Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (89 page)
82
When capitalized,
Realtor
is a trademark of the National Association of Realtors (formerly the National Association of Real Estate Boards). The NAR has long tried unsuccessfully to get journalists to capitalize
realtor
when referring to an NAR member and use
real estate agent
otherwise. Currently the NAR campaigns to get its own members to use
REALTOR
in all capital letters with a trademark symbol attached. This book uses
realtor
as synonymous with the unwieldy
real estate agent.
Often, as here, I do not know whether the agent was a member of the NAR or NAREB. I use
Realtor
only when membership in the national or local association is part of the story.
83
“Housing: How High the Barriers,”
ADL Bulletin
16,1 (1959), 2; former Delray Beach resident, 8/2000; Mary Ellen Stratthaus, “Flaw in the Jewel: Housing Discrimination Against Jews in La Jolla, California,”
American Jewish History
84, 3 (1996): 194; Leonard Valdez, e-mail, 4/2003.
84
Charles T.Clotfelter concurs: “The 1970 census marked a high-water mark for the residential segregation of blacks.” See his
After Brown
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 80.
85
Portfolio 25 and Map 1 (page 63) demonstrate this point for Indiana and Southern Illinois.
86
As noted in Chapters 1 and 14, “can be confirmed” does not imply that the discrimination necessarily continues to the present.
87
The exact number depends on the size of what is referred to as a “town.”
88
Baker meant not that African Americans were excluding others, but that ghettoes were becoming exclusively black as “other classes of people” left.
89
Howard Chudacoff,
Mobile Americans: Residential and Social Mobility in Omaha
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 127; Ray Stannard Baker, “The Color Line in the North,”
American Magazine
65 (1908), in Otto Olsen, ed.,
The Negro Question: From Slavery to Caste, 1863–1910
(New York: Pitman, 1971), 268.
90
D is particularly useful because it is not affected by the overall proportion of African Americans in the metropolitan area, and because it has intuitive clarity. D works for two groups at a time, here blacks and nonblacks.
91
Reynolds Farley and William H. Frey, “Changes in the Segregation of Whites from Blacks During the 1980s,”
American Sociological Review
59, 1 (1994): 24.
92
In fact, segregation was even worse than that, especially in the North. At any given moment, northern metropolitan areas looked more integrated than they really were, owing to the Great Migration, which continued at least to 1968. This influx of African Americans from the South led to blockbusting, in turn creating “transitional” or “changing” neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods are temporarily desegregated and artificially reduce D. After factoring out changing neighborhoods, Ds in both regions would rise, but especially in the North. Perhaps 94 would be a reasonable estimate for the average D in both regions, controlling for transitional neighborhoods.
93
James Loewen and Charles Sallis, eds.,
Mississippi: Conflict and Change
(New York: Pantheon, 1980), 177, 186–87; Art T. Burton, “Gunfight at Boley, Oklahoma,” on Bennie J. McRae Jr.’s “Lest We Forget” web site,
coax.net/people/lwf/gunfight.htm
, 5/2003; William E. Bittle and Gilbert Geis,
The Longest Way Home
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), 37.
94
These were not the first black homes to be blown up in Okemah. The nearby
Paden Press
observed on 3/16/1905, “Once the darkey was not allowed to have his habitat in the town [Okemah] and he was discouraged by high explosives.”
95
Norman Crockett,
The Black Towns
(Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 92; W.L. Payne, “Okemah’s Night of Terror,” in Hazel Ruby McMahan, ed.,
Stories of Early Oklahoma,
on Rootsweb, rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ok/okfuskee/history/town/oknite01 .txt; “Terrific Blast Rocks Town From Slumber Saturday,”
Okemah Daily Leader
4/23/ 1908, on Rootsweb,
rootsweb.com/~okokfusk/cities.htm
, 5/2003.
96
Okmulgee Historical Society,
History of Okmulgee County, Oklahoma
(Tulsa: History Enterprises, 1985), 166–68.
97
Bittle and Geis,
The Longest Way Home,
37.
