The 1964 Civil Rights Act Made Little Difference
Some of these problems might have eased with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but that legislation was aimed at the South and was not enforced in sundown towns, most of which are not in the South. Thus the 1964 law left all-white towns and suburbs largely untouched. Many towns simply did not obey it for decades. “We were not allowed to serve any colored after sundown,” said a woman who had been a waiter in the mid-1970s in Arcola, Illinois. “A white man came in and said, ‘I have my buddy in the truck. Will you serve him?’ He then served the friend at the booth, getting the stuff from me at the counter.” Telling this in 2002, the woman was proud that she let that happen, in violation of the rules.
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In 1974, Dale Leftridge, one of the first African Americans allowed to become a railroad engineer in the United States, took trains to South Pekin, Illinois. Ten years after the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations, the Chicago & North Western Railroad had to post a security guard from the train at the motel, “because the townspeople didn’t want blacks in their town,” in Leftridge’s words. Two years later, a black social worker from the state office in Madison had to stay at a smaller motel outside of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She couldn’t stay at the main hotel within the city, according to June Rosland, then also a social worker in Wisconsin. “And she had an MSW [Master’s of Social Work]!”
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Nick Khan in Paragould said that when he bought his motel in 1982, no motels in town let African Americans spend the night. Paragould had been a sundown town since 1908, when its 40 black families were ordered to leave at gunpoint. The restaurant across the road locked the door on two black Union Pacific Rail Road workers staying with him in 1983 when they walked over and tried to eat there. Police came and accused the African Americans of trying to break in, according to Khan. “The white boys in the restaurant were cracking up over it. The black guys were so scared.” After that, “they never used to go out. If I’m outside, they’ll come out, sit in the chairs. But if they go downtown, they’ll get arrested!” So they bought takeout fried chicken at Kentucky Fried Chicken and ate it in their rooms.
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How are these things possible, so many years after the Civil Rights Act? Enforcement of the law, which should have depended on the federal government, in reality depended on African Americans. Black pioneers tested restaurants and motels across the South, sat wherever they wanted on buses, and sometimes got beaten or killed for their trouble, forcing the government to act. Having no black children, sundown towns had no black students to de-segrate their schools after 1954. Having no black populations, these towns had no African Americans to test their public accommodations after 1964. Members of the St. Louis chapter of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, responsible for so many southern sit-ins, did announce to the media that they were going to test restaurants and motels in Williamson County, Illinois, shortly after passage of the act. Almost every community in Williamson County and adjoining Franklin County was a sundown town then, including Benton, Carterville, Christopher, Herrin, Johnston City, Mulkeytown, Royalton, Sesser, West Frankfort, and Zeigler. The Williamson County sheriff talked with all the motel owners and restaurant owners and told them they had two choices, according to Jim Clayton: “Either they could accommodate them, and they’d all go back to St. Louis, or they could refuse, and all hell would break loose.” They complied. Afterward they put their signs back up—“White Only” or “Management Reserves the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone”—and Williamson and Franklin counties disobeyed the law for another two decades.
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Today many sundown towns exhibit a pattern exactly opposite to that found in the classic pre-1954 segregated southern city (and many northern ones). Back then, black travelers usually could neither stay in the city’s hotels and motels nor eat in its major restaurants, but African Americans were allowed to live in the city, albeit on the “wrong side of the tracks.” Today, most motels and restaurants in sundown towns serve African Americans without a second thought, but blacks still cannot live within the city limits.
Throughout the expulsions, the prohibitions, the shunning, and all the other acts that sundown towns have used to stay all-white, all the while an individual “pet” black, such as Aaron Van Winkle in Arkansas—sometimes an entire household—has often been allowed to stay. The next chapter tells of these anomalies—African Americans permitted to live, usually without much difficulty, in towns and counties that nevertheless designated themselves “sundown.”
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Exceptions to the Sundown Rule
During my life I have heard oral history of at least two instances in Missouri where one or a few ex-slaves (or their descendants) were allowed to remain in a county or town, but any visiting blacks were quickly informed that they were “not to let the sun set on them.” It is as if there were an unspoken feeling of “these are our blacks and they are okay, but other blacks are unwelcome and dangerous strangers.”
—Laurel Boeckman, reference librarian,
State Historical Society of Missouri, 2002
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OWNS THAT TOOK GREAT PAINS to define themselves as sundown towns have nevertheless often allowed an exception or two. Within their otherwise all-white populations, occasionally an African American person or even household was at least tolerated and sometimes celebrated. When Pana, Illinois, for example, forced out its African American population in 1899, whites did not force the black barber and his family to leave. He had an exclusively white clientele and many acquaintances—even friends—in the white community, and no one had a complaint about
him.
Pana did post sundown signs at its corporate limits, signs that remained up at least until 1960, and permitted no other African Americans to move in, so it definitely became a sundown town. Other towns have let in more temporary intruders: flood refugees, soldiers during wartime, college students, and visiting interracial athletic teams and their fans.
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What experiences do these exceptions have, in towns that by definition do not allow them to be there? What are their lives like? What difference—if any—do they make?
African American Servants
Many African Americans in sundown towns were or are servants. In a way, they don’t violate the sundown rule, because they don’t live on their own. Huntington, Indiana, is so anti-black that two residents reported in 2002 that its police still stop any African Americans driving through and warn them “to get out of town—now.” Yet a black couple lived in Huntington in the 1920s and 1930s. They were servants in the household of William Schacht, owner of a rubber factory and one of the richest people in town. She was the family’s maid and cook, he their handyman. “They lived in the Schacht house, but their movements were circumscribed. They couldn’t go downtown—a few blocks away—without problems,” according to a man who grew up in the town in those decades. “They spent most of the time indoors.” And they had no children, so there were no African American children in the schools. At this same time, after the 1919 riot in which whites drove out the African American population of Marion, Ohio, home of president-to-be Warren G. Harding, “local lore has it that there was one black family left in Marion after the riot,” writes Harding scholar Phillip Payne, “and that the woman and her family remained because she had been the Hardings’ maid.” Also, her husband was the barber, so he knew, serviced, and in a limited sense was friends with upper-class whites.
