Live in a Small Town? Racism is Your Problem, Too.
I can remember very few Black people in the small town in Southern Illinois where I grew up: a sweet woman I met with my grandmother (they had worked together in the town’s underwear factory decades before); a classmate who lived at the children’s home on the outskirts of town; and two white-haired women who came to evening services now and then at the church my dad pastored.
My town’s population hovered right under 6000, and I remember four Black residents.
As a child, happily oblivious to any more than the basic facts of America’s racial history, I never gave a second thought to why my hometown was almost all white. It just was.
If you grew up in a small town in America outside of the South, you most likely also rarely saw Black people, much less had them as friends, neighbors, classmates, or fellow church members. Nine out of 10 Black Americans who live in rural areas live in the South.
This is not an accident.
Carmi, Illinois, where I’m from, is a small rural farming community all the way down where the Illinois border meets Indiana and Kentucky. It’s the county seat for White County.
Historically speaking, White County was named after Captain Leonard White. But when I was in high school, a favorite teacher made a passing comment that has haunted me. “It isn’t named White County for nothing.”
I have remembered that comment for almost 30 years.
Talking to my dad recently, I mentioned this, and he said, “Yes, I always heard that, too.”
Knowing what I know now about how racial demographics don’t happen in a vacuum, I wish I could go back to ask that teacher what he meant.
Several online histories of White County record that the villages of Maunie and Rising Sun “attracted several African-American families” in the second half of the 19th century.
I cannot find census data online to help me determine when “several” families turned into virtually none, but research by historian James Loewen provides a clue as to why.
His book Sundown Towns documents the existence of thousands of communities across America — mostly outside of the South — where Black residents were forced out, through legalized discrimination or through extralegal violence and intimidation.
More than 500 of these sundown towns were in Illinois.
Loewen writes:
“Beginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United States for whites only. Many towns drove out their black populations, then posted sundown signs… Other towns passed ordinances barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from owning or renting property; still others established such policies by informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule… Outside the traditional South — states historically dominated by slavery, where sundown towns are rare — probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans.”
In case you missed that last sentence, I’ll repeat it.
“Probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans.”
Loewen’s research starts with census data. If a place like White County has dozens of African American residents in 1890 but then by 1920 has only a handful, he digs deeper. He looks at town ordinances, local histories, and newspapers. He also relies heavily on oral history, as communities don’t usually advertise their racist pasts. Stories of Black townspeople being driven out don’t make for the idyllic lore of a chamber of commerce website and aren’t likely to wind up in the elementary school curriculum.
Loewen has a database of Sundown Towns online, and several towns and villages in White County make the list. Many more sundown towns surround the county.
Carmi itself — my hometown — was perhaps not a sundown town. But the fact that it was surrounded on all sides by sundown communities presumably served to prevent it from being a place where Black people chose to put down roots.
My point is not to demand hand-wringing and shame. My point is this: it is very easy to go through life in a small town thinking America’s racial history has nothing to do with you. It is convenient to live in downstate Illinois or northern Wisconsin or rural Missouri and to think the problems of Chicago, Milwaukee, or St. Louis are no more akin to you than the problems of Greenland. More than that — it’s easy to resent those places. They rob your part of the state of resources, after all.
And so we forget.
We forget that there’s a direct line between the racist pasts of our small towns and the current conditions of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis.
Whatever problems we imagine those cities to be dealing with — interpreted for us by white politicians as out of touch with those places as we are — can be at least partly traced back to our rejection of Black Americans who wanted to make a life for themselves in our small towns.
We forget that it was our communities that forced them to move to cities, where they faced further discrimination that effectively locked them out of middle-class neighborhoods and opportunities.
We erase our racial history and responsibility and live in happy ignorance. It’s easier, after all, to not know. If we don’t know, we can’t be expected to do anything to make it right.
America’s story of racism is your story. There is no universe where you get to opt-out of it.
White-washed histories are convenient, but they’re not honest.
It’s past time for small towns to come clean about their histories in the interest of healing America’s deep racial divisions. Goshen, Indiana, and LaCrosse, Wisconsin are two communities that have begun to get real about their pasts in order to imagine a different type of future. May small towns all across the country follow their lead.
My aim is not to induce shame or to destroy your pride in your community. I appreciate my rural small-town upbringing more with each passing year.
My aim is for you to engage with America’s racial history as your own.
This is not a problem for other people living in other parts of the country. It is your history, your community’s history. It may not be a history you created, but it’s the one you’ve inherited. You are responsible for what you do with it.
Further reading:
- Loewen’s homepage has a wealth of resources and is updated frequently.
- ProPublica piece about Anna, Illinois
- Sundown towns in Wisconsin and the impact on Milwaukee’s history
- How to research whether your own community was a sundown town
