Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism by James W. Loewen Page B
Authors: James W. Loewen
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has a payoff: one need not do anything. If forced to recognize that they speak in sundown towns, the Pinckneyville minister and Valparaiso professors might feel the need to criticize and try to change their communities. This could be risky: even tenured professors can be let go, and Baptist churches can hire or fire their ministers at any time. 18
Often residents of sundown towns have gone beyond merely covering up their communities’ exclusionary policy to laud their towns as particularly democratic. The centennial history of Pekin, Illinois, published in 1949 by the Pekin Chamber of Commerce, contains this paragraph:
Pekin has no social divisions. There are no special neighborhoods in Pekin, either social, economic, religious, or racial. It is this Democracy or Near-Equality which frequently first impresses strangers in our city.
Yet Pekin has been notorious as a Klan center ever since the 1920s. It has also long been one of the larger sundown cities in the United States. African Americans across the United States remain in awe of its fearsome reputation even today. In a certain ghoulish sense, the book is accurate, of course. Just as various German cities can boast today that they have no Jewish ghetto, Pekin can brag that it has no black neighborhood. Likewise, in 1942, writing the history of his hometown, Libertyville, an all-white and probably sundown town northwest of Chicago, Lowell Nye said,
Perhaps the one factor most evident to the newcomer who observes Libertyville’s population is its unusually pure American quality.... It is an American town that is genuinely American; its basic stock can be identified with no one nationality. Taken as a whole, it is a happy tolerant society.
In her 1938 autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, novelist Edna Ferber made a similar assertion about Appleton, Wisconsin: “a lovely little town of 16,000 people; tree shaded, prosperous, civilized. Creed, color, race, money—these mattered less in this civilized, prosperous community than in any town I’ve ever encountered.” This is an extraordinary claim about a sundown town. Ferber, who was Jewish, may not have encountered anti-Semitism in Appleton, but she could not have failed to notice its complete absence of African Americans, and she had to know that their absence was by design. As historian James Cornelius put it, “When I went to Lawrence University [in 1978], that’s one of the first things I learned, that Appleton was a sundown town.” “Color, race” made the key difference in this “civilized, prosperous community,” and in Pekin, and probably in Libertyville. Surely these authors protest too much. 19
These exuberant proclamations of equalitarianism in sundown towns exemplify not only base hypocrisy but also what sociologists call “herrenvolk democracy”—democracy for the master race. White Americans’ verbal commitment to nondiscrimination forms one horn of what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal famously called “The American Dilemma.” Blatant racism forms the other horn. In elite sundown suburbs, this dilemma underlies what we shall later term the “paradox of exclusivity.”
Local Newspapers Don’t Say a Thing and Vanish if They Do
Like centennial histories and historical markers, small-town and suburban newspapers like to present only the sunny side of their community to outsiders. Early in the sundown town movement, many communities were so racist that their newspapers happily published full accounts of the actions their white citizens were taking against their African American neighbors, sometimes even including editorial exhortations before the events. Later, after civic leaders realized that these acts might strike outsiders as reprehensible, the accounts sometimes vanished. Harrison, Arkansas, for example, drove out its African Americans in 1905 and 1909. This was no trivial event, according to Jacqueline Froelich and David Zimmermann, whose article is the definitive treatment
Often residents of sundown towns have gone beyond merely covering up their communities’ exclusionary policy to laud their towns as particularly democratic. The centennial history of Pekin, Illinois, published in 1949 by the Pekin Chamber of Commerce, contains this paragraph:
Pekin has no social divisions. There are no special neighborhoods in Pekin, either social, economic, religious, or racial. It is this Democracy or Near-Equality which frequently first impresses strangers in our city.
Yet Pekin has been notorious as a Klan center ever since the 1920s. It has also long been one of the larger sundown cities in the United States. African Americans across the United States remain in awe of its fearsome reputation even today. In a certain ghoulish sense, the book is accurate, of course. Just as various German cities can boast today that they have no Jewish ghetto, Pekin can brag that it has no black neighborhood. Likewise, in 1942, writing the history of his hometown, Libertyville, an all-white and probably sundown town northwest of Chicago, Lowell Nye said,
Perhaps the one factor most evident to the newcomer who observes Libertyville’s population is its unusually pure American quality.... It is an American town that is genuinely American; its basic stock can be identified with no one nationality. Taken as a whole, it is a happy tolerant society.
In her 1938 autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, novelist Edna Ferber made a similar assertion about Appleton, Wisconsin: “a lovely little town of 16,000 people; tree shaded, prosperous, civilized. Creed, color, race, money—these mattered less in this civilized, prosperous community than in any town I’ve ever encountered.” This is an extraordinary claim about a sundown town. Ferber, who was Jewish, may not have encountered anti-Semitism in Appleton, but she could not have failed to notice its complete absence of African Americans, and she had to know that their absence was by design. As historian James Cornelius put it, “When I went to Lawrence University [in 1978], that’s one of the first things I learned, that Appleton was a sundown town.” “Color, race” made the key difference in this “civilized, prosperous community,” and in Pekin, and probably in Libertyville. Surely these authors protest too much. 19
These exuberant proclamations of equalitarianism in sundown towns exemplify not only base hypocrisy but also what sociologists call “herrenvolk democracy”—democracy for the master race. White Americans’ verbal commitment to nondiscrimination forms one horn of what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal famously called “The American Dilemma.” Blatant racism forms the other horn. In elite sundown suburbs, this dilemma underlies what we shall later term the “paradox of exclusivity.”
Local Newspapers Don’t Say a Thing and Vanish if They Do
Like centennial histories and historical markers, small-town and suburban newspapers like to present only the sunny side of their community to outsiders. Early in the sundown town movement, many communities were so racist that their newspapers happily published full accounts of the actions their white citizens were taking against their African American neighbors, sometimes even including editorial exhortations before the events. Later, after civic leaders realized that these acts might strike outsiders as reprehensible, the accounts sometimes vanished. Harrison, Arkansas, for example, drove out its African Americans in 1905 and 1909. This was no trivial event, according to Jacqueline Froelich and David Zimmermann, whose article is the definitive treatment
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