Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism Read Online Free PDF Page A

officers of United States Colored Troops and their men, between white officers in white units and their black orderlies, and between escaped Union POWs and the African Americans who sheltered them behind enemy lines. Ordinary enlisted men, white and black, came increasingly to rely on each other, albeit in separate units, for the mutual support necessary for survival on the battlefield.

Setting the Stage for the Great Retreat
     
    Thus the textbook archetype of uninterrupted progress falsifies the history of race relations between 1890 and the 1930s. It is almost unimaginable how racist the United States became during the Nadir. If African Americans in those years had experienced only white indifference, rather than overt opposition—often legal and sometimes violent—they could have continued to win the Kentucky Derby, deliver mail, and buy homes in “white” towns and neighborhoods. The ideology of white supremacy increasingly pervaded American culture during this era, more even than during slavery. Convinced by this ideology that African Americans were inferior, whites all across America asked, “Why even let them live in our community?”
    The next chapter tells the result: the “Great Retreat” of African Americans from towns and rural areas across the North to black ghettoes in large northern cities. We live with the results—sundown towns and suburbs—to this day. They form the most visible residue on the American landscape of the nightmare called the Nadir.

PART II
     
    The History of Sundown Towns
     

3
     
    The Great Retreat
     
    In spite of the fact that the total Negro population of Indiana showed a fivefold increase between 1860 and 1900, some parts of the state showed little or no increase, while there was actually a decline in some places. In some instances this was due to a deliberate anti-Negro policy.... Some communities gained a reputation for being so hostile that no Negro dared stay overnight in them.
    —Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 1957 1
     
     
     
     
    D URING THE NADIR, deliberate policies, formal and informal, created America’s most complete form of residential segregation: the complete exclusion of African Americans—and sometimes other groups—from entire communities. As part of the deepening racism that swept through the United States after 1890, town after town outside the traditional South 2 became intentionally all-white.
    This happened in two waves. First, an epidemic of attacks against Chinese Americans across the West prompted what I call the “Chinese Retreat,” resulting in the concentration of that minority in Chinatowns in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a few other cities. 3 Then whites began forcing African Americans out of towns and rural areas across the North. This resulted in what I hope becomes generally recognized as the “Great Retreat”—the withdrawal of African Americans from towns and counties across the United States to black ghettoes in large northern cities.

Aching to Be All-White
     
    How a problem is formulated influences how it gets thought about and what qualifies as a solution. After 1890, as we have seen, most whites no longer viewed slavery and racism as the problem—slavery was over, after all, and racial discrimination had been made illegal under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Now African Americans themselves were seen as the problem, by white northerners as well as southerners. Outside the traditional South, few whites now argued that their town should be interracial, as Republicans had done during Reconstruction. Whites now ached to be rid of their African Americans. The editor of the Cairo Bulletin summarized the feelings of white residents of Cairo, at the southern tip of Illinois, in 1920:
    “CAIRO DISAPPOINTED”
     
    Cairo’s population on January 1, 1920, was 15,203, a gain of 655, or 4.5 per cent. This announcement was made by the Census bureau at Washington yesterday morning and transmitted to