Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Between 1890 and 1968 thousands of towns across the United States drove out their black populations or took steps to forbid African Americans from living in them. Thus were created “sundown towns,” so named because many marked their city limits with signs typically reading, “N----r, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On You in Manitowoc”—a Wisconsin city that displayed such signs in the mid-1960s. Some towns in the West drove out or kept out Chinese Americans. A few excluded American Indians or Mexican Americans. “Sundown suburbs” developed a little later, mostly between 1900 and 1968. Many suburbs kept out not only African Americans but also Jews. These practices do not date to the Civil War. On the contrary, between 1863 and 1890, African Americans went everywhere in America. During this “springtime of freedom,” many communities, especially those with large Quaker, Unitarian, or Republican populations, welcomed them. Then, between 1890 and 1940, blacks commenced a “Great Retreat.” This period is becoming known as the “nadir of race relations,” when lynchings peaked, white owners expelled black baseball players from the major (and minor) leagues, and flourishing unions drove African Americans from such occupations as railroad fireman and meat cutter. During this nadir, whites in many communities indulged in little race riots that have mostly been lost to history. Whites in Liberty, Ore., for example, now part of Salem, ordered their blacks to leave in 1893. Pana, Ill., drove out its African Americans in 1899, killing five in the process. Anna, in southern Illinois, followed suit in 1909. Harrison, Ark., took two riots by whites before the job was done—in 1905 and 1909. Decatur, Ind., expelled its black population in 1902. White workers in Austin, Minn., repeatedly drove out African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. Other towns that violently drove out their black populations include Myakka City, Fla.; Spruce Pine, N.C.; Wehrum, Pa.; Ravenna, Ky.; North Platte, Neb.; Murray, Utah; and many others. Residents of Vienna, Ill., set fire to the homes in its black neighborhood as late as 1954. Legalized expulsion Many towns that had no African-American residents passed ordinances, or think they did, forbidding blacks from remaining after dark. In California, the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s tried to locate a company of African-American workers in a large park that bordered Burbank and Glendale. Both cities refused them, each citing an old ordinance that prohibited African Americans within their city limits after sundown. Some towns believed their ordinances remained in effect long after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The city council of New Market, Iowa, for example, suspended its sundown ordinance for one night in the mid-1980s to allow an interracial band to play at a town festival, but put it back into effect the next day. To this day, New Market has not a single black household. Other towns kept out African Americans by less formal measures, such as cutting off city water, having police call hourly all night with reports of threats, or assaulting African-American children as they tried to go to school. By 1970, when sundown towns were at their peak, probably more than half of all incorporated communities outside the plantation South excluded African Americans. Whites in the plantation South rarely engaged in the practice; they kept African Americans down but hardly drove them out. Despite their ubiquity—or because of it—few Americans had any idea how common sundown towns were. In several states, one town got singled out by the media as outrageous for the practice. In Indiana, Martinsville became regionally notorious for the practice in September 1968, when someone stabbed Carol Jenkins, a 21-year-old African American from nearby Rushville, to death with a screwdriver. Jenkins had been walking door to door selling encyclopedias as twilight fell, thus violating the rule. In 2002 when police finally arrested Kenneth Richmond for her murder, reporters for The New Yorker and People magazines covered the story, but the result was to demonize Martinsville as distinctive. In fact, Martinsville is not distinctive. Indiana boasts at least 230 towns and 18 whole counties that banned African Americans. Similarly, many towns and several counties in Texas kept out black residents, but only Vidor, east of Houston, became notorious for the practice, especially after Ku Klux Klan rallies intimidated four black households into leaving public housing there in 1993. Illinois had about 500 sundown towns and suburbs, but the community that stands out for the practice is Anna, surely owing to its post-1909 nickname “Ain’t No N----rs Allowed.” Oscar-worthy prejudice One sundown suburb enjoyed fleeting national notoriety for the practice in 1947 when the noted film director Elia Kazan released Gentleman’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck. Based on the bestselling novel by Laura Hobson, it told how Darien, Conn., one of the most prestigious suburbs of New York City, kept out Jews. Gentleman’s Agreement won the Academy Award for best picture but had no effect on real estate practices in Darien or anywhere else. Darien continued to keep out Jews for years, and of course it kept out blacks. More than a hundred African Americans lived in Darien—but only as servants in white households. Other than these exceptions, what is so alarming about sundown towns—their astonishing prevalence—is precisely what has made them not newsworthy, except on special occasions. Murders like Martinsville’s sell newspapers. Chronic social pathology does not. Probably 10,000 towns had sundown policies in 1970, more than half of all