Tag: sundown towns

Sundown Towns Pt.2: The Nadir

It wasn’t only towns, counties, and suburbs blacks were expelled from. Before the Nadir there were black masons, carpenters, foundry and factory workers, postal carriers, and more. After 1890, however, in both the North and South, whites pushed blacks out of these jobs. They were also pushed out of professional sports, as blacks had played major league baseball in the 1880s but the last player was forced out by 1889. In 1911, blacks were excluded from being jockeys in the Kentucky Derby. Boxing was still allowed but it served to reinforce the stereotype of black men being dangerous fighters.

It’s interesting to note that blacks were arguably treated more poorly in the North than the South after the end of the Reconstruction. In the South, whites would happily employ black folks to do any job deemed inferior. In the North, on the other hand, the attitude seemed to be that if blacks were so inferior why hire them at all? The lack of employment opportunities meant that many went jobless and their joblessness fed into negative stereotypes. Ironically, the worse the Nadir got, the more whites blamed blacks for it. Northern whites came to see blacks as disaffected, lazy, and dangerous. “They must not work hard enough, think as well, or have as much drive, compared to whites,” was apparently the consensus.

During the Nadir, stereotypes of white supremacy permeated all of American culture. Oddly enough, historians played a major role in this line of thought. After Reconstruction was overthrown in 1890, historians painted the era to be one of oppressed whites, “beset by violence and corruption.” The historical record became so distorted that interpretations of the Nadir in American history textbooks are still shaped by it today.

Minstrel shows, which were widely popular, perpetuated stereotypes of blacks as being ignorant, irresponsible, wide-grinning, loud-laughing, happy-go-lucky, shuffling, singing, banjo playing types that were devoid of any character traits valued among whites. In small towns across the North, where few blacks existed to correct the impression, these stereotypes were the bulk of what whites “knew” about blacks. Eventually minstrelsy gave way to vaudeville and vaudeville gave way to movies but the stereotypes remained. Unfortunately, this set the scene for, perhaps the most racist major picture ever, The Birth of a Nation in 1915. It praised the first Ku Klux Klan (1865 – 1875) as the savior of the “white race,” specifically white Southern civilization, which led to the revival of the Klan.

Worse than these spectacles, science was used to back up feelings of black inferiority with Social Darwinism, “an evolutionary rationale for the inevitability of poverty,” which gave way to eugenics. These were the ultimate way of blaming the victim. Not only was being poor their own fault but they were beyond help because they just plain had bad genes. While technically about improving genetic quality, eugenics was more about preserving white supremacy. People who found themselves targets of the eugenics movement were those who were seen as unfit for society: the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, and specific communities of color like blacks, latinx, or Native Americans. Organized eugenics got its foothold in a meeting of The American Breeders Association in 1904. I wish we were talking about animal breeding. Margaret Sanger, American birth control activist who established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was unfortunately quoted as saying “we do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

All of this leads us back to places like Forsyth County, Georgia, where the sundown county was created by violence. That said, many of the shows or threat of violence have gone unrecorded even by local historians, much like the aforementioned story of Stockton, Missouri. Some towns were cleared out by sheer intimidation by way of massive Klan rallies. Still others created ordinances to keep blacks out of corporate limits after sundown or preventing the sale or rental of property to them. Those ordinances were, in fact, illegal but despite that, they began to appear around 1900 through 1930. Further “freezing-out” or barring blacks from establishments until they could no longer effectively live in a place was another method of creating all-white municipalities. There were also instances of town buying out their black families, or would-be residents, by offering to purchase their property from them so they wouldn’t live there. This sounds almost nicer than some of the other ways but it was made clear that they could not refuse the offer, if they did their property would just be taken either by eminent domain or condemnation.

To be continued…

Jaspin, E. (2008). Buried in the Bitter Waters. Basic Books.

Loewen, J. (2007). Lies My Teacher Told Me. (2nd ed.) Touchstone.

Loewen, J. (2018). Sundown Towns. (2nd ed.) The New Press.

Ortiz, P. (2018). An African American and Latinx history of the United States. Beacon Press Books.

Phillips, P. (2016). Blood at the Root. W. W. Norton & Company.

Rothstein, R. (2017). The Color of Law. Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Taylor, C. (2016). The Roots of Route 66. The Atlantic. Retrieved 15 December 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-roots-of-route-66/506255/.

Sundown Towns Pt.1: Racial Cleansing

Starting around the early 1890s, lasting until the late 1960s, thousands of American towns were established for whites only. These municipalities ranged from the small, with a population of a few hundred, to the surprisingly large, with tens of thousands. Race relations, after the gains of the Civil War, worsened. Black Americans lost their ability to vote in the South and were no longer allowed to use the same spaces as whites. While they never lost their right to vote in the North, they did lose the right to live in many towns, suburbs, and even whole counties. Anti-black sentiments lead to the creation of sundown towns, also known as sunset or grey towns.

“The facts about sundown towns prove hard for many people to believe, partly because high school textbooks in American history present a nation that has always been getting better, in everything from methods of transportation to race relations.”

James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns

The assumption of constant, forward progress has blinded many to the reality that sometimes things got worse. Race relations deteriorated during the 1890s to 1930s, this time period is frequently referred to as the nadir of race relations (“nadir” meaning lowest point or point of greatest adversity or despair). Many sundown towns were created from towns that had been integrated. Some towns even touting stories of previously positive interactions between whites and POC. For example, Stockton, MO, had integrated social gatherings, like their large annual 4th of July picnic, until some now long forgotten event caused a rift. Other towns had riots aimed at driving out POC.

One such place, Forsyth County, Georgia, began with the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man one evening in September 1912. The following morning the news had spread and white Forsyth was in an uproar. A team of bloodhounds and a posse of white men were assembled, the men deputized on the spot. Headed by Sheriff William Reid, a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, they rode in search of the attacker. They knocked doors demanding to speak to each family of black field hands and sharecroppers.

The next day Sheriff Reid, and his deputy Gay Lummus, arrested and jailed one black teen and four “accomplices”. The teen, Toney Howell, was the nephew of a well respected residents of Cumming, a town in Forsyth County. The others were all single, illiterate, and lived in the area in which the attack had happened. What stood out about Toney was that he was not from Forsyth but the neighboring Milton County making him unknown, and therefore conspicuous. He was tried and convicted of the rape in February of the following year. A black preacher, Reverend Smith, was beaten near to death by a mob of white men after he commented on “so much trouble being caused on account of a sorry white woman.” What followed these events was the racial cleansing of Forsyth County by bands of white “night riders” who coordinated a campaign of terror and arson. Ultimately, they drove out the county’s over 1,000 black residents. White residents swooped in to claim the now “abandoned” lands and the memory of black Forsyth was forgotten as locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To be continued…

Loewen, James W. 2018. Sundown Towns. 2nd ed. New York: The New Press.

Phillips, P. (2016). Blood at the Root. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.