By James W. Loewen
The New Press, 2005, 2018
Reviewed by Steve Halpern
The late James W. Loewen was the author of the bestselling book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. That book is a documentary account of the falsifications contained in the American history textbooks most students are exposed to. However, Loewen believed that his book on the Sundown Towns was his most important work. Why did he feel this way?
Loewen gave the following definition of what he meant by a sundown town – “A sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus ‘all white’ on purpose.” In his research Loewen confirmed that there were at least 184 towns in 32 states that had signs on their borders with the words, “N—word, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in __.” Among those towns, only seven were in the traditional South where Jim Crow segregation was the law. In all, Loewen estimated that there were about 10,000 towns across this country where there was a deliberate policy prohibiting all but a few, if any, Blacks from living there.
So, when we think about the “Great Migration” of Black people out of the states where Jim Crow segregation was the law, we can also think about the sundown towns. Because racist mobs and city planners organized these towns to prevent Black people from living there, Blacks who left the South were effectively forced to move into the urban centers. While segregation has broken down to a certain extent, many Blacks continue to live in segregated neighborhoods of the inner cities.
There have been many books about the system of Jim Crow segregation in the southern states, as well as the histories of thousands of lynchings. However, Loewen discovered that his book was the only documented history of sundown towns. Because this book gives us a new perspective on the history of this country, Loewen felt it was his most important work. Of the books by Loewen that I’ve read, I agree with that opinion.
A history of sundown towns
After the Civil War there was a period of radical reconstruction where people who had powerful government positions favored doing away with the vestiges of slavery. Schools were set up in the former slave states. Many white and Black students learned to read for the first time. There were Black elected officials and Black players in the integrated baseball leagues of those days.
W.E.B. DuBois was a talented African American student in the late 1800s and was raised by a single mother who was a maid. A collection was made in Western Massachusetts that enabled DuBois to attend college. He would go on to become one of the most profound leaders in the history of this country. This was another example of the sentiment that favored an end to discrimination.
In most histories I’ve read, this period ended in 1877. Loewen argued that the reconstruction sentiment vanished in 1890 with the state Constitution of Mississippi. At that time, the Democratic Party was known as the “White Man’s Party” and promoted a program of vicious racist discrimination. The Republican Party under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln organized for the military defeat of the slave owning army known as the confederacy.
Several prominent republicans favored defending the rights of African Americans. However, by 1890 that sentiment vanished. In the South a system of Jim Crow segregation became the law. Jim Crow was always a flagrant violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that was supposed to be about “equal protection under the law.” However, the Supreme Court came up with decisions like Plessey v. Ferguson that favored Jim Crow and flagrantly violated the Constitution.
The system of Jim Crow was designed to force Black people to do the worst jobs for the lowest pay. Even an accusation that a Black person acted in any way that questioned this system, might be punished with a gruesome lynching. The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till was just one of the thousands of lynchings in this country.
James Loewen’s book on sundown towns reported on an entirely different style of vicious discrimination that erupted in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Up until 1890, Black people lived in many of the towns in these areas. This discrimination was primarily aimed at Black people, but Jews, Mexicans, and Chinese citizens were also prohibited from living in many towns.
During slavery times, Black slaves needed to have written permission to be out after dark. After slavery in the South, racists lynched Blacks in order to “keep them down.” In other parts of the country whites lynched Blacks to “drive them out.”
Loewen argued that the years 1890 through 1940 were the “Nadir” in race relations in this country. While the Black and white population increased in the northern cities during those years, the Black populations in the sundown towns decreased. Loewen cited the statistics of Granite City Illinois as an extreme example of this. “from 1900 to 1970 Granite City, Illinois zoomed in population from 3,122 to 40,440, owing to skyrocketing employment, while its Black population fell from 154 to 6. Obviously, these growing cities had an abundance of new jobs—for whites.”
Loewen detailed what happened in Anna, Illinois that made it a sundown down. In 1909 a 24-year-old white woman named Anna Pelley was murdered in the town. A Black man named Will James was arrested for the murder, but the evidence against him was very weak. The sheriff, Frank Davis attempted to get James out of the vicinity to avoid the lynch mob that had been organized. He wasn’t successful and about a thousand onlookers viewed the lynching of Will James.
Then, this mob drove the 30 to 40 Black people who had been living in Anna out of the town. Anna got the reputation of “Ain’t No N—words Allowed.” After 1909 few if any Black people lived in Anna, Illinois.
We can also see how this racist sentiment included Chinese immigrants. The city council of Santa Ana, California passed a resolution in 1906 that called for “the fire department to burn each and every one of the said buildings known as Chinatown.” We might consider that Chinese immigrants did some of the indispensable work to build the transcontinental railroad. That railroad transformed this country and opened the western states for development. Yet by 1882 the federal government adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act that prohibited Chinese immigration for ten years.
