Absent from the History Books
Academic historians have long put down what they call “local history,” deploring its shallow boosterism. But silence about sundown towns is hardly confined to local historians; professional historians and social scientists have also failed to notice them. Most Americans—historians and social scientists included—like to dwell on good things. Speaking to a conference of social studies teachers in Indiana, Tim Long, an Indiana teacher, noted how this characteristic can mislead:
Today if you ask Hoosiers, “How many of you know of an Underground Railroad site in Indiana?” everyone raises their hands. “How many of you know of a Ku Klux Klan member in Indiana?” Few raise their hands. Yet Indiana had a million KKK members and few abolitionists.
The same holds for sundown towns: Indiana had many more sundown towns after 1890 than it had towns that helped escaping slaves before 1860. Furthermore, Indiana’s sundown towns kept out African Americans throughout most of the twentieth century, some of them to this day, while its towns that aided slaves did so for about ten years a century and a half ago. Nevertheless, historians, popular writers, and local historical societies in Indiana have spent far more time researching and writing about Underground Railroad sites than sundown towns. The Underground Railroad shows us at our best. Sundown towns show us at our worst.
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Authors have written entire books on sundown towns without ever mentioning their racial policies.
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I am reminded of the Hindi scene of the elephant in the living room: everyone in the room is too polite to mention the elephant, but nevertheless, it dominates the living room. Some city planners seem particularly oblivious to race. Karl Lohmann wrote
Cities and Towns of Illinois
in 1951, when most of them were all-white on purpose, but never mentioned a word about race. Instead, he made various uninteresting generalizations, such as that several towns had lakes. Gregory Randall wrote an entire monograph on one sundown suburb of Chicago, Park Forest, which later famously desegregated, but although he grew up in the suburb and also was conversant with research that candidly stated its sundown policy, he claims not to know for sure that Park Forest was all-white by design.
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Long before he wrote in 2000, Park Forest had desegregated successfully, but Randall cannot tell that story, having never let on that it had been sundown. Randall also treats at length “the Greens”—Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin—yet never mentions that all three were founded as sundown towns. In
Toward New Towns for America,
C. S. Stein similarly whitewashes the Greens; Radburn, New Jersey; and several other planned communities.
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Two anthropologists, Carl Withers and Art Gallaher, each wrote an entire book on Wheatland, Missouri, a sundown town in a sundown county. Gallaher never mentioned race, and Withers’s entire treatment is one sentence in a footnote, “However, no Negroes live now in the county.” Penologist James Jacobs wrote “The Politics of Corrections” about the correctional center in Vienna, Illinois, but even though its subitle focused upon “Town/Prison Relations,” he never mentioned that Vienna was a sundown town, while most of the prisoners were black and Latino. This pattern of evasion continues: most entries on sundown suburbs in the
Encyclopedia of Chicago,
for instance, published in 2004, do not mention their striking racial composition, let alone explain how it was achieved. Romeoville, Illinois, for example, went sundown after a deadly battle between black and white workers on June 8, 1893, and stayed that way until the 1970s, but the entry on Romeoville is silent on the matter. Worse yet, the entry on Berwyn blandly says, “While Berwyn’s Czech heritage retained its importance, increasing ethnic diversity further tested the city.” Considering that Berwyn famously kept African Americans out as recently as 1992, this is another whitewash.
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Journalists, too, have dropped the ball. We have seen how business interests sometimes stop local newspapers from saying anything bad about a town. Propensities within journalism also minimize coverage of racial exclusion. Occasionally a race riot or a heinous crime relates to sundown towns and has caused the topic to become newsworthy. The 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, prompted newspapers to note the sundown nature of nearby towns because African Americans driven from Springfield found no refuge in them. A murder brought media attention to Vidor, an east Texas sundown town with a long history of Klan activity and sundown signs. Under court order, Vidor had admitted four black households to its public housing units in 1992, but by 1993, Ku Klux Klan demonstrations and other threats forced out the last African American, William Simpson. When he was gunned down in nearby Beaumont by a young black man on the night after he moved out of Vidor, the irony prompted several news stories about Vidor. But attention waned after the murder; seven years later, Vidor had just a single black household, made up of two persons, among its 11,440 inhabitants in the 2000 census. Reporters for the
New Yorker
and
People
covered the 2002 arrest of the man who killed African American Carol Jenkins for being in Martinsville, Indiana, after dark, but the result was to demonize Martinsville as distinctive. As a result, I could not get an official of the Indiana Historical Bureau to address how general sundown towns might be in Indiana; instead, she repeated, “Martinsville is an entity unto itself—a real redneck town.” But Martinsville is not unusual. For the most part, precisely what is so alarming about sundown towns—their astonishing prevalence across the country—is what has made them
not
newsworthy, except on special occasions. Murders sell newspapers. Chronic social pathology does not.
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Journalism has been called the “first draft of history,” and the lack of coverage of sundown towns in the press, along with the reluctance of local historians to write anything revealing about their towns, has made it easy for professional historians and social scientists to overlook racial exclusion when they write about sundown communities. Most white writers of fiction similarly leave out race. In
White Diaspora,
Catherine Jurca notes that suburban novelists find the racial composition of their communities “so unremarkable” that they never think about it.
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So far as I can tell, only a handful of books on individual sundown towns has ever seen print, and this is the first general treatment of the topic.
