Sometimes the census “finds” African Americans where they flatly don’t exist. It listed 1 African American in Searcy County in the Arkansas Ozarks in 1930, 1940, and 1950, and none in 1960, but found 22 in 1970. Gordon Morgan, who was doing research for his book
Black Hillbillies of the Arkansas Ozarks
around that time, noted, “The later figure is highly questionable and such people cannot be found in the county.” Pranksters may be responsible. Jim Clayton wrote that the census for Johnston City, Illinois, showed one African American resident in 1960. This so upset the mayor that he “staged an all-out search to try to find out who that was.” The mayor never found out, and Clayton suspects it was a joke by a local. In recent years, when most people fill out their own forms and return them by mail, respondents may also simply check the wrong box by accident.
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All-White on Purpose?
Even granted the foregoing issues, the census remains our best starting point, and classifying a community “all-white” based on census data proved doable. In 1970, using the above definition of “all-white town,” Illinois had about 424 such towns with more than 1,000 people, as Chapter 3 told. But just because a town or suburb is all-white doesn’t make it a place in which African Americans are not
allowed
to live. Were they all white on purpose? What defines “on purpose”?
In a sense, sundown towns self-define: if residents of a town
say
they keep out African Americans, or used to, most likely they do, or did. If African Americans have moved in and quickly out, perhaps reporting unwelcoming behavior, that would be still better evidence. I never assumed that a given town or suburb was all-white on purpose. Only when credible sources, oral or written, confirm that a community expelled its African Americans (or other minority) or took steps to keep them from moving in do I list that community as a sundown town. The rest of this chapter describes the methods and information I used to determine whether a given all-white town was a sundown town and talks about some of the issues involved in making that decision.
Oral History
This chapter has noted the difficulty of relying on written history when doing research on sundown towns. Documents are important to historians and social scientists, of course. Given the widespread suppression of material on
this
topic, however, for historians and social scientists to conclude in their absence that a town did not have sundown policies would be a gross error. Indeed, doing so would allow those community leaders who deliberately left no documentary trail to succeed in bewildering those who would understand their policies. Even in towns where no deliberate suppression was involved, primary written sources are often scarce because small towns often did not keep even such basic records as minutes of city council meetings. Furthermore, the sundown policy in many towns was informal, so nothing was written down in the first place.
Instead, we must talk with longtime residents. Some historians disparage oral history, but about sundown towns, oral history is usually more accurate than written history. The oral histories I have collected typically include revealing details about how and when a town kept out African Americans, details unlikely to have been invented. A key question to put to any historical source is: Is this person in a position to know? One must ask interviewees who say theirs was a sundown town
how
they know what they claim to know. “Where did you learn that?” “Who told you?” “When?” My sources gave persuasive replies, or I didn’t rely on them.
I suggest that when it is off the mark, oral history often
understates
the degree to which a town excluded blacks. Although local historians have told me things about their communities that they would never commit to print, what they tell is still often softened by their desire to say only nice things about their hometown. Also, some interviewees may not be in a position to know. Moreover, fear can affect what people will tell. Some African Americans, like some white Americans, fear offending what might be called “the powers that be.” Michelle Tate elicited this fear from two of her best interviewees, an elderly African American couple in Mattoon, Illinois: “The saddest part of all was when the woman looked at me and made sure I would not use their names in my paper. I assured her I would not.” I elicited the same reluctance from several white interviewees and made the same promises. Fearful interviewees may not divulge all that they know.
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Notwithstanding the foregoing cautions, I have found that most respondents are much more open in oral interview than when writing. They do want to help the person who is asking them questions. It is hard not to, after all, when they are in the midst of a conversation, especially when their relative expertise on the history of the locale has been acknowledged. Even pillars of the community, such as officials of the local historical society, are usually much more forthcoming in conversation than in print. A final reason why oral history often works is this: sundown towns were not usually created by far-out racists throwing bombs in the night. Unfortunately, most white residents of sundown towns and suburbs either approved of their policy of exclusion or said nothing to stop its enforcement. The whiteness of all-white towns is therefore the consensual product of entire communities—made tangible in sundown ordinances, in the blanket adoption of restrictive covenants, or by widespread acts of public or private harassment that townspeople commended, participated in, or at least allowed to go unpunished. Therefore knowledge of towns’ sundown practices was equally widespread. In town after town, when one asks the right people, one learns how their community went sundown, why, and sometimes when, and who did it.
Of course, it is always best to corroborate white oral history with testimony from African American residents of the nearest interracial town. It is also important to triangulate oral history with census data and written sources.
Ordinances, Written or Oral?
One way that cities and towns went all-white or stayed all-white was by passing an ordinance forbidding African Americans from being within their corporate limits after sundown or prohibiting them from owning or renting property in the town. Or at least they
say
they did. Whether such ordinances ever existed has become controversial. My web site,
uvm.edu/~jloewen/
, tells of the controversy and lists towns with oral history of an ordinance. I have put considerable effort into finding such ordinances and have found only one, in East Tennessee, reported in Chapter 4. The difficulty in finding ordinances provides a special case of the issues of written versus oral sources when it comes to sundown towns, so it is appropriate to treat those difficulties here.
Diverse written sources tell of sundown ordinances banning African Americans. In Illinois, written references describe sundown ordinances in East Alton, Fairfield, Granite City, Herrin, and Kenilworth.
The Negroes of Nebraska,
a product of the Nebraska Writers’ Project during the Depression, tells that Plattsmouth and other cities in Kansas and Nebraska passed sundown ordinances. Documents also tell of other enactments by local governments. The “Inventory of the County Archives” of Pike County, Ohio, for example, prepared by the WPA in 1942, tells how “the Downing family, original proprietors” of Waverly, the county seat, gave to the county its central square, for a courthouse site, in 1861.
