Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism

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Authors: James W. Loewen
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cause of its continuing exclusion is far too simple.
    The events that triggered mass expulsions were often instances of black misbehavior. Some African American did something wrong, and whites responded by taking it out on the entire group. Such was the case in Anna, Illinois, in 1909. The convenience store clerk quoted at the beginning of this book who confirmed in 2001 the continuing nickname for Anna, “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” also related Anna’s explanation for its policy: “My girlfriend told me how that all got started. A black man raped a white girl, and she’s buried up in the cemetery with a memorial stone, and they hung him.” Her girlfriend is right: residents of Anna do date its sundown status to 1909. On November 8 of that year, Anna Pelley, a 24-year-old white woman, was murdered in Cairo, some 30 miles south. She was found in an alley near her home the next morning, gagged and strangled, her clothing ripped off. Bloodhounds led police to a black-owned house where they later arrested Will James, a deliveryman for the Cairo Coal & Ice Co. That evening a lynch mob gathered in Cairo, but the police chief quieted them by pointing out that the police weren’t sure they had the right man. After all, the evidence against James consisted mostly of the fact that “bloodhounds had sniffed their way to his house,” as a contemporary newspaper account put it. The following Friday, November 11, rumors that James had confessed caused whites again to threaten a lynch mob. The sheriff, Frank Davis, decided to get his prisoner out of Cairo. That evening the sheriff, a deputy, and James “boarded the northbound Illinois Central train to escape the lynch mob.” But whites in Cairo telephoned news of Davis’s flight to Anna, 30 miles north—Anna Pelley’s hometown—where another mob assembled to await his arrival. 25
    “It would not do to stay on the train and try to get through Anna with him,” the sheriff later explained. “That was the former home of the girl he was accused of killing, and I knew that the news that we were coming would be telephoned and telegraphed to Anna in time for her friends to collect a mob at the depot that would take him from me. So I had the train stopped at Dongola [ten miles south], and we struck out in the darkness across the country eastward.” The mob now combed the woods around Dongola. Eventually, walking through the night, the prisoner and his guards reached the little town of Karnak, where Sheriff Davis bought sardines, crackers, and soft drinks for the three of them. They didn’t dare stay in Karnak, however, lest they be recognized, so they walked on toward Belknap. There they hoped to catch a 5 PM northbound train on a different railroad and evade Anna and the mob altogether. Unfortunately, a train crew at Karnak had recognized them and relayed their whereabouts back to Cairo. “When we discovered late in the afternoon that a mob was tailing us,” in the sheriff ’s words, “we traveled as fast as we could, in the hope of keeping ahead until dark.... But the pursuers closed in on us, and when we found that we were in greater danger of being seen if we kept on than if we hid where we were, we concealed ourselves in the bushes and waited, hoping that they would pass us by, but they found us.” 26
    The mob overpowered the prisoner and his guards and forced them onto a southbound train at Karnak. Word of the capture preceded them. When they reached Cairo, thousands of people, many from Anna and other nearby towns, gathered to watch at the main downtown intersection, spanned by a double ornamental steel arch festooned with hundreds of bright lights. (See Portfolio 5.) A reporter described the scene:
    The mob that hanged James was led by women, many of them the wives of influential residents of Cairo. The rope was pulled taut by female relatives of Miss Pelley, aided by several score of their sex. As the Negro was pulled up into the air, these same women sang and

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