We might recall that in the year 1985, the Police Department in the city of Philadelphia fired 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a home occupied by members of the organization MOVE. Then the police dropped a bomb on the home. The Fire Commissioner ordered the Fire Department to “Let the fire burn.” As a result, homes on three blocks adjoining the MOVE Home were engulfed in flames and destroyed. The parallels between the bombing of the MOVE home and the destruction of the Chinese homes in 1906 in Santa Ana, California are striking.
Trayvon Martin
The title of a chapter in this book is “Enforcement.” The signs prohibiting Black people from entering towns was backed up with racist terror aimed at preventing Black people from even walking through these towns. The organization that enforced these illegal terrorist acts was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had huge chapters, not only in the South, but throughout the northern states.
In 1898, J.J. Wallace invited a Black man to do construction work in Norman, Oklahoma in 1898. This is how James Loewen described what happened next.
“The mayor and other whites beat up Wallace because of it and ran the African American out of town. Wallace sued the government, arguing lack of protection, but the court concluded that neither it nor the state could be expected to do anything about local sentiment—even though the mayor helped lead the attack.”
Loewen gave this summary of all the methods used to keep Black people out of sundown towns.
“When all else fails, after ordinances and covenants were declared illegal, when steering, discriminatory lending, and the like have not sufficed, when an African American family is not deterred by a community’s reputation—when they actually buy and move in—then residents of sundown towns and suburbs have repeatedly fallen back on violence and the threat of violence to keep communities white.”
So, when we think about the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, we see how the circumstances surrounding this murder had a long history in this country. Zimmerman murdered Martin for merely walking in the neighborhood where he lived. While Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin, in the years of the Nadir (1890-1940) whites who murdered Black citizens for merely walking through sundown towns weren't even charged with a crime.
Labor
One of the reasons racists used for prohibiting Blacks to live in sundown towns was the fact that employers attempted to use them as scabs or strike breakers. When white workers went on strike, employers oftentimes used Black workers to break the strike. Under those and other conditions, there were times when employers defended Black workers against racist mobs.
However, one of the most important developments in the labor movement was the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.). This labor federation began to see the importance of recruiting Black workers.
One of the unions in the CIO was the United Auto Workers Union (U.A.W.). The UAW leadership understood that it needed to organize the Ford, River Rouge plant located in Dearborn, Michigan if it would become a national union. Thousands of African American workers toiled in this plant and this was one of the best jobs Black people could get at this time in the country.
The UAW proved that it could be an effective representative of Black workers by making significant stands against Jim Crow and other forms of racist discrimination.
However, the Ford River Rouge plant is located in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn in a sundown town. This meant that Black workers needed to commute from their homes in Detroit in order to work in Dearborn.
Ironically today there is a large Arab community that lives in Dearborn. The residents of the town apparently preferred to live with Arabs rather than Black people.
There was a similar situation at the Ford assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey. Black workers in this plant did not live in the Mahwah area and many commuted to their jobs from Newark, New Jersey.
In 1985 I supported a strike by members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union against the Hormel Meat Packing company in Austin, Minnesota. The workers at this plant went on strike because the routine conditions they faced were unimaginably horrendous. However, Austin had a long history of being a sundown town.
I believe that during the course of this strike, the workers consciousness as to who they are changed. They began to see that the employer was the force that was determined to profit off their labor at any cost. I believe that consciousness might have had a role in changing the attitudes of those workers with respect to the issue of racist discrimination.
Today anyone who understands basic arithmetic has the tools to see how and why institutionalized racist discrimination is a routine part of the reality of the United States. Black workers, on the average, have lower salaries and have less accumulated savings than white workers. Because the owners of corporations are not paying Black workers the same wages, they profit from this discrimination. Therefore, the working class has a real interest in doing away with this clear discrimination. While employers claim they are opposed to discrimination based on race and sex, the numbers don’t lie.
In my opinion, the goals of the labor movement to champion the interests of the working class can only be achieved if labor supports the unconditional liberation of Black people and the abolition of all forms of racist and sexist discrimination.
Immigration
James Loewen gave several examples of how sundown towns now allow Mexican and other Latin people to live there. What he didn’t mention is the drive by the federal government to deport millions of immigrants from this country. With the emergence of sundown towns as well as with the drive to deport millions of immigrants, we see clear parallels to the legacy of chattel slavery.
In the year 1850 the United States government adopted the Fugitive Slave Act. This law required all state governments to cooperate with slave catchers who were paid money to apprehend human beings. They returned escaped slaves to a condition where they were viewed as commodities who had no rights at all.
In recent years the federal government agency known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) has been deporting millions of workers from this country. Thousands of these immigrants have children who were born in this country. When the parents are deported, the children are not supposed to be deported since they are citizens. So, thousands of children of deported immigrants are separated from their parents possibly for the rest of their lives. In the times of slavery, slave families were routinely separated so slave owners could maximize profits on their investments.
