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both sides of the Iowa-Missouri border
    • Virtually every town and city along the Illinois River, from its mouth at the Mississippi northeast almost to Chicago, except Peoria
    Still other subregions need confirmation. More research is needed, everywhere.

Alternatives to the Great Retreat
     
    The Great Retreat to the larger cities of the North and West and to black towns and townships was not African Americans’ only response to the wave of increasing white hostility they met during the Nadir—but there was no good answer. Following Booker T. Washington’s advice to “cast down your buckets where you are” and seek only economic advancement, forgoing political and social rights, didn’t work; white southerners sometimes lynched successful black businessmen and farmers simply because they were successful. Following the counsel of W. E. B. DuBois and pursuing voting rights and full citizenship led to such fiascoes as the Ocoee, Florida, riot, described in Chapter 7, in which whites drove out the entire black population and converted Ocoee to a sundown town.
    We have seen that moving to small towns in the North became difficult as more and more of them went sundown. Emigrating to Indian Territory, which at first promised a more tolerant multiracial milieu, led to the overt racism of Oklahoma after 1907, including sundown towns such as Okemah and Henryetta. Going farther west didn’t work either; an African American in Denver lamented in 1910 that what he called “the onslaught” against the race had reached Colorado, even though “the Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and all other races are given a chance.” Giving up hope for America, the author wrote, “We are leaving in great numbers to the far northwest, taking up claims in Canada.” But Canada offered no real refuge; Portfolio 17 shows that it considered closing its doors to blacks entirely. African Americans in Boley and in many interracial towns joined the back-to-Africa movements organized by Chief Sam and Marcus Garvey. The popularity of these movements did not derive from any developments in Africa but was another aspect of the Great Retreat, prompted by the white racism exemplified in the sundown town crusade. The movements organized by both Sam and Garvey ended in disarray, partly because they expressed pride and despair more than actual intentions to emigrate. 109

The Great Retreat Was No Solution
     
    We have seen that forming black towns and townships offered only partial relief. So did moving to large cities, which increasingly segregated their African American residents into constricted ghettos and marginal occupations. Despair seemed to be the only answer to the hatred of the Nadir. Still relevant were the old slave spirituals such as “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
    Certainly the Great Retreat did not improve race relations. Regardless of how sundown towns were created, the whites within them only became more racist. They almost had to, to rationalize having forced or kept nonwhites out. Writing about Omaha, Howard Chudacoff points out another reason: because African Americans increasingly lived in separate neighborhoods, whites no longer had the benefit of knowing them individually, so they fell back on thinking stereotypically about them as a group. “The lack of familiarity bred suspicion and resentment which burst during the riot of 1919.” 110
    Chudacoff concludes, “Clearly, the experience of Negroes resembled those of no other ethnic group.” Every white ethnic group experienced and even chose residential concentration during their initial immigration to the United States. Thereafter, as the years passed and they became more Americanized, their residential concentration decreased—precisely when it was rising for African Americans. As the years passed, African Americans found themselves more and more isolated—increasingly barred from towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. 111
    How did this happen? How were sundown towns (and