Read Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism Online

Authors: James W. Loewen

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (62 page)

In 1994, anthropologist Jane Adams found that a peculiar anxiety gripped residents of Anna, in southern Illinois, about nearby Carbondale, long after student riots at Southern Illinois University and a Black Panther shootout with police there in 1970. “Many people in the area still avoid Carbondale and are afraid to go through the town at night.” This fear had no rational basis: student rioters and Black Panthers are long gone, and the campus has been quiet for decades. The fear is partly racial, for African Americans are not gone; Carbondale in 1994 was 20% black, which looks very black from the vantage point of all-white Anna. Thus where one lives affects how one perceives.
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When dealing with towns that actually
have
black majorities, fears in sundown towns can become absurd enough to merit the label “paranoia.” When West Side High School in Greers Ferry, Arkansas, a sundown town according to a nearby resident, plays Cotton Plant, a majority-black high school to the southeast, the team and buses get escorted by state troopers. When West Side hosts Cotton Plant, according to a recent West Side graduate, administrators warn their students “not to leave jewelry or other valuables in your lockers! Leave them with your parents!” Yet Cotton Plant players are surely already nervous playing in a sundown town and would hardly be likely to wander the halls of an unfamiliar high school scoping out student lockers. A former resident of Herrin, a sundown town in southern Illinois, relates that Herrin natives still warn each other, “Don’t go to Colp,” a nearby black-majority township, even during the daytime. Residents of independent sundown towns expressed particular anxiety about visiting Atlanta, Detroit, or Washington, D.C., three cities they know have black majorities.
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Not just small-town residents, but also some elite white suburbanites seem enfeebled rather than emboldened by their privileged isolated communities and wind up reluctant to go to cultural events or restaurants in central cities. A professor at Western Michigan University reported the reaction of her relatives from Naperville, an elite suburb southwest of Chicago, after going with her to a Jewel Supermarket in Kalamazoo, Michigan: “Oh, how can you go there? Aren’t you afraid of being mugged?” The store’s interracial clientele made them apprehensive—in broad daylight in Kalamazoo! Imagine their fear of Chicago! Undergraduates at the University of Illinois–Chicago tell that their friends from such suburbs as Naperville went to Iowa or the University of Illinois–Champaign; “they’re afraid of Chicago,” and not just of those neighborhoods that are in fact dangerous. High school students from sundown suburbs of New York City are similarly wary of Manhattan. “When we rode the subway,” said Andy Cavalier about his Darien, Connecticut, school friends, “they would ride wide-eyed, thinking they’d be mugged at any moment.” Diane Hershberger, taking high school students from suburban Johnson County to an art exhibit in Kansas City, overheard them saying in worried tones, “I’ve never been downtown before.”
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Young people absorb this posture toward the outside world from their parents and other adults in the community, of course. Karns supplied an example:
My recent Cleveland trip was interesting in that it was two swimmers and their fathers.... One father was pretty uncomfortable in general. He made several comments about Cleveland being dangerous because of its racial make-up. We were looking for a reasonably priced place to eat . . . and it took awhile. At one stop, he said ‘maybe we should find an area with some more white faces,’ attached to some comment about safety. I was surprised because this is one of the gentlest, most accepting men I know, and he allowed himself to fall prey to that kind of thinking. I pass this on, not to belittle him but because I think it illustrates the kind of thinking that is created in small all-white communities.
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Residents of sundown towns have long feared black-majority towns. According to historian Norman Crockett, author of
The Black Towns,
citizens of Paden and Okemah, sundown towns in eastern Oklahoma, worried they were in danger while in Boley, a neighboring black town. This anxiety escalated to full-blown panic one warm June night in 1911. A month before, a white mob from Okemah had hanged Laura Nelson and her son, African American farmers living near Boley, from the steel bridge that spanned the North Canadian River (see Portfolio 11.) As customary in such matters, the grand jury investigating the lynchings somehow could not determine who was responsible. Now, in the words of Okemah resident W. L. Payne, townspeople “watched movements of the lawless Negro element,” fearing retaliation from Boley. On June 23, according to Payne, “a white ‘stool pigeon’ informed the sheriff of Okfuskee County that the Negroes were planning to sack and burn Okemah that night. No mercy was to be shown women and children.” Terror and confusion reigned within Okemah. Payne tells what happened next:
Citizens came from every section of the town with firearms. Ammunition dealers soon sold their entire stock of firearms and ammunition. An armed cordon of men was placed around Okemah at the edge of town and all approaches were guarded. Strategic locations within the city limits were soon fortified. Mobilization officers ordered all street lights cut off to prevent the enemy from observing the movements of the town’s brave defenders. The light plant engineer was to signal the attack by blowing the whistle.... As both young and old scrambled for safety . . . mothers and children often became separated in the mad rush for safety. Hysterical mothers were screaming for their children and pleading for assistance.
 
