AP Road Trip: Racial tensions in America's 'sundown towns'
“Race isn’t a big problem around here,” said
“We don’t have any trouble with racism,” said a twice-widowed woman, also white, with a meticulously-kept yard and a white picket fence.
But in
Unless they’re among the handful of Black residents.
“It’s real strange and weird out here sometimes,” said
The rules of a sundown town were simple: Black people were allowed to pass through during the day or go in to shop or work, but they had to be gone by nightfall. Anyone breaking the rules could risk arrest, a beating or worse.
These towns were an open secret of racial segregation that spilled over much of the nation for at least a century, and still exist in various forms, enforced today more by tradition and fear than by rules.
Across America, some of these towns are now openly wrestling with their histories, publicly acknowledging now-abandoned racist laws or holding racial justice protests. Some old sundown towns are now integrated. But many also still have tiny Black communities living alongside residents who don’t bother hiding their cold stares of disapproval.
This story was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
This part of southern
We wanted to take a close look at systemic racism, trying to understand how something that is so crushingly obvious to some people can be utterly invisible to others.
So we went to a longtime sundown town.
They were called “grey towns,” in some parts of America, “sunset towns” in others. The terms were used by both Black and white people.
Very often, especially in well-to-do suburbs that didn’t want to be known as racist, they had no name at all. But they still kept out Black residents. There were hundreds of such towns, scholars say, reaching from
Sometimes, the rules were official policies, with signs at the edge of towns warning Black people to be gone by nightfall. More often, everyone - both Black and white - simply knew the unwritten rules.
In this area, near the borders of both
“It was something that was known,” said
In places still seen as sundown towns, many Black people now follow their own rules: Avoid them if possible, and lock your car doors if you have to drive through. If you stop for gas, look for a well-lit gas station with security cameras.
So it is in
“Every time you come into town, or you go into a gas station, or in a store, people look at you,” said
“You can feel them looking at you, feel them staring,” she said. “I’ve never had anybody say anything (racist) to me in
She was in
At first things went well. Protesters and counter-protesters prayed together. They talked calmly about race. But not for long.
“Bullshit!” an older white man shouted at Vaughn, after she said Black people aren’t treated equally. “They get the same as the white people get!”
Vaughn, whose grandmother gently pulled her back from the confrontation with the angry older man, isn’t surprised that Vienna’s white residents don’t see racial issues around them. The situation is far more subtle today than when Black residents were forced out.
“Until you live in a Black or brown person’s body you’re not going to understand,” she said. “You have to know somebody who lived it, or live it yourself, to truly understand.”
Today it’s just an overgrown field, vibrant green from recent rains.
But 60 years ago, there was a small collection of houses along that stretch of
The violence erupted in August, 1954, after the arrest of a 31-year-old resident,
"
A few weeks after his arrest, Latham escaped from jail. Dozens of armed men took to the streets of Vienna and the surrounding fields, backed up by bloodhounds and spotters in low-flying planes.
Within hours, the cluster of Black homes along
A week or so later Latham gave himself up and pleaded guilty. One day after he surrendered, he was sentenced to 180 years in prison.
By then, the town’s Black residents were gone.
"The Black community, from that point on, disappeared from Vienna,” said
Black people had lived in and around Vienna since the late 1820s or early 1830s, said Dexter. But he estimates that after the fires, perhaps 50 people fled the town. The town later repaid Black residents for their lost homes, the
The 1950 census showed 54 Black people living in
In 2000, it showed one.
A couple of blocks from the field where Vienna’s Black community once lived, down a narrow dead-end street, a grandmother with pink fingernails and an easy laugh watches over an extended family that spans much of America’s Black-white divide.
They are not what you’d expect to find here.
“It’s our sanctuary,”
Harris, her husband and their daughters are white. Lewis is Black. The grandchildren are biracial.
“This is our own little world down here,” Harris said, sighing before she begins listing some of the troubles the family has faced. “They just brush everything under the rug.”
There was the time one of the kids was called “burned toast” by a classmate. Or when an elderly woman walked past the family at a church dinner and loudly called the children “damn half-breeds.”
There was the day the 10-year-old came home with a painful question: “Grandma, why do I have to be Black?”
She and her husband moved to Vienna about 10 years ago from northern
“We want to get out of here,” she said. “We have to figure out what’s good for them. And Vienna won’t be good for them.”
Lewis joined the little enclave two years ago, expecting a short visit but staying after his girlfriend, one of Harris’ daughters, got pregnant.
He’s an unassuming man deeply in love with his young son, Nick. If he hasn’t felt the
It’s complicated, he added, because most people are friendly once they know him. But he also believes his family should leave.
“I don’t want my son raised down here,” he said. “I don’t want him out here where (white people) are all he sees.”
They call themselves
Their clubhouse, a few miles outside Vienna, is an old gas station, later turned into a convenience store and now a gathering place for a dozen or so friends. It’s part workshop, part bar, part informal store. But mostly it’s a place for a bunch of gray-haired men to pass the time, drink light beer and relive a sliver of their childhoods every day at noon with reruns of “Gunsmoke,” the TV show about a marshal whose steely nerve and Colt revolver kept the peace in the American West.
“That’s what formed this nation!,” said
This is a deeply conservative part of the nation — 77 percent of the county voted for President
For them, race has become an issue twisted far beyond proportion, a cudgel for hypocritical liberals.
“Really, we got a good country, and I think there is probably some racism going on. But I try not to be racist,” Stevens, the retired prison guard, said in his gentle drawl about this year’s protests over racial injustice. “I think they’re overreacting a little bit.”
Warren is more blunt, pounding his fist on a particle-board table when he gets really angry.
“I’ve had Black friends. I’ve had Black babysitters. I had Black people who took care of me through my childhood,” he said. But the easygoing race relations of his youth were lost, he said, when President
Then there’s former President
“He claims to be Black!” Warren said, pounding the table. “What the hell happened to his white mama?”
Another of the men later pulls back his shirt to show that he now carries a .357-magnum revolver tucked into his jeans, worried about the unrest that occasionally flared during this year's racial protests.
Vienna’s own violent history doesn’t come up until the men are asked about it.
Stevens was about 10 when it happened.
“When they burned them out that time, a lot of them just packed their bags and went up north,” said Stevens, who said he hated to see Black classmates driven from town.
“For a long time there were very very few Blacks in this county, and then they started easing back in,” he said. “We got a few more families in here now, but we get along good.”
How many sundown towns remain? It’s rarely clear anymore. Openly racist laws are now largely illegal, and few towns want the infamy of being known for keeping out Black people. Scholars often rely now on demographic data, looking carefully at towns that have tiny Black populations.
Loewen, the historian, says the number is clearly dropping, categorizing many as “recovering” sundown towns, where organized resistance to Black residents has ended but the racial divide can remain wide. Vienna would almost certainly fall into that category.
Dexter sees hope in the dozens of towns with racist histories that have held racial justice protests, from the infamous
“I do think that there are lots of changes, and progress, being made today. Mostly I think that comes from people talking about the issue,” he said. “People didn’t want to talk about it before.”
But while legal protections and changing mores have lessened the power of sundown towns, there are still plenty of them with well-known racist histories. Sometimes, towns know their violent past keeps racial minorities away. Sometimes, that history makes those minorities avoid them.
“It’s not by law” that Black people remain a tiny population in many towns, Dexter said. “It’s by tradition.”
Even in
But ever so slowly.
In 2010, the
This story has been corrected to change the name of a town to
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