Racism Flourishes, From Sundown Towns to Educational Bans
So much about the history of racism in America has been intentionally ignored in schools, and the effort continues in states around the nation.
One relatively little understood form of racism but one of the most insidious manifestations involved racial cleansing through violence against African Americans. Another more subtle, but just as effective practice are the so-called “Sundown” towns where African Americans or other minorities such as Chinese Americans, Jews, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Mormons got not so subtle formal or informal reminders that they were not welcomed in town and had to leave either peacefully or through force.
Both forms of racism have been very effective and continue to this day.
Several cities tried to drive out their entire black populations through violent race riots and become sundown towns. White race riots failed to destroy or otherwise convince African Americans to leave in some cities because the Black communities were so large.
In the early 20th Century, riots were reported in many cities, including Tulsa, Okla., and Springfield, Ill. Whites also tried to “cleanse” Denver and Seattle of Chinese residents; eliminate African Americans from Akron and Evansville, Ind.; Joplin and Springfield, Mo.; Springfield, Ill.; Youngstown, Ohio; Omaha and Lincoln, Neb.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Johnstown, Pa., among others.
Racial violence was enough to drive thousands of African Americans from their homes in Springfield, Ill., and some never returned. For two summer days in August 1908, several thousand whites in Springfield, the home of President Abraham Lincoln, shot African Americans, burned their homes, looted their stores and mutilated and lynched two elderly blacks.
On the evening of Aug. 14, 1908, a large mob of 5,000 to 10,000 whites gathered outside the Springfield jail demanding vengeance against two black prisoners, George Richardson and Joe James. Richardson had been accused of raping a white woman and James was accused of killing a white man.
With violence approaching, Sangamon County Sheriff Charles Werner wanted to move two black men out of the county jail. Harry Loper, a successful white restaurateur, owned one of the few cars in Springfield in 1908 and he offered to remove the men. Werner distracted the mob with a false fire alarm, and James and Richardson slipped into Loper’s car. They were removed to the safety of the McLean County Jail.
The mob was so enraged when they learned about Loper’s aid that they destroyed Loper’s Restaurant and set fire to Loper’s cars as Loper escaped through the basement. The mob went on a rampage in the black area, looting and damaging black owned business, destroying their homes, and eventually lynching two important members of the black community, Scott Burton and William Donegan.
After two days of violence, Illinois Gov. Charles Deneen called the Illinois National Guard to bring the riots under control. The events caused thousands of the black residents to move out of Springfield, some to never return.
Of the two accused black men, James was eventually tried, convicted and hanged for the murder of Clergy Ballard. Richardson was set free after his accuser, Mabel Hallam recanted her story.
Six months later, heavily influenced by the Springfield 1908 Race Riot, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was created on Feb. 12, 1909, the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday.
The Seattle, Wash., riot of Feb. 6–9, 1886, fueled by white anger toward Chinese workers, was effective in purging the area of many of its more than 3,000 Chinese immigrant residents. The dispute began after a mob affiliated with a local Knights of Labor chapter formed small committees to expel Chinese from the city. Violence erupted between the Knights of Labor rioters and federal troops ordered in by President Grover Cleveland.
Few Chinese continued to reside in the Seattle area following the riot as many returned to China to flee from the racially inspired violence.
One African American was lynched, another was shot to death and a third was incinerated on Aug. 19, 1901, in Pierce City, Mo., leading to the exodus of all of the city’s 400 African Americans, a legacy that remains today as the 2010 census showed the city was 95.9 percent white. One resident, Mark Twain, later wrote an essay, referring to Pierce City as “The United States of Lyncherdom.”
“Although it was a region of churches and schools the people rose, lynched three negroes — two of them very aged ones — burned out five negro households, and drove thirty negro families into the woods,” Twain wrote.