While sundown towns kept African Americans and other nationalities out, today the federal government has a clear policy of throwing millions of workers out of this country. We might also think about the fact that corporations rely on the profits extracted from nations where workers are paid between one and ten dollars per day. That is the primary reason why workers from other countries feel the need to come here in order to make a sustainable living. No one can control the place where we are born.
Cuba and the United States
James Loewen concludes his book with suggestions of how to combat the legacy of the sundown towns. He argues that when young people are raised in segregated or integrated neighborhoods, they oftentimes develop differing perspectives on life. Growing up in integrated neighborhoods enables people to have attitudes that are more critical of racist and sexist discrimination.
While this is true, there is more to this story. In her book The New Jim Crow – Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, Michelle Alexander documented how Black people are grossly overrepresented in the prison system in this country. The United States has more prisoners than any other nation in the world. According to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, slavery continues to be legal with respect to the millions who have been “duly convicted” of a crime.
We can also see how the gross inequality between Black and white workers continues to be a fact of life in this country. For these reasons, I believe that Loewen’s suggestions to deal with the legacy of the sundown towns are inadequate.
In my opinion, the persistence of racist discrimination in this country comes out of the routine functioning of the capitalist system. So, when we look at the timeline of a comparison between events in this country and the nation of Cuba, I believe a clear trend takes shape. I wrote a blog about this timeline in my article Two Conflicting Histories—The United States and Cuba.
April 19, 1775—The revolution that gave birth to the United States has been called the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The reason for this battle was about which side would control the arms depot located in that area.
October 16 1859—John Brown and his supporters raided an arms depot at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The goal of this raid was to take the arms from the depot, retreat to the Allegheny Mountains and use those arms in the battle to end slavery.
July 26, 1953—An armed force led by Fidel Castro attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, Cuba. The goal of this attack was to take the arms stored at this garrison, retreat to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and advance the Cuban Revolution.
The ruling powers at the time of these rebellions defeated all three of the uprisings. Eventually revolutions erupted that would remove the British, the slave owners, and the U.S. supported Cuban regime of Fulgencio Batista from power.
August 18, 1955—A racist mob brutalized and murdered Emmett Till in Mississippi. His murderers were found not guilty in a so-called trial that made absolutely no attempt to bring Till’s murderers to justice.
December 1, 1955—A police officer arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The NAACP responded to this arrest with the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott.
December 2, 1956—A small force of Cuban revolutionaries landed on the shores of Oriente Province in Cuba. The forces of Fulgencio Batista murdered most of those who landed. Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Ernesto Che Guevara were among the survivors, and they retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra.
January 1, 1959—The victorious revolutionary army marched into Havana, Cuba. The new revolutionary government outlawed racial discrimination and organized a literacy drive that taught everyone on the island how to read. As a result, today Cuba might have more teachers and doctors per capita, than any other nation in the world.
April 17, 1960—An armed force created and financed by the United States government attacked Cuba at the Bay of Pigs or Playa Girón. This force was quickly defeated by the Cubans.
December 22, 1961—Cuba announces it has completed its mobilization to teach every Cuban how to read. Today there are tens of millions of U.S. citizens who are functionally illiterate. In 2016 Donald Trump made the statement, “I love the poorly educated.”
March 7, 1965—Police attacked a demonstration of peaceful protesters at the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Alabama. The protesters were attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand the right to vote for African Americans.
November 5, 1975—1991—Cuba sent about 36,000 military troops to Angola in an effort to stop a invasion of the country that was supported by the apartheid regime of South Africa. The Cubans and Angolans succeeded in stopping that invasion. In later years, the President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela thanked the Cubans for their role in coming to the defense of the African people.
September 13, 1994—President Clinton signed his 1994 Crime Bill. This law made it possible for the prison population in the United States to skyrocket. African Americans are grossly over-represented in the dungeons of this country.
Recently the United Nations voted for the 29th time to condemn the United States embargo against Cuba. However, that embargo, with its international implications continues to be in effect. Because the Cuban Revolution erupted in an underdeveloped nation, Cuba has found it extremely challenging to work its way around that criminal embargo.
On the December 11, 2022 issue of the New York Times there was a front page article about the increasing number of Cubans who are leaving the island. We might consider the fact that about 250,000 people left the United States after the revolution in this country.
When we look at the above timeline, I believe that if Cuba had the resources of a developed nation, few if any people would be leaving. However, the United States clearly has these resources. Yet, the legacy of the sundown towns and institutionalized racist discrimination continues to be facts of life here.
I believe that the above timeline makes a clear argument that when a government makes a priority of human needs over profits, there is a clear possibility that racist discrimination can begin to vanish.