incorporated communities outside the plantation South. Millions of Americans—including many of our country’s leaders—lived in or grew up in sundown towns and suburbs. Presidents and presidential candidates who did so would include Republican William McKinley (Niles, Ohio), Democrat William Jennings Bryan (Salem, Ill.), Democrat Harry Truman (Lamar, Mo.), and Republican George W. Bush (Highland Park, Texas, where the first African-American family ever to buy a home did so in June 2003). Signature American edibles such as Spam (Austin, Minn.), Kentucky Fried Chicken (Corbin, Ky.), and Heath Bars (Robinson, Ill.) come from sundown towns. So did such famous novelists as Ernest Hemingway (Oak Park, Ill.), and Edna Ferber (Appleton, Wis.), although they seem never to have mentioned the matter in their writing. Sundown towns ranged in size from De Land, Ill., population 500, to large cities like Appleton, Wis., with 57,000 residents in 1970. “Sundown suburbs” could be even larger, such as Glendale, the suburb of Los Angeles, with more than 60,000; Levittown, on Long Island, more than 80,000; and Warren, a Detroit suburb with 180,000. They mostly escaped notice. Helping to keep sundown towns off the radar has been the reluctance of historians and sociologists to write about them. Authors have written entire books on sundown towns without ever mentioning their racial policies. English professor Catherine Jurca notes that novelists of suburbia find the racial composition of their communities “so unremarkable” that they never mention it. Histories of city planning relate how practitioners of that discipline designed community after community to keep out urban nuisances like noise, smoke, and traffic—but fail to mention how nonwhites were also excluded. Undocumented history Typically, local historians also do not write down what they know. In 1954 typical sundown town signs stood on Highway 127 north and south of Anna, Ill. In the year of Brown v. Board of Education, integration was on everyone’s mind. In that year, town leaders published One Hundred Years of Progress: The Centennial History of Anna, Illinois, a book so fat (446 pages) that it has a paragraph on every small business in town, even the local Dairy Queen—which refused service to African Americans as recently as 2001. Yet the book contains no mention of Anna’s expulsion of its black population in 1909, no mention of the signs, no mention of what “A-N-N-A” had come to stand for. In conversation, however, residents of Anna readily confirm all these things. Since 1970, many sundown towns—probably more than half—have given up their bans on African Americans, and no known community still bans Jews, Chinese Americans, or anyone other than blacks. However, many sundown towns have no blacks to this day, and some still enforce the ban, albeit informally. What is to be done about such places? Blowing the whistle on them can help, and individuals can do the research to “out” them. Nowadays, sundown towns rely upon deniability for their policy to work. This is the “paradox of exclusivity.” Residents want their towns to be known as “exclusive”; that says good things about them—that they have the money, status, and social savvy to be accepted in such a locale. Residents do not want to be known as “excluding,” especially on racial or religious grounds, for that would say bad things about them. So long as towns can appear “accidentally” all white, they avoid the difficulty. Bringing to light the conscious decisions and often horrific actions that underlie almost every all-white town and neighborhood in America is a first step toward ending what surely remains as the last major bastion of racial segregation in America. (James W. Loewen) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I was born in 1947 in Sheboygan Wisconsin, a little south of the first town you mentioned, Manitowoc. I remember when I was young hearing about the "after dark" rule for Sheboygan. I don't know if it was an actual law - I doubt it and I don't think there were any signs on the road about it, but it evidently was taken seriously at that time. The world has changed since then - people have treated other people badly for thousands of years. All we can do is try to not to keep making those mistakes. There are no rules like that in Manitowoc or Sheboygan now!
thanks for the account, jim which is why this thread is in the history forum. since you mention it tho, i shall endeavor, for illustrative purposes, show how those "rules" evolved into tools of further discrimination.
Is that really necessary? Does anyone here disagree with that premise? I guess what I don't understand is the objection that: This sounds like a bit of an overblown claim---while it is certainly true that there are towns that have no black people in them, is it due to collective racism? Can you point to cases where blacks have tried to move into a town and been denied entry? And, if so, how widespread are such incidents? It's not really clear what "informally" means here.
I did some work for the census, and last fall struck up a conversation with another census worker while traveling through Missouri. He said that in his enumeration travels in backwoods northern Missouri he had seen a couple of towns - one or two - that still had sundown signs posted at the town line. They seemed informal, to him - probably not permanent fixtures, but replaced by dedicated parties often enough to be there at the time. I didn't see the signs myself. But the idea that collective racism disappeared from the US landscape in 1968 seems farfetched to me - under ideal circumstances one would expect it to last at least a full human lifespan past its last official enforcement - so the earliest we would expect the fade to insignificance would be 2030 or thereabouts, in the US.