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That is an astounding statement, given the number of sundown towns across the United States and across the decades. Social scientists and historians may also have failed to write about sundown towns because they have trouble thinking to include those who aren’t there. “People find it very difficult to learn that the absence of a feature is informative,” note psychologists Frank Kardes and David Sanbonmatsu. Writers who don’t notice the absence of people of color see nothing to explain and pay the topic no attention at all. Where does the subject even fit? Is this book African American history? Assuredly not—most of the towns it describes have not had even one African American resident for decades. It is
white
history . . . but “white history” is not a subject heading in college course lists, the Library of Congress catalog, or most people’s minds. Perhaps the new but growing field of “whiteness studies” will provide a home for sundown town research.
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I don’t mean to excuse these omissions. The absence of prior work on sundown towns is troubling. Omitted events usually signify hidden fault lines in our culture. If a given community has not admitted on its landscape to having been a sundown town in the past, that may be partly because it has not yet developed good race relations in the present. It follows that America may not have admitted to having sundown towns in its history books because it has not yet developed good race relations as a society. Optimistically, ending this cover-up now may be both symptom and cause of better race relations.
To be sure, all-white communities are about much more than race. Tuxedo Park, New York, was noted for its role in the invention of radar. Mariemont, Ohio; Park Forest, Illinois; Highland Park, Texas; and the Greens offer interesting examples of innovative urban design. Edina, Minnesota, boasted the nation’s first totally enclosed shopping mall, by the renowned architect Victor Gruen. Arcola, Illinois, is famous for its annual Broom Corn Festival. The Winnetka Plan, named after a Chicago sundown suburb, is a progressive method of teaching taught in most graduate schools of education.
At the same time, however, sundown towns
are
about race. Speaking of the dozen or so race riots that led to all-white towns in Missouri and Arkansas around 1910, historian Patrick Huber calls them “defining events in the history of their communities.” Even without a riot—so far as I know, none of the towns listed in the foregoing paragraph experienced such an event—eternal vigilance toward the occasional person of color is the price for maintaining racial purity. Thus to a degree sundown towns are
always
about race.
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There is no excuse for being oblivious to that fact. Not to treat the sundown nature of sundown towns—often not even to
see
that nature—points to a weakness in white social science and history. If this seems harsh, well, I too was oblivious for most of my life.
Defining “Sundown Town”
Given that so little historical work existed to be examined and summarized, I was reduced to discovering the facts about sundown towns myself. How should I proceed?
Chapter 1 defined “sundown town” as any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept out African Americans (or others). It also noted that towns could have a black household or two as explicit exceptions. Here we shall see that some additional nuances must be considered. To locate sundown towns, I began with the United States Census, looking for cities with 2,500 or more residents that had no or fewer than 10 African Americans. I usually left towns of fewer than 2,500 residents off my “suspect” list if they had 2–9 blacks in repeated censuses.
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For cities larger than 10,000, I changed my definition for “all-white town” to “less than 0.1% black,” decade after decade.
The census can mislead, however. It includes as part of a town’s population African Americans who live in institutions—such as the residents of Anna’s mental hospital—in many sundown towns that maintained a taboo against independent black households.
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Thus only late in my research did I learn that Dwight, in northern Illinois, and Vienna, in southern Illinois, were sundown towns; African Americans in their prisons, included in their census populations, had caused me not to put them on my list of suspected towns. I cannot know how many other sundown towns I have missed by beginning with the census.
The census can also mislead by counting African Americans in white households: live-in maids and gardeners and in later decades black or biracial adopted children. “I cannot account for the 17 and 21 African Americans you list as having lived in Cullman [Alabama] in 1950 and 1960,” John Paul Myrick, Cullman County librarian, wrote in 2002. “To my knowledge, there were none that lived here, other than maybe a few domestic workers who lived with their employers and/or perhaps students at the then operating St. Bernard and Sacred Heart colleges.” Writing in 1986 about Darien, Connecticut, whose restrictive covenants and “gentleman’s agreements” had been the subject of Laura Hobson’s bestselling 1947 novel,
Gentleman’s Agreement,
Richard Todd noted, “The overwhelming absence in Darien is the absence of black faces. If there was ever a time when a black householder lived here, no one seems to remember it. No black families at all live in Darien now. In the past there were a few black live-in servants, but there appear to be none today.” Historian Gregory Dorr, who grew up in Darien, wrote that during his childhood (1968–1990), “no African American families lived in town, and rumor was that only one black family ever attempted (unsuccessfully) to move into town.” Yet the census found 58 African Americans in 1990. The solution to this puzzle, as Myrick hints, may be live-in servants who rarely venture out. Certainly that was the case in wealthy Darien.
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Inner suburbs present a different census anomaly. These cities typically contain large apartment houses located on major arteries in very urban sectors of the larger metropolitan area—what sociologists call “gesellschaft,” the opposite of “gemeinschaft” or community. Since there is little gemeinschaft in such an area, there is no one to feel offended that blacks have moved into “his” or “her” neighborhood—
there is no neighborhood.
With all the shoppers, janitors, deliveries, and other miscellaneous tradespeople of all races, few residents may even realize that a black renter has moved in. Even if they do, being transient themselves, they may not feel a need to protest or realize that their suburb’s sundown tradition confers upon them a “right” to protest. The 1990 census showed 54 African Americans in Berwyn, an inner suburb of Chicago, “most, if not all, in apartments,” according to Alex Kotlowitz. Two years later, he described how threats, arson, and other bad behavior drove out Clifton and Dolcy Campbell and their three children after they bought a home in a Berwyn neighborhood and moved in. Some neighbors befriended the black family, but city officials did little. As he departed, Clifton Campbell explained, “When we realized that we had no official support for being in Berwyn, we felt like outside intruders.” Thus Berwyn still acted as a sundown suburb in 1992.
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