Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (98 page)

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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39
Villa Grove native, 9/2002.
40
Gentry Journal-Advance,
reprinted in
Rogers Democrat,
10/17/1906.
41
Maren A. Stein, “The Agricommercial Tradition,” in Daniel J. Elazar, ed.,
Cities of the Prairie Revisited
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 229; Susan Welch et al.,
Race and Place
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 85–92.
42
Joe T. Darden, “African American Residential Segregation,” in Robert D. Bullard et al.,
Residential Apartheid
(Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, 1994), 82.
43
Five years later, Park Forest stopped excluding blacks.
44
William H. Whyte Jr.,
The Organization Man
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 311.
45
Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma
(New York: Harper & Row, 1944), lxxiii; Robert Terry,
For Whites Only
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 41.
46
Colony, Alabama, has long been about one-eighth white, according to a librarian in nearby Cullman. In 1960 whites made up about half of the population in Chevy Chase Heights, Pennsylvania. Of course, to white residents in the nearly all-white neighboring town of Indiana, African Americans seemed in the overwhelming majority. In 1930 Colp, Illinois, had 1,250 residents, including 397 whites. Today it has a white mayor. Nevertheless, a white woman who lived and taught school in Herrin in the 1980s assured me in 2001 that Colp was all-black. Again, believing such a fallacy helped her to rationalize the fact that for decades Herrin was all-white, except for live-in maids. Over the years, whites have made up one-tenth to one-quarter of North Amityville’s population, on Long Island, and Hispanics are now about one-eighth. When residents of the sundown towns near Boley charged that Boley made whites leave at sundown, “O. H. Bradley, editor of the
Boley Progress,
insisted that many whites lived near Boley, several shopped there both day and night, and most used it as their P.O.,” according to historian Norman Crockett. Crockett does admit that whites were discouraged from buying real estate in Boley and Mound Bayou. Poet Jodey Bateman “was told by a black man from Tatum that up until 1972, whites could not stay overnight there.” Tatum is a tiny hamlet of fewer than 200 people in southern Oklahoma; Bateman notes drily, “I don’t know if whites ever tried to visit Tatum at night.” Certainly neither I nor other whites had any difficulty living in Mound Bayou around 1970. Moreover, when a black community
has
kept out whites, sometimes it did so to avoid white retaliation. Leaders knew that one reason whites allowed their town to exist was because its all-black nature legitimized segregation in white eyes. Hence some “black” towns and townships maintained a low profile about their openness to all. See Patrick Clark, e-mail, 7/2002; Myrdal,
An American Dilemma,
619; Norman Crockett,
The Black Towns
(Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 74–75; Jodey Bateman, e-mail, 7/2002.
47
Kenilworth realtor, 10/2002; Tulsa resident, 9/2000.
48
Richard J. Hermstein and Charles Murray,
The Bell Curve
(New York: Free Press, 1994), Chapters 2–16.
49
Some years ago the Educational Testing Service, which once called the SAT the Scholastic Aptitude Test, dropped “Aptitude”; they could not defend the claim that the test measured “aptitude for college work.” ETS renamed it the Scholastic Assessment Test, but perhaps due to the obvious redundancy, more recently ETS simply calls it the SAT. This has the added advantage of not drawing attention to the name change; most people still think the acronym means “Scholastic Aptitude Test.”
50
Robert Coles,
Privileged Ones
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 259; cf. 296–97.
51
Thomas P. Bailey,
Race Orthodoxy in the South
(New York: Neale, 1914), 41.
52
Lynne Duke, “But Some of My Best Friends Are . . . ,”
Washington Post
National Weekly Edition, 1/14/1991.
53
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton,
American Apartheid
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 94, citing Stanley B. Greenberg,
Report on Democratic Defection
(Washington, DC: Analysis Group, 1985), 13–18, 28.
54
Oak Lawn librarian, 1997; Cosseboom,
Grosse Pointe,
56.
55
Leonard Steinhorn, “Is America Integrated?” History News Network, 12/23/2002,
hnn.us/articles/1174.html
, 5/2004; Frederick Douglass,
Douglass Monthly
3 (10/1860): 337.
56
Dongola genealogist, 6/2003; Arkansas secretary, 9/2002.
