by Kevin Stoda, born and bread in Midwest America--in & near American Sundown Towns
Some years ago, Dr. James W. Loewen, began to research the historical locations of America's Sundown Towns. In his "SundownTowns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,"Loewen wrote:
"From Maine to California, thousands of communities kept out African Americans (or sometimes Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, etc.) by force, law, or custom. These communities are sometimes called 'sundown towns' because some of them posted signs at their city limits reading, typically, 'n-word, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On You In ___.' Some towns are still all white on purpose. Their chilling stories have been joined more recently by the many elite (and some not so elite) suburbs like Grosse Pointe, MI, or Edina, MN, that have excluded nonwhites by 'kinder gentler means.'"
Loewen continued, "When I began this research, I expected to find about 10 sundown towns in Illinois (my home state) and perhaps 50 across the country. Instead, I have found about 507 in Illinois and thousands across the United States. This is their story; it is the first book ever written on the topic."
Too Many Historical Sundown Towns in the USA Affect our Politics Today
Recently, I wrote a political science professor at the University of Kansas and encouraged him to do statistical analyses on whether there was a disproportionate relationship to be found amongst USA towns that voted for Donald Trump and the country's many Sundown Towns or Sundown Counties. Like Professor Loewen, I had been raised in three Midwestern states as a child myself and have only come to retroactively (over decades) come to observe the wide spread prevalences of SunDown Towns in these states: Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas.
The first 8 years of my life, I grew up in the town of Genoa, Illinois, which is located in DeKalb County. Dekalb City, the largest town in the county, was a historical Sundown City in that same county. I believe that politically, the county of DeKalb also went to George Wallace's presidential campaign in the 1968 election. From this point on own my father--who was born in the same county--, began to believe that (in retrospect), "Perhaps our little town of Genoa was a Sundown Town, too." I could only recall one token Mexican American family living at the edge of that town through the time we moved to Missouri in 1970.
Naturally, most of the thousands--or even hundreds of thousands--of communities in the United States that one can now label as Sundown Towns historically were often de facto Sun Down towns--rather than de jur Sundown towns.
Whether parts of towns or counties, many regions and towns across our land were simply openly redlined, such as were parts of Midwestern cities, like Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Johnson County (KS).(Note: As recent as this year, 2018, "Lending discrimination, redlining still plague St. Louis, new data show". [2]
Long before open-redlining was prohibited in most communities across the land, my mother was born in and raised in the town of Sarcoxie, Missouri, which is a Sundown Town located on the southeast edge of Jasper County. No blacks apparently lived in that town at all in the 1950s or 1940s when she grew up there. My mom now lives in another town in the opposite corner of the Jasper County. It's named Carl Junction, which is also a historical Sundown town in that Dixiecrat area of the state. Over the years, I have seen only one black family move into the area around the historic downtown of Carl Junction over the past decade.
In Missouri, I lived as a middle-schooler with my family in a multicultural town--named Wentzville and located in St. Charles County. However, throughout the state of Missouri, there were Sundown towns, such as Webb City--also in Jasper County or Warsaw, located near Lake of the Ozarks. Certainly, there is evidence to show that prior to the 1950s the now infamous Ferguson, Missouri was a Sundown Town.
I may certainly be misusing the term "Dixiecrat" here, but I am doing so here to make it clear that the separation between southern and northern Missouri had been one of two types of Democracies above and below the Mason-Dixon line . Later, Cities were divided long ago amongst racial lines, too, both in large and small cities. Neosho, the neighboring county to the south of Jasper County, was the seat of the infamous rump group of Show-Me Staters who sought to cut the state in half during the early battles between confederate and union soldiers in 1861.
Fast-forward to the red-hatted Donald Trump Election of 2016 in Jasper County. Sarcoxie township went to Trump while my mother, a Democrat of today (not a Dixiecrat cum GOP member post 1970s) was afraid to go out in either Carl Junction to poll-watch that day, i.e. this was because there were so many rumors that Trump's red-hatted bullies would be poll-watching, too.
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