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

migrations to the North worked. People from small villages in Italy often wound up in places such as Barre, Vermont, or West Frankfort, Illinois, as well as St. Louis. Norwegians went to Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, not just Minneapolis. But this was not true of African Americans—not after the 1890s, anyway.
    Indeed, historians and social scientists have used the Great Migration to “explain” the increased racism in the North. That is, they used documents such as the Beloit editorial to explain the increased segregation African Americans experienced: the masses of newcomers strained the system, threatened whites’ jobs, upset existing equilibriums, and the like. But the Great Migration did not cause the Great Retreat. Whites were already driving African Americans from small towns across the Midwest before those towns experienced any substantial migration from the South. They continued to drive out blacks from towns that never saw any sizable influx after 1915. The Great Retreat started in 1890, a product of the increasing white racism of the Nadir. It cannot be understood as a reaction to a migration that started in 1915.
    Now let us tour the country, seeing the profusion of sundown towns almost everywhere, beginning in the Midwest. In the process, we shall visit towns that excluded not only African Americans, but also Chinese, Jewish, Native, and Mexican Americans—and in a few cases Catholics, labor union members, homosexuals, and some others. We shall see that prime real estate—elite suburbs, beach resorts, mountain vacation spots, and islands—has typically been off-limits. And we shall encounter whole subregions where African Americans are generally not allowed, even in unincorporated rural areas.

Sundown Subregions and “Dead Lines”
     
    We have seen that entire subregions of the United States, such as the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and the suburbs of Los Angeles, went sundown—not every suburb of Los Angeles, not every county in the Ozarks or the Cumberlands, but enough to warrant the generalization. In several subregions of the United States, signs in rural areas, usually on major highways, announced “dead lines” beyond which blacks were not to go except at risk of life itself. In Mississippi County, Arkansas, for example, according to historian Michael Dougan, a “red line” that was originally a road surveyor’s mark defined where blacks might not trespass beyond to the west. That line probably continued north into the Missouri Bootheel and west beyond Paragould, encompassing more than 2,000 square miles. In southern Illinois, African Americans were not permitted “to settle north of the Mobile & Ohio switch track. This has been a settled feeling for years,” according to a 1924 newspaper report that described a series of attacks—arson, attempted murder, and dynamite—against blacks who tried to move north of that line and against a white farmer in Elco who hired them. Unconfirmed oral history in east Wisconsin holds that there was a sign outside Fond du Lac along Highway 41 warning that blacks were not welcome north of there. This sign sighting needs corroboration but is credible, because in addition to Fond du Lac itself and confirmed sundown towns Appleton and Oshkosh, all towns north of that point were overwhelmingly white. 78 The Arkansas and Illinois dead lines may still be in effect; as recently as 1992, a black friend said, “I can’t go into that town,” to reporter Jack Tichenor when he proposed buying a bag of charcoal after dark in Karnak, just north of the Illinois dead line. However, African Americans do live north of the Wisconsin line without difficulty today. 79
    From west to east, other confirmed sundown subregions—not just individual counties or towns—include:
    • A 4,000-square-mile area southwest of Fort Worth, Texas, including Comanche, Hamilton, and Mills counties, where whites drove out African Americans in 1886
    • A thick band of sundown counties and towns on