Other Survival Tactics
Some African Americans managed to survive without a protector. Sometimes maintaining a low profile worked as a survival stratagem for African Americans who lived independently. After the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, when small towns all around Springfield were expelling their African Americans, residents of Pleasant Plains made an exception, ordering all blacks out, except for one elderly couple who were “old and law abiding.” When Ambrose Roan, probably the only African American man in Porter County, Indiana, died in 1911 at the age of 66, the
Chesterton Tribune
called him “a hard working, peaceful man, of quiet, unassuming ways.” The tiny town of Hazel Dell, Illinois, a few miles south of Greenup, had an African American blacksmith. According to a Greenup resident. “He simply disappeared at sundown and you never saw him again until morning.” The fact that his occupation was simultaneously useful and archaic, thus not a threat to most whites, probably helped ensure his safety.
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Living in such nonresidential places as above a downtown business worked for some African American individuals, although not for families. Huntington, Indiana, would never let African Americans live independently in a neighborhood, but it allowed an elderly African American man to live downtown, in an otherwise abandoned upstairs room above a store. He was called “Rags” and made a living by washing windows in the downtown area. “He, too, was tolerated but watched,” according to an elderly Huntington native.
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Overt identification with the white community was another survival tactic. Such blacks became “Tonto figures”—taking pains to associate with the “white side,” differentiated from the hordes of blacks outside of the city limits. White workers in Austin, Minnesota, repeatedly expelled African Americans, and Austin became a sundown town, but like many others, it allowed one African American to stay—the shoeshine “boy.” Union member John Winkols tells about him:
And I’ll tell you a good one: so one time we had Frank—I forget his last name—he was shining shoes in the barbershop and then afterwards he bell-hopped for the bus in town here, and everybody liked him. . . . He’d never go in the packing house because he knew he couldn’t, he didn’t
want
to go there.
So one day I was walking along . . . and here came a couple of niggers, and they stood there by the bridge facing the packing house, and . . . [Frank] says, “Y’know, John,” he says, “when the damn niggers start comin’ into this town, I’m gonna get the hell outta here.” And he was
black!
He was black!
He
didn’t want them to come into town either.... But we never had no trouble with Frank at all.
Indeed, they didn’t; Frank knew with which side of the color line he had to identify if he was to remain in Austin.
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Often the one African American in town becomes a celebrity, in a perverse sort of way. Everyone “knows” that person, including their harmless eccentricities. Piety is good, as is always having cookies ready for neighboring children or going by a nickname—but not voting, wanting to work at jobs where whites also work, or attending civic meetings. African Americans who played this part well became genuinely liked by whites. Kathleen Blee, author of
Women of the Klan,
collected a good example from an Indiana woman in the 1980s: “We didn’t hate the niggers. We had the Wills family that lived right here in [this] township. And they were like pet coons to us. I went to school with them.” Often they got known by nicknames, such as “Snowball” for the only African American in West Bend, Wisconsin, or “Nigger Slim” for the father of the only black family in Salem, Illinois.
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Sometimes whites make a big deal out of the only African American in town. After the person’s death, everyone turns out for the funeral. Decades after death, such a person may get warm retrospective articles in the local newspaper. “If there is any one character that everyone hears about sooner or later in connection with West Bend it is ‘Snowball,’ ”wrote Dorothy Williams in a 1980 town history. “Snowball,” or Elmer Lynden, was “a young Negro [
sic
] about 25 years old” who was killed by two police officers, allegedly while resisting arrest, in 1924. In 1936 the
Chesterton Tribune
in Chesterton, Indiana, ran a story, “Only Colored Couple,” about the death of Ambrose Roan 24 years earlier:
The story goes that when Ambrose Roan found his eternity the present Congregational church choir showed its respect and love for their “Uncle Tom” by singing a number of his beloved hymns. Mrs. Roan was so much moved by this act of courtesy that she invited the entire group of singers for a good Negro cooked chicken dinner.
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Staying out of the File Folder
The exceptions would need all the publicity they could get, because their position was always precarious. To become widely and affectionately known, they usually displayed strong but innocuous personalities, the opposite of the low-profile approach favored by the Hazel Dell blacksmith. Often they dressed exceptionally well or exceptionally badly. Usually they allowed and even encouraged whites to call them “nigger.” Sometimes they played a clownish role. Whites in Arab, a sundown town in the hills of north Alabama, let an African American live in a nearby hamlet, according to a local expert who has lived in Arab since 1927. “There was one in the Roof community; they called him ‘Rabbit,’ ‘Nigger Rabbit.’ Everybody liked him.” He lived there until he died. These lone African Americans had
better
be liked by all, because if one person doesn’t, even if one person merely doesn’t know who they are, they may be in danger. Indeed, he blamed the anti-black nature of Arab on “one guy, really, a chiropractor,” an extreme white supremacist whom no one opposed. All it takes is one white person willing to attack, because it is hard for other whites to come to the defense of the person of color. Whites who do may risk being called “nigger lovers” and accused of the opposite of racial patriotism.
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What the exception to the sundown rule tries to achieve is a nonthreatening individuality. Newspaper stories in the 1920s repeatedly featured George Washington Maddox for his full name and for being probably the only dwarf as well as the only African American in Medford, Oregon. Casey, population about 2,500, in eastern Illinois, was a sundown town complete with a sign at its city limits saying something like “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Shine on Your Back in Casey,” according to nearby resident Carolyn Stephens, but for many years whites exempted their nurse-midwife. Elizabeth Davis was locally famous as “Nigger Liz, the best midwife in Clark County” and the only African American allowed to live in Casey (see Portfolio 20). Eventually she grew old and died there in 1963.