The incident began after the body of a white woman, Caselle Wild, was found in a wooded area of Pierce City. The woman had a fractured finger but there was no evidence she had been raped. Despite the lack of evidence, William Godley, a Black man, was arrested and charged with rape and murder. On Aug. 20, 1901, Godley was seized from the city jail by a mob of 1,000 armed white men and lynched.
In 15 hours of violence and terror, the mob proceeded to the Black section of Pierce City, where they shot Godley’s grandfather, French Godley, while a third victim, Peter Hampton, 75, was burned to death in a fire set at his home.
African American families had moved to Pierce City to escape violence in Monnett, Mo., where a Black laborer and white railroad men got into a dispute and a gun went off, killing one of the white workers.
Eight days later, a Black man, Hulett Ulysses Hayden was arrested for the killing. He was being taken by train to the Barry County Jail when vigilantes boarded the train, carried Hayden away and hung him from a telephone pole. After the lynching, mobs of white railroad workers ordered all African Americans to leave Monett.
The African Americans fled to Pierce City but met violence there and again fled to Joplin, Mo., only to be uprooted again after a Black man was lynched and homes were set ablaze in downtown Joplin.
In “sundown towns,” African Americans knew they were not welcome once the sun went down. Some towns like Goshen, Ind., boasted of “no negro population” as recently as 1955. A community promotional booklet published in 1936 or 1937, notes the town’s safe nature and that “Contributing in a large measure to the absence of crime is the character of the population of Goshen. Nationalities are 97.5 percent native born white, and 2.5 percent foreign born white. There is no negro population.”
One covenant for a Goshen housing development in 1946 read: “No person of any other race but the white race shall occupy any building or any lot.”
In Pierce City, Mo., the first African-American didn’t graduate from high school until 2003.
In towns across the Midwest, African Americans were denied housing, persecuted, or violently evicted during a period roughly from the 1890s to the 1940s. The exodus created a homogeneity that has defined the towns to the present day.
A sundown town is not represented by one racist event but rather is an entire community or county that for decades was kept “all white.” Some towns allowed one black family to remain when they drove out the rest. Sundown towns include institutionalized persons of color in prisons, hospitals and colleges; live-in servants in white households; and black or interracial children in white households.
Sundown towns may maintain their whiteness through laws or by force or custom. The term “sundown towns” was used because some of the towns like Upper Sandusky, Ohio, posted a sign on the banks of the Sandusky River next to the Indian Mill that warned “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You In Upper Sandusky.”
The History and Social Justice website at Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Miss., posts the only registry of sundown towns in America. The website, copyrighted by James W. Loewen, historian and social justice worker, notes that some towns remain all white intentionally while suburbs like Grosse Pointe, Mich., or Edina, Minn., have excluded nonwhites by “kinder gentler means.”
As Loewen began researching sundown towns, he found they were much more numerous than he expected. For example, he determined that about 506 towns in Illinois, two-thirds of all the towns in the state, were sundown towns. Similar proportions in Oregon, Indiana, and other Northern states also went sundown, mostly between 1890 and 1940.
When sundown towns failed to force out African Americans, many cities turned to redlining where real estate agents steered African Americans or others towards specific parts of a city that were informally or formally segregated. The results were the entrenched ghettos where African Americans were forced to live.
Teaching about the history of racism is under attack as Republicans officials around the country, led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are working hard to keep white students from learning uncomfortable lessons about racism in the nation.
And signs of growing racism in the nation are obvious every day.
The founder of a neo-Nazi hate group and his associate were arrested this week in connection with what authorities say were plans for a racially motivated attack on the power grid in Baltimore.
An Ohio couple created a neo-Nazi-themed homeschooling channel, “Dissident Homeschool,” to distribute elementary school lesson plans to a group of 2,400 subscribers.
And a new report shows that extremists are using online crowdfunding platforms to raise millions of dollars for their ideologically driven activities. Through crowdfunding, extremists have generated at least $6,246,072 from 324 campaigns between 2016 and mid-2022, the report said.