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

the Bulletin by Associated Press.
    The Population in 1910 was 14,548.
    Disappointment was expressed by some that the figure was not larger but those who knew how the population was made up were gratified at the showing. It is estimated that more than 2,000 Negroes have left Cairo since the last census, making the increase in the white population nearly 2,700 people.
     
    Although “disappointed” that Cairo’s overall population had gained only 4.5%, white residents were “gratified” 4 at its now whiter makeup. 5
    This line of thought was hardly unique to Cairo. During the first half of the twentieth century, towns competed by advertising how white they were; several Portfolio items show examples. In its 1907 Guide and Directory, Rogers, Arkansas, bragged about what it had, including “seven churches, two public schools, one Academy, one sanitorium, ice plant and cold storage, etc.,” and also what it did not have: “Rogers has no Negroes or saloons.” Not to be outdone, nearby Siloam Springs claimed “Healing Waters, Beautiful Parks, Many Springs, Public Library,” alongside “No Malaria, No Mosquitoes, and No Negroes.” Whites in Cumberland County, Tennessee, forced out African Americans around 1900; in the 1920s, its main newspaper, the Crossville Chronicle, boasted, “No Mosquitoes, No Malaria, and No Niggers.”
    White residents of much of Oklahoma and the “non-southern” parts of Texas adopted this rhetoric. Land owners and developers who were trying to entice whites to central and western Texas in the 1910s exhorted them to “leave the niggers, chiggers, and gravediggers behind you!” Terry County, Texas, advertised itself in 1908 as a sundown county:
    Terry County is thirty miles square, situated eighty miles north from Stanton, on the T & P railroad, and about eighty southwest from Plainview, terminus of the Santa Fe; was organized in 1904, and has about 2,000 population. ALL WHITE, about 400 homes . . .
     
    Comanche County, Texas, drove out its African Americans in 1886. It was delighted also to have no Jews, almost no Mexicans, and few immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. After the 1940 U.S. Census, Representative Bill Chambers announced that according to a congressional report, “Comanche County, long famous for many unique advantages, has gained national distinction, for being the home of the purest Anglo-Saxon population of any county in the United States.” Among its 19,245 residents, just 28 were born in countries other than the United States, including only 2 from Mexico, both listed as white. 6
    Many towns in the Midwest were likewise thrilled to be all-white. After bragging about high literacy and home ownership rates, the 1936 Owosso and Shiawassee County Directory in Owosso, Michigan, declared, “There is not a Negro living in the limits of Owosso’s incorporated territory.” Mentone, Indiana, bragged, “With a population of 1,100, Mentone has not a Catholic, foreigner, Negro, nor Jew living in the city.” In its 1954 pamphlet titled “Royal Oak: Michigan’s Most Promising Community,” the Detroit suburb’s Chamber of Commerce proudly proclaimed, “The population is virtually 100% white.” 7
    The Far West was equally smitten with the idea. Fliers for Maywood Colony, a huge development entirely surrounding the town of Corning, California, trumpeted:
    GOOD PEOPLE
     
    In most communities in California you’ll find Chinese, Japs, Dagoes, Mexicans, and Negroes mixing up and working in competition with the white folks. Not so at Maywood Colony. Employment is not given to this element. 8
     
    Thus except in the traditional South, driving African Americans out and keeping them out became the proper civic-minded thing to do, in the thinking of many whites of all social strata between about 1890 and 1940, lasting until at least 1968. Doing so seemed a perfectly reasonable solution once African Americans were defined as “the problem.” Spurred by the ideological