The leadership of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions in the 1930s did campaign against the exclusion of African Americans in the auto industry and some other manufacturing areas. Otherwise, as labor unions gained in power during the 1930s and into the ’40s, the position of African Americans grew worse. In Missouri, according to
Missouri’s Black Heritage,
“white labor unions, traditionally hostile to black workers, became even more so during the 1930s.” Railroads had been the largest single employer of African Americans. To be sure, they had never hired blacks as locomotive engineers (by definition a “white job” requiring intelligence) but they had in some states as firemen (a “black job” involving shoveling coal into a hot firebox). Now unemployed whites shot at and killed black railroad firemen, making that a “white job” in many states. In 1932, white workers on just one railroad, the Illinois Central, killed ten African American trainmen in a campaign to drive them out of railroad jobs. By 1940, white unions had mostly thrown blacks out of all railroad work, except for Pullman porters, who supplied personal service to sleeping-car passengers.
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The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was largely under the thumb of white southerners so far as race relations was concerned, at least to 1938.
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The president never pushed for an anti-lynching bill, even though such a bill would merely have criminalized a crime and although Republicans did try to pass it. Housing the government built or subsidized for defense workers during World War II was deliberately more segregated even than the housing in surrounding communities. Indeed, under FDR the federal government built seven new towns that explicitly kept out African Americans. The armed forces also maintained rigid segregation throughout the war.
FDR’s economic programs were legally open to all Americans without regard to race, however, and they spoke to the poverty many African Americans endured during the Depression, even if they were not administered fairly. In 1941, Roosevelt also did set up the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which opened some defense plants to black workers. These policies, along with the symbolic gestures of Eleanor Roosevelt, the rise of the CIO, and processes set in motion by Adolf Hitler and his demise, led to some improvement in race relations beginning around 1940. That’s why I now date the Nadir as 1890–1940.
Setting the Stage for the Great Retreat
Thus the textbook archetype of uninterrupted progress falsifies the history of race relations between 1890 and the 1930s. It is almost unimaginable how racist the United States became during the Nadir. If African Americans in those years had experienced only white indifference, rather than overt opposition—often legal and sometimes violent—they could have continued to win the Kentucky Derby, deliver mail, and buy homes in “white” towns and neighborhoods. The ideology of white supremacy increasingly pervaded American culture during this era, more even than during slavery. Convinced by this ideology that African Americans were inferior, whites all across America asked, “Why even let them live in our community?”
The next chapter tells the result: the “Great Retreat” of African Americans from towns and rural areas across the North to black ghettoes in large northern cities. We live with the results—sundown towns and suburbs—to this day. They form the most visible residue on the American landscape of the nightmare called the Nadir.
PART II
The History of Sundown Towns
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The Great Retreat
In spite of the fact that the total Negro population of Indiana showed a fivefold increase between 1860 and 1900, some parts of the state showed little or no increase, while there was actually a decline in some places. In some instances this was due to a deliberate anti-Negro policy.... Some communities gained a reputation for being so hostile that no Negro dared stay overnight in them.
—Emma Lou Thornbrough,
The Negro in Indiana,
1957
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D
URING THE NADIR, deliberate policies, formal and informal, created America’s most complete form of residential segregation: the complete exclusion of African Americans—and sometimes other groups—from entire communities. As part of the deepening racism that swept through the United States after 1890, town after town outside the traditional South
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became intentionally all-white.
This happened in two waves. First, an epidemic of attacks against Chinese Americans across the West prompted what I call the “Chinese Retreat,” resulting in the concentration of that minority in Chinatowns in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a few other cities.
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Then whites began forcing African Americans out of towns and rural areas across the North. This resulted in what I hope becomes generally recognized as the “Great Retreat”—the withdrawal of African Americans from towns and counties across the United States to black ghettoes in large northern cities.
Aching to Be All-White
How a problem is formulated influences how it gets thought about and what qualifies as a solution. After 1890, as we have seen, most whites no longer viewed slavery and racism as the problem—slavery was over, after all, and racial discrimination had been made illegal under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Now African Americans themselves were seen as the problem, by white northerners as well as southerners. Outside the traditional South, few whites now argued that their town
should
be interracial, as Republicans had done during Reconstruction. Whites now ached to be rid of their African Americans. The editor of the
Cairo Bulletin
summarized the feelings of white residents of Cairo, at the southern tip of Illinois, in 1920:
“CAIRO DISAPPOINTED”
Cairo’s population on January 1, 1920, was 15,203, a gain of 655, or 4.5 per cent. This announcement was made by the Census bureau at Washington yesterday morning and transmitted to the
Bulletin
by Associated Press.
The Population in 1910 was 14,548.
Disappointment was expressed by some that the figure was not larger but those who knew how the population was made up were gratified at the showing. It is estimated that more than 2,000 Negroes have left Cairo since the last census, making the increase in the white population nearly 2,700 people.
Although “disappointed” that Cairo’s overall population had gained only 4.5%, white residents were “gratified”
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at its now whiter makeup.
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This line of thought was hardly unique to Cairo. During the first half of the twentieth century, towns competed by advertising how white they were; several Portfolio items show examples. In its
1907 Guide and Directory,
Rogers, Arkansas, bragged about what it had, including “seven churches, two public schools, one Academy, one sanitorium, ice plant and cold storage, etc.,” and also what it did not have: “Rogers has no Negroes or saloons.” Not to be outdone, nearby Siloam Springs claimed “Healing Waters, Beautiful Parks, Many Springs, Public Library,” alongside “No Malaria, No Mosquitoes, and No Negroes.” Whites in Cumberland County, Tennessee, forced out African Americans around 1900; in the 1920s, its main newspaper, the
Crossville Chronicle,
boasted, “No Mosquitoes, No Malaria, and No Niggers.”