57
Jane Adams,
The Transformation of Rural Life, 1890–1990
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 227.
58
Darla Craft, e-mail via
Classmates.com
, 10/2002; undergraduate at University of the Ozarks, 9/2002; Herrin native in Decatur, 9/2001; Donahue, “Wrestling with Democracy,” 26.
59
Professor, Western Michigan University, 11/2000; undergraduates, University of Illinois–Chicago, 9/2001; André Cavalier, 7/1998; Diane Hershberger, 11/2000.
60
Karns, e-mail, 5/2002.
61
Norman Crockett,
The Black Towns
(Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 74; W. L. Payne, “Okemah’s Night of Terror,” in Hazel Ruby McMahan, ed.,
Stories of Early Oklahoma,
on Rootsweb,
rootsweb.com/~okokfusk/cities.htm
, 5/2003; Anna native, e-mail, 1/2003.
62
Arthur F. Raper,
The Tragedy of Lynching
(New York: Dover, 1970 [1933]), 426.
63
Karns, e-mail, 5/2002; Glendale native, e-mail, 11/2003.
64
Mark Singer, “Who Killed Carol Jenkins?”
New Yorker,
1/7/2002, 25.
65
Ibid., 26.
66
Ibid.; 1987 Indiana University residence advisor, e-mail, 11/2002; Alan Boehm, e-mail, 6/2002.
67
“Martinsville’s Sad Season,”
Sports Illustrated,
2/23/1998, 24.
68
Singer, “Who Killed Carol Jenkins?”; Bill Hewitt, “Slow Justice,”
People Weekly
58, 3, July 15, 2002: 89ff.,
web3.infotrac.galegroup.com/
. . . , #A88718549, 11/2002; Jeff Herlig, “Dateline Diversity” radio program, 11/1/2002,
words-at-work.com/dateline.htm
, 1/2003; Stephen Stuebner, “Extremists Undermine a Small Town’s Efforts to Overcome a Legacy of Racism,”
Intelligence Report
107 (2002),
indianacofcc.org
, 12/2003.
69
Hmongs are refugees from highland Laos, many of whom had enlisted to fight on our side during the Vietnam War in both Vietnam and Laos.
70
John Lee, “Three Incidents at HS Connected,”
Appleton Post-Crescent,
10/7/1999; Kathy W. Nufer, “Racial Tensions Mount at North,”
Post-Crescent,
9/24/1999.
71
Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay in Laramie, Wyoming, and Laramie was never a sundown town. African Americans, too, have showed intolerance toward gays.
72
“Anti-Gay Extremism,” posted at
Yahoo.com
News Community Headlines, 7/18/1998, and followup by CWBarton, 7/23/1998; New Hope resident, 4/2001; Mt. Rainier gay/lesbian page, hometown. aol. com/glmr2 0 712/page2. html, 10/2002.
73
Shelly H. Kelly, e-mail, 7/2002; Claudia Kolker, “Santa Fe, Texas: Town Struggles to Outgrow Hate,”
San Francisco Chronicle,
9/11/2000.
74
Brooks Blevins, “The Strike and the Still,”
Arkansas Historical Quarterly
52, 4 (1993): 405–20; Charles C. Alexander,
The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 62; Katie Benton-Cohen, e-mail, 8/2003.
75
Jodey Bateman, e-mail, 7/2002; post by cyberella5 at
virtualtourist.com/f/p/1489/?r=ae52
, 5/2002.
76
Abraham Lincoln, letter to Joshua Speed, 8/24/1855, Abraham Lincoln Online, showcase.
netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm
, 5/2003.
77
Paul Delaney, “Use of ‘Multi-Ethnic Textbooks’ Grows,”
New York Times,
6/7/1971.
78
Elaine Woo and Kim Kowsky, “Schools’ Racial Mix Boils Over,”
Los Angeles Times,
6/14/1991, via LexisNexis.
79
Forsyth County resident, e-mail, 5/2002.
80
The correct figure is less than 13%.
81
Joseph Amato, review of Richard Davies,
Main Street Blues
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press), in
American Historical Review,
2/2000, 236–37; student estimates from University of Vermont undergraduates, introductory sociology, 1990–96.
82
Longtime resident of Anna now at Northern Illinois University, 10/2002; Donahue, “Wrestling with Democracy,” 27.
