Read Online Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism by James W. Loewen - Free Book Online
Authors: James W. Loewen
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questions—why did so many towns go sundown? what caused one town to do so but not another?—is not so easy. It is always hard to assign causes for large-scale historical movements, and all the more so when the movement entails attitudes and actions that are embarrassing or repugnant in retrospect. I suggest two kinds of underlying factors were at work. First, the spirit of the times—the zeitgeist—changed. I am referring to the deepening racism known as the Nadir of race relations, of course, between 1890 and 1940. This change in our national culture affected towns all across America. But it did not affect them equally. The second type of underlying social and cultural causes predisposed some towns—but not others—to go sundown. These factors included a Democratic voting majority, mono-ethnic makeup, and strong labor movement. Such characteristics did not determine that a town would go sundown, but as the Nadir deepened, African Americans in these towns lived on the knife edge. The actions of a few individuals on one side or the other often swayed the outcome. Even chance played a role.
Chapter 2 analyzed how and why racism intensified after 1890 across the United States. Lynchings rose to their all-time high, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn as a national institution, and whites drove blacks from occupation after occupation. Causal factors underlying the Nadir included the three i’ s—Indian wars, increasing opposition to immigrants, and imperialism—as well as the rise of Social Darwinism to justify the opulence of the Gilded Age. Of course, the racism that had arisen earlier in our culture as a rationale for slavery was always a key underlying ingredient.
If not for this intensification of white supremacy between 1890 and 1940, towns and suburbs across the North would never have been allowed to expel and exclude African Americans and others. The most obvious way that the Nadir of race relations gave birth to sundown towns was in the changed response of governments when whites drove out African Americans. Two incidents in Anna, in southern Illinois, one before the Nadir and one during it, highlight its impact. This book began with a mention of the 1909 lynching that led to the expulsion of African Americans from Anna; Chapter 7 tells that story in detail. But 1909 was not the first expulsion of African Americans from Anna-Jonesboro, which had long been anti-black. In 1862, citizens of Union County had supported a new state constitutional provision, “No Negro or Mulatto shall migrate or settle in this state,” by a vote of 1,583 to 98. Complaining because ex-slaves passed through the county going north on the Illinois Central Rail Road, the Anna newspaper editor wrote, “We have laws prohibiting their settlement here.” During the Civil War, Cairo was a place of refuge for African Americans from the Lower Mississippi Valley. United States Army officers struggled to cope with the flood of refugees. In 1863, residents in and around Cobden, six miles north of Anna, agreed to take some of these men and women as workers in their apple orchards. Benjamin Fenton brought in about 40 African American refugees to work on his farm. Whites from the Anna-Jonesboro area charged the orchard owners with “unlawfully and willfully bringing [slaves] into the State of Illinois . . . in order to free them,” a violation of the old statewide racial exclusion law passed before the Civil War. Then a mob of about 25 men led by an Anna doctor visited Fenton and forced him to return his workers to Cairo . 6
After the Anna mob drove the African American farmworkers from Union County in 1863, the army commander at Cairo who had let them go there in the first place was outraged. He wrote that he would have sent armed troops to protect them if the farmer who employed them had requested it. The military later arrested the mob leaders and imprisoned them for most of the rest of the war. 7
But when Anna whites again drove out their black
Chapter 2 analyzed how and why racism intensified after 1890 across the United States. Lynchings rose to their all-time high, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn as a national institution, and whites drove blacks from occupation after occupation. Causal factors underlying the Nadir included the three i’ s—Indian wars, increasing opposition to immigrants, and imperialism—as well as the rise of Social Darwinism to justify the opulence of the Gilded Age. Of course, the racism that had arisen earlier in our culture as a rationale for slavery was always a key underlying ingredient.
If not for this intensification of white supremacy between 1890 and 1940, towns and suburbs across the North would never have been allowed to expel and exclude African Americans and others. The most obvious way that the Nadir of race relations gave birth to sundown towns was in the changed response of governments when whites drove out African Americans. Two incidents in Anna, in southern Illinois, one before the Nadir and one during it, highlight its impact. This book began with a mention of the 1909 lynching that led to the expulsion of African Americans from Anna; Chapter 7 tells that story in detail. But 1909 was not the first expulsion of African Americans from Anna-Jonesboro, which had long been anti-black. In 1862, citizens of Union County had supported a new state constitutional provision, “No Negro or Mulatto shall migrate or settle in this state,” by a vote of 1,583 to 98. Complaining because ex-slaves passed through the county going north on the Illinois Central Rail Road, the Anna newspaper editor wrote, “We have laws prohibiting their settlement here.” During the Civil War, Cairo was a place of refuge for African Americans from the Lower Mississippi Valley. United States Army officers struggled to cope with the flood of refugees. In 1863, residents in and around Cobden, six miles north of Anna, agreed to take some of these men and women as workers in their apple orchards. Benjamin Fenton brought in about 40 African American refugees to work on his farm. Whites from the Anna-Jonesboro area charged the orchard owners with “unlawfully and willfully bringing [slaves] into the State of Illinois . . . in order to free them,” a violation of the old statewide racial exclusion law passed before the Civil War. Then a mob of about 25 men led by an Anna doctor visited Fenton and forced him to return his workers to Cairo . 6
After the Anna mob drove the African American farmworkers from Union County in 1863, the army commander at Cairo who had let them go there in the first place was outraged. He wrote that he would have sent armed troops to protect them if the farmer who employed them had requested it. The military later arrested the mob leaders and imprisoned them for most of the rest of the war. 7
But when Anna whites again drove out their black
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