The Downings caused to be written into the agreement accepting the donation of the public square a provision that if any Negroes ever should be permitted to settle within the corporation limits, the square should be sold and the proceeds revert to the down heirs. Present-day Waverly has no Negro residents. The Downings said that the “correct way to treat a Negro was to kill him.”
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Despite these sources and many other written and oral reports of ordinances, finding such laws has proven difficult. Many—indeed, perhaps most—towns have lost their records. Consider the case of Kenilworth. That affluent Chicago suburb was the creation of its developer, Joseph Sears; widespread oral and written tradition holds that he made it a sundown town in its founding documents. The town’s official history,
Joseph Sears and His Kenilworth,
by Colleen Kilner, hired by the Kenilworth Historical Society for the task, begins by designating Kenilworth “Number One on the Suburban Totem Pole” according to “the press,” and it is an understatement to call her account of Kenilworth sympathetic. Kilner uses italics to emphasize the four principles that guided Sears:
These restrictions were incorporated in the village ordinance:
2.
High standards of construction . . .
4. Sales to
Caucasians only.
When I visited the Kenilworth Historical Society in 2002, however, my request for Kenilworth’s ordinances or incorporation documents baffled them. Helpful staff members provided boxes of papers, including scattered minutes of meetings of the board Sears created to govern Kenilworth in its early days, but no ordinances. Surely Kenilworth had ordinances—one prohibiting alleys, for example. It cannot be found either, but Kenilworth has no alleys, just as it has no blacks. Moreover, the local acclaim that met Kilner’s 1969 book, and its reprinting without change in 1990, suggest that Kenilworth residents had no quarrel with its statement about the restrictive ordinance because it was accurate. Even some recent towns have lost their records. Rolling Hills Estates, for example, founded probably as a sundown suburb of Los Angeles in 1958, can find no ordinances before 1975, according to a municipal clerk there.
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Even when records exist, finding these ordinances proves next to impossible because they never got codified—that is, listed in a book, organized by topic or even by year. Attorney Armand Derfner explains, “A lot of ordinances never got codified. They only put in the things they were going to need all the time.”
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And some small towns have never codified their ordinances at all.
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Ordinances Are Real, Written or Not
Some white Americans have told me that without a written ordinance, there is little evidence that a town kept out African Americans. This is absurd. Major league baseball, which kept out African Americans from 1890 to 1947, never had a formal prohibition. In fact, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, commissioner of baseball from 1921 through 1944, stated, “There is no rule, formal or informal . . . against the hiring of Negroes in organized baseball.” Nevertheless, everyone knew blacks were not allowed, and when the Pittsburgh Pirates sought to hire Josh Gibson from the Negro Leagues in 1943, Landis wouldn’t let them. It is the same with sundown towns. Laws about daily practice are rarely read anyway. When newcomers move to a town, they learn the rules from those already there. If people say that it is illegal to park facing south on the east side of a north-south street, newcomers park “correctly,” facing north. Oral tradition is crucial because people live in the oral tradition. They don’t go to city hall and look up ordinances.
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If the written ordinance cannot now be located, so what? If whites have
not
had the power, legally, to keep African Americans out of town since 1917, so what? Tell that to the three African American families in Saline County, Illinois, whose homes whites dynamited in 1923. To Harvey Clark, whose furnishings were destroyed in the 1951 Cicero riot. To the engineers on the Wabash Railroad, who took care to pull their work trains east beyond the Niantic, Illinois, village limits when a black work crew was on board, because it was “against the law” for African Americans to stay in Niantic overnight. Or to black would-be home buyers in Maroa today, who are not shown houses because a realtor doesn’t think she should sell to them, because of an ordinance.
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Historian Clayton Cramer grasps this point:
When I lived in La Crescenta, just north of Glendale [California] in the 1970s, locals told me that Glendale had maintained a “no blacks allowed after sundown” ordinance on the books until the end of World War II. I’m not sure that I believe that an actual ordinance to that effect was still on the books that late. Of course, just because it isn’t in writing doesn’t mean it doesn’t get enforced.
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Ordinances are passed orally first, after all, by voice vote of the body passing them. Whether they get written down depends on several factors, including the level of record keeping in the town. Here are two examples of ordinances passed orally in rather recent years. New England towns transact some of their important business by town meeting, and in 1973 the annual meeting of Ashby, Massachusetts, voted 148 to 79
against
inviting people of color into town. Sure enough, the 1980 census showed Ashby with 2,311 people including no African Americans. New Market, in southwestern Iowa, re-passed its sundown ordinance even later, in the 1980s. African American John Baskerville, now a historian at the University of Northern Iowa, tells the story:
I played in a band called Westwind, from Tarkio, Missouri, in the northwest corner of the state of Missouri.... In the summer of 1984 or 1985, we had a chance to play a street dance in New Market for a guy who owned a car dealership and a restaurant . . . [and] was also a member of the New Market city council. We had been playing for a couple of hours and it was starting to get dark, when during one of our breaks between sets, he came over and said exactly, “Hey, we almost had an incident here. The sheriff reminded me that it was against city ordinance for a ‘colored’ person to be in town after dark and that we were about to break the law. So, since most of the members of the city council are here [it was the only happening party in town that night], we held a special meeting of the council and voted to suspend the law for the night.” I mind you, for the NIGHT! He went on to inform me that to his knowledge, all of those little towns in southwest Iowa (Gravity, Bedford, Villisca, most of Taylor county) all had laws prohibiting African-Americans in town after dark and that if we were going to continue to play in the area, we’d better check first before booking any gigs in the area.