83
Native of Pana in Decatur, 10/2001; Pana fast-food workers and other residents, 10/2001.
84
Chantel Scherer, e-mail via
Classmates.com
, 12/2002.
85
Granite City High School graduate (c.1995) at Ripon College, 4/2002.
86
Oblong native, 4/2000; post by goneaviking to
uncensored-news.com/alt.flame.niggers
, 5/23/2001.
87
Pana native in Decatur, 10/2001; undergraduates, University of Illinois–Chicago, 9/2001; Kathy Spillman, 12/2000.
88
Oblong native, 4/2000.
89
Anthony L. Antonio et al., “Effects of Racial Diversity on Complex Thinking in College Students,”
ingenta.com/journals/browse/bpl/psci
, summarized in “How Racial Diversity Helps Students to Think,”
Chronicle of Higher Education,
e-mail, 8/4/2004.
90
Coles,
Privileged Ones
, 416–18.
91
Oklahoma informant, e-mail, 5/2003; former Bishop resident, e-mail, 8/2002; Cullman native, e-mail, 5/2002; Kelly Burroughs, e-mail via
Classmates.com
, 11/2002.
92
Edwina M. DeWindt, “Wyandotte History; Negro,” typescript, 1945, in Bacon Library, Wyandotte, MI, 22.
93
“The Real Polk County,” 1/9(?)/1980; Gordon D. Morgan, “Black Hillbillies of the Arkansas Ozarks,” Department of Sociology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 1973, 155–59; wife of store manager, e-mail, 8/2002; Pana resident, 10/2001.
94
Alan Raucher, review of Mark S. Foster,
Castles in the Sand,
in
Journal of American History,
3/2002, 1574; Mark S. Foster,
Castles in the Sand
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 159–60, 209–10; Karl Taeuber,
Negroes in Cities
(Chicago: Aldine, 1965), 32–37.
95
Among the many overwhelmingly white towns that hosted huge KKK rallies were Milo, Maine; Montpelier, Vermont; Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; Brookston and Valparaiso, Indiana; Fisher and Palestine, Illinois; Grand Saline, Texas; Grants Pass, Oregon; and several suburbs of Los Angeles.
96
Kathleen M. Blee,
Women of the Klan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 172.
97
Blee,
Women of the Klan,
213, believes some clause in the original charter of the university may have prevented the sale. Others hold that the growing split between the national Klan headquarters in Georgia and the Indiana leadership may have prompted the national organization to withhold the funds.
98
Lance Trusty, “All Talk and No ‘Kash,’ ”
Indiana Magazine of History
82, 1 (1986): 19, 21; James Loewen,
Lies Across America
(New York: New Press, 1999), 238; “Still Riding, with a Bigger Banner,”
The Economist,
4/8/2000, 29–30; Transylvania University student, 10/2001; Central Michigan University student, 10/2002; Texas A&M staffer, e-mail, 6/2000.
99
There is debate about whether Eureka Springs was a sundown town or whether its African Americans departed voluntarily. However, according to a man who lived in Eureka Springs in the mid-1970s, the town has some oral tradition that after the last African American man “died or left town, his house was burned to the ground and that no blacks had lived in the county since that incident” (former Eureka resident, e-mail, 6/2002).
100
I have not confirmed Belmont, but its demographics were stark. In 1930, for example, among 21,748 people in the suburb lived 16 African Americans, 15 of whom were female. None was younger than the age bracket 15–19; surely the fifteen women were live-in maids and the other one was a live-in butler or gardener.
101
John Higham,
Strangers in the Land
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 180; Aviva Kempner,
The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg,
PBS-TV documentary, 4/4004; Michael Tomasky, “New York’s Finest,”
New York Review of Books,
2/12/2004, 28; Michael Dougan,
Arkansas Odyssey
(Little Rock: Rose, 1994), 608; former Eureka resident, e-mail, 6/2002; Robert Welch, “A Letter to the South,” John Birch Society,
jbs.org/visitor/focus/refute/letter_south.htm
, 5/2003; Tony Platt, e-mail, 9/2002; Stephen Kercher, review of
Joseph McCarthy: A Modern Tragedy,
exhibit at Outagamie Museum,
Journal of American History,
12/2002, 1004.

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