Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (38 page)

Read Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism Online

Authors: James W. Loewen

The
Daily News
also ran a front-page news story on the event. The next day, the Rogers Chamber of Commerce called a special meeting of its Publicity and Public Relations Committee. The Chamber called in the reporter and editor of the
Daily News,
the manager of the Victory Theatre, where the concert had taken place, and the chief of police, Hugh Basse, who had been quoted in the news story. The purpose of the meeting was to challenge the newspaper coverage. Singled out for attention was the statement about the signs. The newspaper defended its statement as historically accurate and necessary background for the editorial. The committee contended that the statement was “unnecessary even if a substantiated fact in view of the possible repercussions it might have in the future.”
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The Rogers Historical Museum obtained and saved the formal two-page “Committee Report” resulting from this meeting. Among its seven conclusions:
• Local persons giving quotes to the newspaper should be more careful in the wording of such statements to prevent misinterpretation.
• The conference with the newspaper representatives was fruitful in that the committee feels a better job of reporting the news will be done.
• A written report [will] be filed with the Board of Directors requesting official Chamber action to bring this matter to the attention of supervisory personnel of the Reynolds chain.
• The Chamber, through this committee, [will] keep a close watch on future news reporting and take any appropriate action should further detriment to the City of Rogers be detected.
The chilling intent is obvious.
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Chambers of Commerce still spread disinformation about their towns’ sundown policies. A Chamber official in Corbin, Kentucky, a town that drove out its black population in 1919, pretended to be mystified by Corbin’s whiteness in the 1991 documentary
Trouble Behind
: “The [African Americans] have chosen to live in either Barbourville, Williamsburg, or north of Clarenton-Corbin . . . but their reasons for that decision—I have no knowledge of that.” Certainly Corbin cannot be at fault: “I don’t feel there is any more prejudice in Corbin, Kentucky, than you’ll find in any other community in the country.” This man is intelligent enough to know that other Corbin residents will tell the filmmaker that no African American should move into Corbin, thus exposing the falseness of his statement; in fact, some young white males did just that in other footage in the film. Nevertheless, he thinks it best to dissimulate about Corbin’s racism, undoubtedly because it’s not good for Corbin’s image.
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Historical Societies Help to Suppress the Truth
 
The Rogers Historical Museum is unusual among local historical societies and museums in telling the truth about its community’s racist past and saving material that documents that past. The usual response I got when I asked at local libraries, historical societies, and museums if they saved the sundown sign from their community or a photo of it was “Why would we do that?” while they laughed out loud.
Writing historical societies proved particularly useless for most towns. Since I could hardly visit all the probable sundown towns and counties in the United States, I wrote or e-mailed the historical societies in many of them. Unfortunately, like the Chamber of Commerce in Corbin, historical societies don’t like to say anything bad about their towns or counties. For example, Shirley De Young, director of the Mower County Historical Society in southern Minnesota, said she had no information confirming Austin and Mower County as sundown communities. Actually, it is common knowledge in Austin that it was sundown from at least 1922 to the 1980s. In 1890, Mower County, of which Austin is the seat, had 36 African Americans, a number surpassed by only six counties in the state. The county then witnessed probably four expulsions of its African Americans: in the late 1890s, shortly before 1920, in 1922 (prompted by a railroad strike, described below), and between 1924 and 1933 (described below). Much later, historian Peter Rachleff studied the famous Hormel strike of 1985–86 in Austin. He wrote:
It was noticeable that there were exactly two Black workers among the workforce, both of whom were young Africans who had come to the U.S. to attend college and had run out of money. This seemed rather stunning, given the high percentage of African American workers in the meat-packing industry in Omaha, Chicago, KC [Kansas City], etc. When some of us asked about this, union members and retirees recounted a local tale—that in 1922, during the railroad shopmen’s strike, a number of African American strikebreakers had been brought in by rail and housed inside the RR roundhouse. A crowd of strikers, family members, and local supporters laid siege to the roundhouse and the strikebreakers fled for their lives, many of them jumping into the Cedar River and swimming to safety . . . or drowning. No African American had lived in Austin since 1922, we were told.
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Thanks to historian Roger Horowitz, who did oral history in Austin, we have a detailed account of Austin’s last two expulsions. He taped John Winkols, a veteran labor leader, in 1990.
One time Hormel hired 40 niggers . . . and they put ’em all in the plant at one time.
And at that time, you know, they used to scab, you know. Really not their fault, but the companies that hired them scabbed them. Well, first of all, they hired them when the roundhouses were on strike, they hired a boxcar full of’em . . .
My cousin was up here, and we went to a dance in town.... And so my cousin says, “You want to go over to the roundhouse? We’re gonna chase the niggers out of town.”
I said, “What’d
they
do?” . . .
And he said, “They’re scabbing on the workers in the roundhouse, because they’re on strike.”
“OK, let’s go!” [I] had a piece of shovel handle; we went.... We surrounded them at the roundhouse and broke it in and went in to the roundhouse. The sheriff or the cops couldn’t do nothing because hell, they were the same as the workers. We went in there and run the niggers out. Hit ’em over the head, you know, and tell them to “get goin”! . . . Albert’s Creek runs through there, and some of them run that way, and we was after ’em, chased them, and one of them fell in the creek. He got up on his feet and he says, “Lordy mercy, if I ever gets on my feet again, I’ll
never
come in this town again!”
Then Hormel hired them forty. We run
them
out of town . . . somewhere between ’24 and ’33. . . . After supper we got clubs and went down there and we run
them
out. After that they didn’t come in no more, because they knew they couldn’t hire them.
 
