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

developments of the Nadir, towns with no black residents—including some with little prospect of attracting any—now passed ordinances or informally agreed that African Americans were not to be allowed after sundown. Where blacks did live, whites now forced them to flee from town after town, county after county, even entire regions—the Great Retreat. Threat of mob attack dangled over every black neighborhood in the nation (as it had earlier over most Chinese neighborhoods) as an ever-present menace. In short, an epidemic of sundown towns and counties swept America between 1890 and about 1940.

The Great Retreat and the Great Migration
     
    These decreases to no or only a few African Americans by 1930 came in the teeth of huge increases in the black population nationally and in many northern states. Nationally, the number of African Americans went up by nearly 60%, from 7,388,000 in 1890 to 11,759,000 in 1930. Moreover, beginning about 1915, African Americans from Dixie started moving north in large numbers, a movement now known as the “Great Migration,” in response to the impact of World War I, which simultaneously increased the demand for American products abroad and interfered with European migration to northern cities. 26 More than 1,000,000 African Americans moved north between 1915 and 1930. Thus the absolute declines in black population by 1930 in many northern counties are all the more staggering. Without a retreat to the cities, these increases in overall black populations would have caused the number of counties with zero or few blacks to plummet.
    Coming in the middle of the deepening racism of the Nadir, this Great Migration prompted even more white northerners to view African Americans as a threat. A 1916 editorial from Beloit, Wisconsin, exemplifies the “Negro as problem” rhetoric:
    The Negro problem has moved north. Rather, the Negro problem has spread from south to north.... Within a few years, experts predict the Negro population of the North will be tripled. It’s your problem, or it will be when the Negro moves next door.... With the black tide setting north, the southern Negro, formerly a docile tool, is demanding better pay, better food, and better treatment. . . . It’s a national problem now, instead of a sectional problem. And it has got to be solved. 27
     
    Historians and sociologists took note of the growing urban concentration of African Americans between 1890 and 1930, continuing to about 1960. One of the foremost writers on race relations of the era, T. J. Woofter Jr., put it this way: “It is remarkable that Negro city population should have increased by a million and a half between 1900 and 1920; but it is astounding that a million of this increase should have been concentrated in the metropolitan centers of the East and the Middle West.” More than half of this increase was absorbed by just 24 cities, each having black populations of more than 25,000, he observed. “This emphasizes the astonishing degree of concentration that has taken place.” 28
    But neither Woofter nor other commentators noted the decreases in black populations—often to zero or to a single household—in smaller cities and towns across the North. The Great Migration seems to have masked the Great Retreat. Scores of books discuss the Great Migration; none tells of the Great Retreat (by this or any other name). The increased black population in, say, Chicago got ascribed to migration from Mississippi, which was largely true; hence the internal migration of African Americans from small towns in Illinois to Chicago went unnoticed. Not grasping the extent of anti-black sentiment in smaller northern towns during the Nadir, social scientists somehow found it “natural” for people from tiny Glen Allan, Mississippi, to wind up in Chicago; for those from Brownsville, Tennessee, to move to Decatur, Illinois; and for inhabitants of Ninety Six, South Carolina, to move to Washington, D.C. This is not how other