Sundown
towns are mentioned in books by four
nonfiction authors: Frank Quillen,
Ray Stannard Baker, Jacque Voegeli,
and Emma Lou Thornbrough, all cited
in Sundown Towns. Michael D'Orso's
Like Judgment Day (New York: Putnam's,
1996), treats the riot that drove
African Americans from Rosewood, Florida,
leaving the area all-white, including
Cedar Key, a sundown town, and does
mention Cedar Key. John Gehm, Bringing
it Home (Chi.: Chi. Review P, 1984),
tells how he and others brought the
first African American family to Valparaiso,
Indiana, in about 1970. Joseph Lyford's
1962 book, The Talk in Vandalia (Santa
Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions, 1962), does tell that
African Americans were not allowed
in that southern Illinois community,
but given that his work was a report
for the Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions, his treatment of their
exclusion seems curiously understated.
Orvie, a biography of Dearborn Mayor
Orville Hubbard by David Good, treats
his sundown policies (Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 1989) in detail. There are
also a handful of books — fewer
than ten — on four race riots
that tried to create sundown towns
but failed, in Springfield, Missouri;
Springfield, Illinois; East St. Louis,
Illinois; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Three
more books are in progress that I
know of: Jack Blocker Jr., on the
influence of violence on black migration
paths, Elliot Jaspin on violent expulsions
that led to sundown counties, and
Jean Pfaelzer about California towns
that expelled their Chinese Americans.
Considerable
treatment in Morgan on Ozarks...
Paul
Lawrence Dunbar, the black poet, wrote
a novel, The Fanatics, in 1901, just
as towns were going sundown across
the North and West. It tells of the
expulsion of blacks by whites in "Dorbury,"
Ohio, in about 1862. The town did
not quite go sundown: "Some ran
away, only to return when the storm
had passed; others, terrified by the
horror of the night, went, never to
return, and their homes are occupied
in Dorbury today by the men who drove
them from them" (NY: Dodd Mead,
1901, 159). Laura Hobson's 1947 novel,
Gentleman's Agreement, treated the
unwritten covenant in Darien, Connecticut,
that prohibited real estate sales
to Jews (NY: Simon & Schuster,
1947). William Burroughs mentions
a "Nigger, Don't Let the Sun
Go Down" sign in his novel, Naked
Lunch, but makes the common error
of locating it in the South (NY: Grove,
1962 [1958], 39-40). Lee Martin's
2001 novel Quakertown tells how the
banker and other white residents of
Denton, Texas, expelled the African
American residents from a neighborhood
in 1921, moving them and their houses
three miles east, except for one gardener
(NY: Dutton, 2001). Caroline Cooney's
Burning Up, a novel for teenagers,
describes a girl's gradual discovery
that her family acquiesced when whites
in her Connecticut town burned out
the town's only African American,
a teacher (NY: Delacorte, 1999). Another
novel for teenagers, Bud, Not Buddy
by Christopher Paul Curtis (NY: Delacorte,
1999), has a scene with a young African
American hitchhiker stranded at the
sundown sign at the city limits of
Owosso, Michigan. (Owosso may never
have had a sign but was a sundown
town for many decades.) Barbara Elliott
Carpenter included a sundown incident
from Arcola, Illinois, in Starlight,
Starbright..., a novel she wrote for
teenagers (Bloomington, IL: 1stBooks,
2003). I'm told that Kurt Vonnegut
sets a scene in a sundown town in
one of his novels. Clifford D. Simak's
science fiction novel, Time is the
Simplest Thing (NY: Macmillan Collier,
1994 [1961]), depicts "parries,"
humans who have been partly captured
by extraterrestrial beings; a character
says (page 48), "They have signs
in some towns (a billboard with the
words: PARRY, DON'T LET THE SUN SET
ON YOU HERE)." Murray Bishoff
is writing a novel on the expulsion
from Monett, Missouri.
Articles
and talks: Patrick Huber, "Race
Riots and Black Exodus in the Missouri
Ozarks, 1894-1905" (Harrison,
AR: Ozark Cultural Celebration, 9/2002).
|