After the last expulsion, as his last sentence implied, Austin stayed sundown.
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De Young’s professed ignorance of what was commonly known in Austin is typical of historical society officials. A high school history teacher in northern Indiana wrote that Hobart, Indiana, still had a sundown sign in the 1970s; three other longtime Hobart residents corroborated that Hobart was a sundown town. One Hobart native told of hearing “of a black family attempting to move in and their car being firebombed” in 1980 or 1981. Nevertheless, Elin Christianson, president of the Hobart Historical Society, wrote, “We have received your letter about your research into ‘sundown towns.’ We have no documentation that Hobart fits the parameters you describe.” The careful reader will note that his statement, the native’s, and Norwine’s may all be correct—but I had asked Christianson about oral history as well as documents. Moira Meltzer-Cohen, then a resident of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, did extensive research to confirm Beaver Dam as a sundown town, findings summarized in Chapter 3. She got no help from the historical society: “Unfortunately, when I have approached the historical society and the library about verifying this, they have become defensive and showered me with information about Frederick Douglass” (who once visited Beaver Dam in 1856).
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In 2002, Patrick Clark, curator at the Andrew County Museum in northwest Missouri, wrote:
Fortunately for our county, we should not be listed as a “Sundown Town” for your project. Also, we are not aware of communities in adjacent counties that would be designated as such.
 
Apparently Clark did not know that Missouri’s last spectacle lynching occurred in Maryville, seat of the next county north of Andrew, in 1931. A mob of almost 3,000 whites marched Raymond Gunn, a black man accused of murdering a white schoolteacher, from Maryville to the scene of the crime, 3 miles away. Then they watched as ringleaders chained him “to the ridgepole and burned [him] to death as the schoolhouse itself was consumed,” in the words of Arthur Raper’s famous book,
The Tragedy of Lynching.
The sheriff permitted the lynching and never arrested anyone. In the aftermath, the huge crowd searched the ashes for teeth and bone fragments and pieces of charred flesh as souvenirs. Then white paranoia set in: rumors swept the town that “a large band of Negroes was moving on Maryville to wreak vengeance for the lynching,” in the words of the nearby
St. Joseph Gazette.
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This fanciful news “sent Maryville citizens and farmers of the vicinity heavily armed upon the streets . . . late Saturday night.” “There was almost a complete exodus of colored people from town following the lynching, and for most of the week they remained away,” according to Raper. Whites gave a list of ten African Americans to the black minister “that were branded as undesirable, and he was requested to ask these never to return. This he did.” Some whites tried to run all blacks out, but several businessmen refused their demand to fire their janitors, so not all African Americans left immediately. Most did, however, and the black population of Nodaway County, of which Maryville is county seat, fell from 95 in 1930 to 33 ten years later and still fewer thereafter. In 1958, the Maryville Industrial Development Corporation advertised this accomplishment to seek new industries:
This 8,600 population town and surrounding community possesses an abundant number [
sic
] native born, nigger-free, non-union workers who believe in giving an honest day’s work for a day’s pay.
 
“We cannot offer any tax inducements,” said Joe Jackson Jr., chair of the corporation, but
we can offer them all-white contented labor. We don’t have any niggers here in Maryville. There may be three or four left in Nodaway County, but all of them are in their 70s and wouldn’t be seeking any jobs in the plants. We had to lynch one nigger back in 1931 . . . and the rest of them just up and left. So we’ve got an all-white town and all-white labor to offer anybody who brings new industry here.
 
Many members of the crowd of spectators came from surrounding counties, including Andrew County. Andrew County itself then showed a parallel decline in black population, from 42 in 1930 to 33 in 1940 and 5 by 1960. Moreover, Albany, seat of Gentry County, which adjoins Andrew County to the northeast, “maintained as part of the city code a rule that said blacks couldn’t spend the evening in the town,” according to a native of Albany. As far as I can ascertain, Gentry County has not had a single black household since at least 1930 and still doesn’t. Yet Patrick Clark of the Andrew County Museum is “not aware of communities in adjacent counties” that kept out African Americans. Surely he is in denial.
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A recent published example of the problem comes from Chittenden County, Vermont. In 2003, Sylvia Smith wrote an entire article on Mayfair Park, a residential subdivision of South Burlington, Vermont, for the
Chittenden County Historical Society Bulletin.
In it she treats at length “protective covenants, which met required objectives of the Federal Housing Administration for the protection of the subdivision.” She tells how they “established strict limits on sizes of lots, buildings, and setbacks.” She goes on to quote “covenants pertaining to ‘quality of life’ concerns,” which she believes are “of interest in present times,” such as:
No noxious or offensive trade or activity shall be carried on upon any lot nor should anything be done thereon which may become an annoyance or nuisance to the neighborhood.... No dwelling costing less than $3,500 shall be permitted on any lot in the tract. These covenants shall run with the land.
 
The ellipsis in the above quotation indicates a passage left out, of course. That passage was, in substantial part:
No persons of any race other than the white race shall use or occupy any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant.
 
Precisely this missing sentence makes the covenant “restrictive” rather than merely “protective.” Smith later tells that in 1951 a “vote was taken to eliminate and revoke the restrictive covenants,” but she never mentions what these were. Only those few readers who already know that Mayfair Park was all-white on purpose can possibly understand what was undone in 1951.
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