The alarm lasted all night, but in the end, Payne concludes, “while Okemah citizens were preparing for war, their colored foes were at home preparing for a good night’s rest, which prevented the loss of blood on both sides.” But Payne does not draw the obvious lesson: that white fears were silly. Sixty years later, a similar rumor prompted a similar vigil in Anna, Illinois. “Most of the store owners spent the night in their stores with their guns loaded,” according to a woman who grew up there. African Americans in Cairo, 30 miles south, were boycotting its stores, and a rumor flew around Anna one weekend “that the blacks (by the way, no one called them blacks—they were always referred to as ‘niggers’) were going to come up to Anna and cause trouble.” All that happened was that “a few blacks came into town to shop—which was not uncommon—and they went home as usual.”
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Perhaps a bad conscience of sorts (Freud would call it projection) helped motivate the Okemah panic. Similarly, after whites in Maryville, Missouri, lynched Raymond Gunn in 1931 and threatened the rest of Maryville’s small black community, a rumor swept through town that 2,000 African Americans from Kansas City, almost 100 miles south, augmented by reinforcements from Omaha, Nebraska, almost 100 miles northwest, were coming to invade Maryville to avenge the lynching. According to a white minister,
Every [white] man in town was armed, and on the streets. We were sure we were going to have to protect ourselves in blood. The sheriff deputized numerous men to help with the defense. The streets were crowded all night.
 
The sheriff sought help from other counties, and plans were made to block the oncoming Nebraska horde at the Missouri River bridge. Of course, no attack ever materialized.
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Over the years, when African Americans
have
rioted, even if they are miles away, white paranoia in sundown towns has often reached a fever pitch. Karns grew up in Huntington, former vice president Dan Quayle’s hometown, a sundown town in northern Indiana:
My father owned a sporting goods store and among other things he sold guns. During the race riots of the ’60s, particularly following King’s assassination, he would get phone calls warning him of black “motorcycle gangs” on their way to Huntington from Ft. Wayne to attack the all-white town as well as his business to steal the guns. No attack ever came but it illustrates the paranoia. I remember two or three such incidents.
 
Huntington is 30 miles from Fort Wayne, hardly a suburb. Glendale, California, is a suburb of Los Angeles, but it lies “about an hour’s drive” from Watts, according to a woman who attended high school in Glendale in the mid-1960s. One day, playing tennis after school, she was “shocked to see what appeared to be an incredibly large contingen[t] of National Reserve soldiers! There were tanks, tents, trucks and a lot of soldiers.” City officials of this sundown suburb had called out the National Guard to protect Glendale during the Watts riot—from what, they never specified. Officials of Grosse Pointe, Grosse Ile, Dearborn, and other communities took similarly extraordinary precautions in their sundown suburbs during periods of racial unrest in Detroit. Having no African Americans in town, knowing none, having friends who also know no African Americans and live there partly so they cannot—these conditions foster a “we/they” mentality that can escalate to a sense of being besieged, even though no one is at the gates. Even in calm times and notwithstanding their privilege, many residents of elite sundown suburbs seem to feel beleaguered.
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Cognitive Dissonance in Martinsville, Indiana
 
