “In 1936, a huge banner flew in [Greeley]: ‘All Mexican and other aliens to leave the State of Colorado at once by order of Colorado State vigilantes.’ ”
46
The Great Depression also intensified the pressure on African Americans. “Menial public service jobs such as street-cleaning and garbage collection, to which ‘no self-respecting white man’ would stoop a decade or so ago, are rapidly becoming exclusively white men’s jobs,” wrote sociologists Willis Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson in 1934. In some towns whites now drove blacks from the position of hotel waiter and porter. Black barbers (for whites) had been under attack for decades, and more barbers were forced out as the Depression set in. In 1929, white elevator operators replaced blacks in Jefferson City, Missouri, a setback that symbolized the difficulties African Americans faced throughout the country. After all, the position of elevator operator, while it has its ups and downs, is hardly a skilled or prestigious job. If whites could now deem blacks unfit for
that
job, what might be left for them? Certainly not the National Football League: the NFL, which had allowed black players and even a black coach in the 1920s, banned African Americans in 1933.
47

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