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In the suburbs, these live-in exceptions were common. Laura Hobson’s novel about anti-Semitism in Darien, Connecticut, in the 1940s,
Gentleman’s Agreement,
pointed out the town’s practice of not letting Jews or African Americans live there. Meanwhile, when she wrote, Darien had about 150 African Americans, mostly female—live-in maids, gardeners, and the like. Similarly, Kenilworth, Illinois, the richest suburb of Chicago, had a population that was 4.3% African American in 1930, all live-in servants. On the West Coast, Beverly Hills, a famed affluent suburb of Los Angeles, had 397 African Americans in 1920. Almost 300 were female; the imbalance implies that at least 200 were live-in maids. In fact, probably every African American was a maid, gardener, or other live-in servant, because the total of 397 included just four children, all girls who probably assisted their mothers or were older teenagers working on their own. This sexual imbalance then worsened: by 1960, Beverly Hills had 649 African Americans, of whom 554 were females.
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Often these exceptions were codified into law. In 1912, Virginia passed a law providing for all-white and all-black neighborhoods or towns: “It shall be unlawful for any colored person, not then residing in a district so defined and designated as a white district, or who is not a member of a family then therein residing, to move into and occupy as a residence any building or portion thereof in such white district,” and vice versa. The act immediately went on to make the exception: “Nothing herein contained shall preclude persons of either race employed as servants by persons of the other race from residing upon the premises of which such employer is the owner or occupier.” After the Supreme Court invalidated such laws in 1917, suburbs switched to restrictive covenants to keep out African Americans. Typically those covenants similarly exempted servants, as did this succinct example from Chicago suburb Villa Park: “Said premises shall not be conveyed or leased to, or occupied by, any person who is not a Caucasian, except servants.” Examples in my collection range from California to Minnesota to Vermont to Florida.
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When entire suburbs made it their policy for all neighborhoods to be covered by these covenants, they became sundown towns. After World War II, for example, South Pasadena, California, did so, according to this 1947 newspaper report:
The city of S. Pasadena, California, provides an example of the extreme to which the trend toward restrictive racial and religious covenants can go. In South Pasadena restrictive covenants, denying persons not of the Caucasian race the right to live within its municipal boundaries, are a matter of official policy. The city administration has been charged with promoting the program under which the entire city will be blanketed with restrictive agreements. South Pasadena is to be completely “white.” Of course, persons not of Caucasian ancestry will not be completely barred from residence in South Pasadena. The restrictive covenants specify that non-Caucasians may reside in the city as servants, caretakers, and in similar menial work. Non-Caucasians may work in the city in other capacities, but they must be outside its limits by nightfall.
Again, live-in servants did not and could not constitute real exceptions, because they could not live within the city limits on their own. Often their children could not live there at all; maids and gardeners with children sent them to live with relatives. Sometimes, as in Texas’s Park Cities, the suburban school district or the maid’s employer paid for her children to attend schools in the central city. Sundown suburbs thus ensured that the only African Americans their white children would meet were servants in positions of inferiority.
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Like the Schacht servants in Huntington, live-in servants have often had to practice invisibility. There were African American maids in Johnston City, in southern Illinois, in the 1920s, but “they weren’t allowed out of doors after dark,” according to Jim Clayton, a
Washington Post
reporter who grew up there. A former resident of nearby Herrin spoke to historian Paul Angle around 1950:
Some Herrin families do keep hired Negro help in their homes overnight. I had a “Clarissa” who lived with me for four years. The old feeling of “being out of the city limits by dark” was still with her, however. She didn’t like to answer my door after the evening meal and usually stayed right in her room. She never appeared on the streets after dark.
Angle’s informant seems to locate her maid’s “feeling” within the employee, but town policy was to blame. Her acts were prudent and would be appropriate in Herrin for several more decades. A member of the Batesville Historical Society told of “a prominent family” in that southeastern Indiana town “who employed black maids, chefs, chauffeurs for business functions. Those employees were told to never be on the streets at night.” Their housekeeper, who worked for them on a more permanent basis, “would only go outdoors to attend the earliest [morning] Mass at the local Catholic church.”
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As in independent sundown towns, servants in sundown suburbs have also had to watch the sun. In the late 1940s, for example, Lois Johnson, who lived in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles, would see maids running to the bus stop “so they would not be caught there after dark.” In 1940, among 81,992 residents, Glendale had 68 African Americans, three to one female, surely the ratio of maids to gardeners and chauffeurs; they included just two individuals under 21 years old, both likely maids in their late teens. Probably all 68 were live-in servants, who apparently had no more freedom to poke their heads out of doors after sundown than black servants in Huntington or Herrin. Even more constricted were the lives of servants in Wyandotte, Michigan, the sundown suburb near Detroit, who stayed indoors day and night. Writing in about 1945, Mable Bishop Gilmer told of “a high class type of Negroes, descendants of slaves of George Washington, and so-named Washington.” They were the servants she knew as a child in the wealthy Bishop family. “These Negroes sensing the Wyandotte attitude never left the house to enter the streets but sent the Bishop children on errands for their personal needs.”
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