98
William E. Bittle and Gilbert Geis, “Racial Self Fulfillment and the Rise of an All-Negro Community in Oklahoma,” in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds.,
The Making of Black America II
(New York: Atheneum, 1969), 116–21.
99
Sometimes whites—especially “river rats” in floodplains—live in similar settlements, but with a key difference: residents of black townships outside sundown towns are not
allowed
to live elsewhere.
100
Oakley V. Glenn, untitled manuscript (summary of events leading to a Eugene Human Rights Commission), (Eugene: Commission on Human Rights Office, n.d.), 3.
101
Clarence D. Stephenson, “Indiana Area Blacks Battle for Civil Rights,”
Indiana Gazette,
6/8/1985, and
175th Anniversary History of Indiana County
(Indiana: A.D. Halldin, 1979), 2:770–74, citing Dorothy Lydic et al., “Negro Progress in Indiana County,” WPA manuscript, 1938, and Ralph Stone, “A Social Picture of Chevy Chase,” Indiana (PA) State College (now Indiana University of Pennsylvania), 1960, 2–5.
102
Cullman librarian, e-mail, 3/2002; former Cullman resident, e-mail, 5/2002; Helen Bass Williams, manuscript fragment, “History of Negroes in Southern Illinois,” n.d., in possession of Mary O’Hara; Noel Hall, 9/2002; untitled clipping in J. A. Gordon, comp.,
“Days Beyond Recall,”
vol.2, reprints from
Warsaw Bulletin,
in Carthage (IL) Museum collection.
103
Brentwood, Central Islip, Flanders, Freeport, Gordon Heights, Hempstead, New Cassel, North Amityville, North Bay Shore, North Bellport, Roosevelt, and Uniondale.
104
Examples include North Brentwood, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., and Kinloch, Missouri, outside of St. Louis. Unlike townships, North Brentwood incorporated in 1924 and is proud today to claim the title of “oldest incorporated black town in Maryland.”
105
Vivian S. Toy, “Stuck in Last Place,”
New York Times,
5/4/2003; Leonard Blumberg and Michael Lalli, “Little Ghettoes: A Study of Negroes in the Suburbs,”
Phylon
27 (1966): 125; Andrew Wiese,
Places of Their Own
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 6, 17, 21; Harold M. Rose,
Black Suburbanization
(Cambridge: Ballinger, 1976), 29.
106
According to historian Lee Buchsbaum (e-mail, 3/2003), its prostitutes, all of whom were black, “could only be patronized by white customers. Black men were not even allowed in the building, day or night.” The sheriff never challenged the arrangement, so long as he was paid off.
107
After the 1933 repeal of Prohibition nationally, it continued for many decades in some counties and the entire state of Oklahoma. So did white purchases of alcohol in black townships in those places.
108
Buchsbaum, e-mail, 3/2003; Jane Adams, e-mail, 6/2003; Stone, “A Social Picture of Chevy Chase,” 7; Dean E. Murphy, “This Land Is Made, Finally, for Chinese Settlers,”
New York Times,
6/29/2003.
109
“Denver Closing Door of Hope Against Americans,” Chicago
Defender,
4/9/1910.
110
Chudacoff,
Mobile Americans,
156.
111
Ibid.; original has “ethic group” in error.
CHAPTER 4: HOW SUNDOWN TOWNS WERE CREATED
1
Cf. “Decatur, Indiana, Is Suffering from a Bad Attack of ‘Negrophobia,’ ”
Indianapolis Freeman,
6/14/1902.
2
Jean Nipps Swaim, “Black History in Cedar County, Missouri,” in
Black Families of the Ozarks,
Bulletin 45 (Springfield, MO: Greene County Archives, n.d.), 2:534.
3
Swaim doubts that any specific event took place, but I think it did, because the black population decline was so precipitous and the ensuing sundown ideology so strong.
4
Swaim, “Black History in Cedar County,” 535; Cedar County historian, 10/2002. Swaim, 10/2002, does not know why blacks evacuated the county and thinks some merely relocated to Humansville, across the line in Polk County. Possibly, but Polk County also showed a drastic decline in black population shortly thereafter.