White residents of much of Oklahoma and the “non-southern” parts of Texas adopted this rhetoric. Land owners and developers who were trying to entice whites to central and western Texas in the 1910s exhorted them to “leave the niggers, chiggers, and gravediggers behind you!” Terry County, Texas, advertised itself in 1908 as a sundown county:
Terry County is thirty miles square, situated eighty miles north from Stanton, on the T & P railroad, and about eighty southwest from Plainview, terminus of the Santa Fe; was organized in 1904, and has about 2,000 population. ALL WHITE, about 400 homes . . .
Comanche County, Texas, drove out its African Americans in 1886. It was delighted also to have no Jews, almost no Mexicans, and few immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. After the 1940 U.S. Census, Representative Bill Chambers announced that according to a congressional report, “Comanche County, long famous for many unique advantages, has gained national distinction, for being the home of the purest Anglo-Saxon population of any county in the United States.” Among its 19,245 residents, just 28 were born in countries other than the United States, including only 2 from Mexico, both listed as white.
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Many towns in the Midwest were likewise thrilled to be all-white. After bragging about high literacy and home ownership rates, the 1936
Owosso and Shiawassee County Directory
in Owosso, Michigan, declared, “There is not a Negro living in the limits of Owosso’s incorporated territory.” Mentone, Indiana, bragged, “With a population of 1,100, Mentone has not a Catholic, foreigner, Negro, nor Jew living in the city.” In its 1954 pamphlet titled “Royal Oak: Michigan’s Most Promising Community,” the Detroit suburb’s Chamber of Commerce proudly proclaimed, “The population is virtually 100% white.”
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The Far West was equally smitten with the idea. Fliers for Maywood Colony, a huge development entirely surrounding the town of Corning, California, trumpeted:
GOOD PEOPLE
In most communities in California you’ll find Chinese, Japs, Dagoes, Mexicans, and Negroes mixing up and working in competition with the white folks. Not so at Maywood Colony. Employment is not given to this element.
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Thus except in the traditional South, driving African Americans out and keeping them out became the proper civic-minded thing to do, in the thinking of many whites of all social strata between about 1890 and 1940, lasting until at least 1968. Doing so seemed a perfectly reasonable solution once African Americans were defined as “the problem.” Spurred by the ideological developments of the Nadir, towns with no black residents—including some with little prospect of attracting any—now passed ordinances or informally agreed that African Americans were not to be allowed after sundown. Where blacks did live, whites now forced them to flee from town after town, county after county, even entire regions—the Great Retreat. Threat of mob attack dangled over every black neighborhood in the nation (as it had earlier over most Chinese neighborhoods) as an ever-present menace. In short, an epidemic of sundown towns and counties swept America between 1890 and about 1940.
The Chinese Retreat
Before African Americans made their Great Retreat, the Chinese provided something of a dress rehearsal. Until about 1884, Chinese Americans lived in virtually every town in the West.
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They were farmers and domestic servants, played a major role in the California fishing industry, and mined gold along streams in countryside newly wrested from the Indians. Hundreds of Chinese Americans mined coal in Wyoming in the 1870s. Their role in building the railroad and many other construction projects is well known. Republicans usually defended their right to immigrate to America and compete for employment.
Capitalists benefited from the competition, of course, but white workers did not, frequently resulting in sundown towns. Between 1885 and about 1920, dozens of communities in the West, including towns and counties as far inland as Wyoming and Colorado and cities as large as Seattle and Tacoma, drove out their entire Chinese American populations—some briefly, some for decades.
Rock Springs, Wyoming, built at a coal mine owned by the Union Pacific that was the biggest single source of coal for its locomotives, was the site of one of the earliest expulsions. The railroad had hired hundreds of Chinese American miners, most of whom lived in a separate neighborhood, “Chinatown.” On September 2, 1885, led by the Knights of Labor, at least 150 white miners and railroad workers, most of them armed, gave the Chinese “one hour to pack their belongings and leave town,” according to historian Craig Storti. Then they attacked. “The Chinamen were fleeing like a herd of hunted antelope, making no resistance. Volley upon volley was fired after the fugitives,” Storti tells. It was chaotic: “Most carried nothing at all, not even their money.” Many hid in their homes, but the rioters then burned Chinatown, incinerating those who were hiding there. Storti quotes an eyewitness:
The stench of burning human flesh was sickening and almost unendurable, and was plainly discernible for more than a mile along the railroad both east and west.... Not a living Chinaman—man, woman, or child—was left in the town where 700 to 900 had lived the day before, and not a single house, shanty, or structure of any kind that had ever been inhabited by a Chinaman was left unburned.
Those who fled were hardly better off, because the temperature dropped below freezing that night, so scores died from exposure. According to Bill Bryson, this persecution in Rock Springs led to the expression “He doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance.” Copycat riots and expulsions then swept the West, including almost every town in Wyoming; Cripple Creek and later Sil-verton, Colorado; Hells Canyon, Oregon; Grass Creek and Corinne, Utah; and communities in most other western states.
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