Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism by James W. Loewen Page A

sundown towns who are pleased to be living in all-white communities may not want to talk openly about it either, lest their open racism become the target of legal action or scorn. Either way, residents usually cover up, especially in print. Commemorative histories, in particular, rarely treat embarrassing facts or controversial topics. People don’t want to publish anything negative about their own town, especially in the coffee table book that marks its centennial. Consider One Hundred Years of Progress, published in 1954 in Anna, Illinois. You will recall that whites in Anna drove out all African Americans in the city in 1909, and the town has been sundown ever since. This 446-page book provides a history of every organization in town, down to the local Dairy Queen. Yet it contains no mention of African Americans, the murder and lynching that led to their banishment, the expulsion itself, their continuing exclusion, or the nickname that confirms Anna’s notoriety. These facts are hardly obscure; everyone in town knows them; I confirmed the nickname in my first conversation in the city. Published in the year when the U.S. Supreme Court had just declared segregation illegal, the book can hardly have omitted these facts by accident. The anonymous authors had to have known that to say openly that Anna was now known as “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed” would no longer reflect credit on their town. 16
    Only a handful of local histories treat the exclusion of African Americans (or Chinese or Jewish Americans) from their community or county forthrightly. Most—like Anna’s—do not. The overt racism that led to sundown suburbs has been especially mystified. In 1961, for example, on the occasion of its 35th anniversary, Life Newspapers, serving the west Chicago suburbs, published a 150-page special issue, featuring an article, “Cicero . . . the Best Town in America,” that contained not a word about the 1951 race riot that made Cicero nationally notorious. This is all too typical of the publications put out by local newspapers and historical societies. The result is not happy for today’s researcher. 17
    One might imagine that priests and preachers might chide their congregations about their un-Christian attitude toward people of color, but clergy, like local historians, avoid controversy by not saying anything bad about their town. In 1960, a Baptist minister in Vandalia, Illinois, told of a nearby town: “When I was pastor in Pinckneyville, they had an unwritten rule that no Negroes should be in town after sundown. No Negro could live in the community.” The minister was right about Pinckneyville but ignored the same rule in Vandalia, where he was living. A still more heroic omission comes in the Proceedings produced by the annual Valparaiso University Institute on Human Relations from 1950 to 1968, an interracial Lutheran group that often focused on concerns of race relations—but never in Valparaiso. Valparaiso was a sundown town from at least 1890 until the early 1970s. The 1951 conference passed a resolution about the Cicero, Illinois, riot of that year, condemning Cicero’s all-white policy. In later years, the conference printed articles favoring integrated housing, discussed black-white issues in Chicago, Cleveland, and other American cities, and passed resolutions against apartheid in South Africa—but never said a thing about Valparaiso. Even the 1966 conference, “Where You Live,” never once mentioned that they were meeting in a sundown town. Yet many speeches and papers were by faculty members and the president of Valparaiso University, who had to know this. For that matter, all participants of color had to be housed on campus because they could not spend the night elsewhere in the city. If the conference and the college had taken a stand in Valparaiso, they might have accomplished something. It is not clear that their resolutions had any impact on Cicero, South Africa, or Cleveland. Such studied ignorance