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I call this the “file folder phenomenon.” Upon first encounter with a person different from ourselves, we all tend to place him or her in a file folder: “woman,” “teenager,” “lesbian,” “black,” and so on. Elizabeth Davis needed to be filed as “Nigger Liz, the midwife.” She could not afford to be a little-known member of her race, because then she would be filed as “black” first, which would never do, not in a sundown county. George Washington Maddox needed his full name—and his nonthreatening status as a dwarf—in order to live peacefully in Medford. Similarly, the sole African American allowed to remain in Harrison, Arkansas, after its 1909 race riot “insisted that her name was Alecta Caledonia Melvina Smith,” which shows her as a strong character, but she also let whites call her “Aunt Vine,” which played along with the inferior status connoted by
uncle
and
auntie
as applied to older African Americans.
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In a fine book on race relations during the Nadir period in Monroe, Michigan, an interracial city, James DeVries describes the file folder phenomenon:
In their daily interactions with Negroes, the racist perceptions of Monroe’s citizens were brought into play. The framework of the childlike Negro was raised to consciousness whenever African Americans who were not personally known appeared on city streets. Indeed, Negroes who arrived in Monroe in the early 20th century found that their presence was carefully noted.
One of Kathleen Blee’s interviewees, a white Indiana woman, provides an example of file folder thinking. She agreed that it might have been all right if a local restaurant served food to a local African American in a back room: “I don’t think . . . anybody would have thought anything about it. I certainly wouldn’t have of our local Negroes. But, not a strange Negro. You get several of them together and they become niggers. Individually they’re fine people.” To avoid being pigeonholed into this imperiled outgroup, blacks in sundown towns have struggled to establish themselves as individuals.
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The Suburban File Folder
Surviving as the exception in a sundown town is always fraught with peril, because at any point one might be accosted by whites who see one as “a nigger” rather than a specific person. One must then hope that other whites who know one as an individual will come to the rescue. In suburbia this rarely happened: there it is too hard for an African American to create and maintain celebrity as an individual. Suburbs have less community—less “gemeinschaft,” as sociologists say. There is less “talk” about neighbors and other townspeople, who aren’t known as well, and families move in and out even more rapidly than in independent towns. So it is harder for all the residents to learn that a given African American family is OK, that they are the allowed exception.
Alice Thompson, a longtime resident of Brea, California, a sundown suburb of Los Angeles, told in 1982 of one man who almost made it:
There were no Negroes in Brea; they were not allowed. We had a shoeshine man who we called Neff, and he always spoke to all the kids and everything. He had a little cigar store in front of the barbershop; another man ran a little cigar counter and he [Neff] had the shoeshine place. But at six o’clock, some people say ten but I believe it was six, the bus came through and he left for Fullerton. Fullerton has always had more colored people. He was an awful nice old man, but Brea just would not allow them to be here and I don’t know how they stopped them.
[Who are they?]
I don’t know, I would say, maybe, the Ku-Klux Klan.
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Fred and Mary Clark did succeed in staying in West Lawn, the sundown neighborhood of Chicago where they were the only black household. Indeed, the Clarks were no interlopers. They had lived in West Lawn since 1893, before there
was
a West Lawn. Nevertheless, newcomers to West Lawn had to learn that their existence was tolerated, or the Clarks were in trouble. “Even now that the Clarks are older,” wrote reporter Steve Bogira in 1986, “they have to worry about the reaction of whites—especially young ones—to their presence.”
“Walking down the street is not a pleasant ordeal . . . ,” Fred says. “School kids will come and throw stones.” . . . The Clarks don’t even sit on the porch—they mainly stay inside the house, where they’re out of the way of white animosity. Mostly out of the way, that is—they still have rocks and bricks tossed through their windows periodically, still find racist graffiti scribbled on their garage at times. Several years ago, after all of their front windows, upstairs and downstairs, had been smashed with rocks one night, the Clarks put the house up for sale. “When people would come to look at it and they found a black was here they’d move on,” Mary says. “So it wasn’t no way of selling it.”
Many decades ago, when West Lawn had more gemeinschaft, white neighbors helped guard the house when whites attacked African Americans throughout Chicago during the 1919 race riot. Gradually “the old-timers moved out, and the new neighbors seemed less comfortable with the Clarks.” As an adult, Fred Clark “has been chased through the neighborhood several times, had rocks thrown at him, but his docile attitude has kept him from serious harm.”
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Exceptions That Embody the Rule
Even transient African Americans, by the sheer fact of their existence, can prompt some change for the better. Bus passengers might find themselves in Cullman, Alabama, a rest stop on U.S. 31, the main route from Nashville to Birmingham and points south. During the segregation era, according to a woman who grew up in Cullman, African Americans
would step off in Cullman to look for restrooms only to be turned back, and mothers could be heard explaining to their crying children that they would have to wait until farther down the road. Mother never told us that without a catch in her voice. By the time I can remember, a bus station had been built that had a set of facilities for each race—the only place in Cullman that did, to the best of my knowledge.
Those “colored” restrooms brought Cullman partway into the era of “mere” segregation (although African Americans still could not eat or sleep in the town) and therefore marked an advance compared to total exclusion.
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