Driving to my former job as editor
of the News-Progress in Sullivan, IL, one Tuesday morning in 2005, I heard Jim
Loewen talking about a past that many central Illinois residents would prefer
to forget.
Loewen, an Illinois native with a
doctorate from Harvard, is the author of “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of
American Racism,” (W.W. Norton & Co.) and he was being interviewed on WILL
Radio's morning show in Urbana.
 |
| Art by SamiShain |
In his book, Loewen noted that up
until the 1960s, many towns adopted policies designed to maintain all-white
communities.
You've heard the old rural legend
— this or that town had a sign that told blacks they'd better be gone by the
time the sun set.
Well, it’s more than a legend.
"While African Americans
never lost the right to vote in the North... they did lose the right to live in
town after town, county after county," Loewen said.
In other words, blacks ended up
concentrated in a Decatur or a Chicago not so much out of choice, but because
when they tried to live elsewhere, they were cruelly driven out.
“Located mostly outside the
traditional South, these towns employed legal formalities, race riots,
policemen, bricks, fires and guns to produce homogeneously Caucasian
communities,” Publishers Weekly said in its review of Loewen's book.
Loewen documented data on hundreds
of such towns. Radio listeners heard such a tale from Arcola, IL. One woman
recalled that when she was a child, a black family was told by the school
district that their children's records had been “lost in the mails.”
The girl watched as the mother and
her children approached a grocery store in the middle of the day, only to be
confronted by a “closed” sign on the door. There they stood, perplexed and
hungry, in a parking lot full of shoppers' cars.
Monticello had a particularly
infamous reputation, Loewen said. And so, unfortunately, did my hometown of
Effingham. Blacks there were permitted to travel only one narrow route — from
the bus station to the train station and vice versa. I wasn't told any of this
as a child, although I might have gotten a clue from the uniformly pale faces I
saw while growing up there.
Interestingly, Mattoon, as a
railroad town, had a better reputation than most for racial tolerance. But as
many as 480 of the 650 Illinois towns Loewen investigated were “sundown towns,”
formally or informally.
Naturally, I wanted to know about
the towns in Moultrie County, so I contacted Loewen. He said he had no information
on Bethany or Lovington “...except census statistics, which show them to be
all-white for decade after decade, so I therefore suspect them as having been
sundown towns but list them as unconfirmed.”
But Loewen had corresponded with
residents of Sullivan, and was generous enough to share what he'd learned.
“I don't have any specific
anecdotes on Sullivan, except to say that it was always just 'one of those
things you knew' - blacks were not permitted there,” one person told him.
A former resident now living in
London said, “I remember growing up in Sullivan where all outsiders were made
to feel unwelcome. Sullivan was, and probably still is, a town with many
small-minded people living in it.
"I love where I grew up, but
yes, this unrealistic living situation had its implications when those of us
who lived there grew up and moved away," the London dweller said.
“I remember being afraid of all
the different people when I was 17 and a freshman at college. There were over
30,000 students representing a huge variety of people — this fact is what made
my education complete. I now live in London, England, and have been fortunate
enough to travel all over Europe and Africa. Americans in general are very
small-minded when it comes to accepting differences in other people, or perhaps
I notice this because I grew up in Sullivan."
Whatever Sullivan's sundown
status, it ended in the early 1960s, thanks to one family's courage, according
to a former resident.
“I hope that my response will not
be taken as gospel, but I clearly remember the issue of blacks spending the
night in Sullivan due to my association with The Little Theatre on the Square,”
the person said.
“Such prohibitions were termed
'Sunset Laws' and did not allow blacks to stay in Sullivan in such a way that
they would have to or be allowed to sleep there. I really doubt that such
prohibitions were statute, as this prohibition was by-passed in
approximately1963, although I am unsure as to the specific year.
“Guy S. Little, Jr. made a decision
to have the musical 'Showboat' as one of the summer offerings at The Little
Theatre. As such, one or two black principal Equity actors were part of the
summer cast for the entire season, in addition to one or two black apprentices.
Also, the role of the actor who sang 'Old Man River' was filled by a black
professor from the U of I, Champaign.
“Casts were filled and rooms
rented, and one man summarily turned his back on 'Sunset Laws.'”
"As an aside, I was so
incredibly proud of the Little family and its decision to tum its back on the
prejudices that had been formally or informally enforced in the town. I am
further proud of the quiet courage and dignity that it took to achieve such an
action quietly and effectively!"
By the Martin Luther King holiday 2014,
we've come pretty far along the path of racial tolerance — far enough that we
can no longer see, or sometimes even remember, the distant point where the
journey began. And that's a problem, because we need to remember.
We need to remember in part
because it's a useful corrective to our tendency toward fatuous ancestor
worship. Our forebears didn't have all the answers, and they weren't any better
than they should have been. And we also need to remember the racist past in
order to avert a racist future.
After Hurricane Katrina and the
election of President Obama, I heard some mutterings of gutter racism that
surprised and saddened me. I am caught off-guard when something as primitively
tribal and as viciously, blindly moronic as racism reemerges, blinking, into
the light of modem civilization.
---
“The test of courage comes when we
are in the minority. The test of
tolerance comes when we are in the majority.”
— Ralph W. Sackman
No comments:
Post a Comment