Recent events in Martinsville, Indiana, provide an eerie example of cognitive dissonance at work. Martinsville is a city of 12,000 located 50 miles south of Indianapolis. In 1890, the town had 53 African Americans; by 1930 it had just 4. Martinsville was a Ku Klux Klan hotbed in the 1920s, but so was most of Indiana. In the late 1950s, Martinsville High School played basketball against Crispus Attucks, Indianapolis’s de jure segregated black high school, without incident. By 1967, however, when Martinsville played Rushville in football and Rushville’s star running back was African American Larry Davis, Martinsville fans were yelling, “Get that nigger!” Then, on September 16, 1968, someone stabbed Carol Jenkins, a 21-year-old African American from Rushville, to death with a screwdriver as she walked along Morgan Street trying to sell encyclopedias door-to-door. It was her first evening in the city, so she knew no one; thus no one had any conceivable personal motive for killing her. At about 7:30 PM, she had gone to a house briefly, seeking refuge from a car with two white men in it who had been shouting at her. So most people (correctly) assumed the motive to be rage at Jenkins as a black person for being in the city after dark.
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In the aftermath of the murder, NAACP leaders and reporters from outside the town levied criticism at the city’s police department, alleging lack of interest in solving the crime. Martinsville residents responded by appearing to define the situation as “us” against “them,” “them” being outsiders and nonwhites. The community seemed to close ranks behind the murderer and refused to turn him in, whoever he was. “The town became a clam,” said an Indianapolis newspaper reporter.
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Now Martinsville came to see itself not just as a sundown town—it already defined itself as that—but as a community that united in silence to protect the murderer of a black woman who had innocently violated its sundown taboo. To justify this behavior required still more extreme racism, which in turn prompted additional racist behaviors and thus festered further. During the years after Jenkins’s murder, gas stations in Martinsville repeatedly refused to sell gasoline to African American customers, at least as late as 1986. Not only the murder but also actions such as these gave Martinsville a particularly scary reputation among African Americans. According to Professor Alan Boehm, who attended Indiana University in the 1970s, Indianapolis’s large black middle-class population got the state to build a bypass around Martinsville, “because they did not want their children put in harm’s way when they drove between home and the university.”
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In the 1990s, fans and students in Martinsville intensified their harassment of visiting athletic teams that had black players. In 1998, that tradition won Martinsville an article, “Martinsville’s Sad Season,” in
Sports Illustrated
: “On January 23, as Bloomington High North’s racially mixed team got off the bus upon arriving for a game at Martinsville, about a dozen Martinsville students greeted the visitors with a barrage of racial epithets.” Students shouted things like “Here come the darkies.” The
Sports Illustrated
account continues:
During the junior varsity game several Bloomington players were bitten by Martinsville players. During the varsity game a member of Martinsville’s all-white team elbowed a black North player in the stomach so fiercely that the player began vomiting. As he was doubled over on the sidelines, a fan yelled, “That nigger’s spitting on the floor! Get his ass off the floor.” According to a report that Bloomington North filed with the Indiana High School Athletics Association, epithets like “baboon” and threats such as “You’re not safe in this town” continued after the game, which Martinsville won 69–66. “It wasn’t just nasty,” says one Bloomington North fan, an adult who was in attendance, “it was downright scary.”
 
Martinsville was sanctioned: it could not host a conference game in any sport for a year. “This wasn’t the first time that charges of racist behavior were leveled against one of Martinsville’s teams,” the story made clear. “In the last year at least two high schools in central Indiana have dropped the Artesians from their schedules after games were marred by brawls and racial slurs. School administrators in Martinsville . . . were unwilling to discuss the incident or its aftermath.”
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