5
In most of the riots Horowitz describes, mass murder competed with forced relocation as an outcome; in almost all of the riots I have uncovered, forced relocation was the preferred outcome and killings were few and in the service of that goal. Exceptions include Rock Springs, Wyoming (1885); Rosewood, Florida (1923); and possibly Zeigler, Illinois (1905), and Mindenmines, Missouri (unknown date).
6
Donald Horowitz,
The Deadly Ethnic Riot
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1–2.
7
Patrick Huber, “Race Riots and Black Exodus in the Missouri Ozarks, 1894–1905,” Ozark Cultural Celebration, Harrison, AR, 9/2002, 7.
8
Straight-line 1908 projection based on 1900 and 1910 total populations; 1908 total percentage increase then applied to 1900 African American population.
9
Roberta Senechal,
The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 135.
10
National outrage over this riot helped spark the formation of the NAACP the next year.
11
Nancy C. Curtis,
Black Heritage Sites: The North
(New York: New Press, 1996), 59; officer quoted in Allen C. Guelzo,
Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 452; Philip A. Klinkner and R. M. Smith,
The Unsteady March
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 106–7.
13
Taylorville had a small African American population and did not go sundown, although new African Americans, especially refugees from Springfield, may have been kept out.
14
Illinois State Register
quoted in Senechal,
The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot,
129, 191; William English Walling, “The Race War in the North,”
Independent,
9/3/1908, 529–34, reprinted in Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, eds.,
Civil Rights Since 1787
(New York: New York University Press, 2000), 187; Lester C. Lamon,
Black Tennesseans, 1900–1930
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 134.
15
See Chapter 6 for a fuller account of Spring Valley.
16
Carterville had already been sundown when this expulsion of strikebreakers took place.
17
Otto H. Olsen,
The Negro Question: From Slavery to Caste, 1863–1910
(New York: Pitman, 1971), xxi; “Negroes Have Always Avoided Beardstown,” unidentified Beardstown newspaper clipping, 1929, via S. Lynn Walter; Malcolm Ross,
All Manner of Men
(New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1948), 51; Felix Armfield, “Fire on the Prairies,”
Journal of Illinois History
3, 3 (2000): 191; Victor Hicken, “The Virden and Pana Mine Wars of 1898,”
Illinois State Historical Society Journal
52, 2 (1959): 265–78; Millie Meyerholtz,
When Hatred and Fear Ruled
(Pana, IL: Pana News, 2001); Paul M. Angle,
Bloody Williamson
(New York: Knopf, 1952), 99–109; “Race War in Illinois,”
New York Times,
6/17/1902; “The Eldorado, Illinois Affair,”
Indianapolis Freeman,
7/19/1902; Senechal,
The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot,
129–30; untitled article datelined “Anna, Ill., Nov. 13,”
Carbondale Free Press,
11/13/1909; Winifred M. Henson, “History of Franklin County, Illinois,” M.A. thesis, Colorado State College of Education, 1942, 143; Pinckneyville native and homeowner, 9/2002, Pinckneyville motel owner, 9/2002, and warranty deed record, Edwards Addition Block 5 Lot 11, sale by Colored Free Will Baptist Church to Riley J. Boyd, 8/29/1928; “Lynch Law in Lacon,”
Lacon Journal,
11/10/1898; for Zeigler controversy see Ruby B. Goodwin,
It’s Good To Be Black
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), 174–75, Angle,
Bloody Williamson,
128–31, Allan Patton,
In the Shadow of the Tipple: Zeigler, Illinois
(Zeigler: author, 1994), 34–38, Bob Proctor, 9/2002, and Noel Hall, 9/2002.
18
Again, according to Murray Bishoff, they got the wrong man.
19
Murray Bishoff, “Monett’s Darkest Hour: The Lynching of June 28, 1894,”
Monett Times,
6/27–28/1994; Connie Farrow, “ ‘The Anger and the Hatred Ends,’ ”
News-Leader,
8/18/2001.