“Sundown Towns” — Black Workers and White Segregation in the Rural Midwest
Chapter Ten of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
As a child, I was an avid reader and intensely curious. I wondered, for example, why all the land around my central Illinois hometown was so pancake flat. I wondered what the land had looked liked before the farmers came and made it an endless checkerboard of corn and soybean fields. I wondered who could possibly want all those soybeans.
I wondered about the people in my hometown. Where did they all come from? Why were they all so much alike? I wondered why everyone I knew was a White person. What had happened to all the Indigenous people who had once lived in Illinois. The only remnants of their ever having been there seemed to be place names like Maroa, Wapella, Moweaqua, Peoria, Kickapoo, and Kankakee, and the old University of Illinois mascot, Chief Illiniwek.
Why were there so few Black people in my hometown and in the other small towns in Illinois where my relatives lived? As a child, I only ever saw Black people through a car window as we drove through a nearby city like Decatur or Springfield, or, on rare visits, among the crowds of a truly big city like Chicago or St. Louis.
I got the impression there had never been more than a few isolated Black people in rural Midwestern places like my hometown. I was wrong about that.
After the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction, many emancipated Black families from the rural South migrated to the rural Midwest. From the late 1870s to the turn of the century and after, rural towns in central Illinois, like my hometown, became home to communities of Black families who had migrated from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and elsewhere.
My hometown in central Illinois was far more diverse in the 1880s than it was when I was born in the 1950s. When I was growing up there from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, my hometown’s population was around seven to eight thousand and more than ninety-nine percent White people. In 1880, the Black population of my hometown peaked at about a hundred people in a total population just under three thousand.
Why did Black families leave small towns and rural areas in the Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century? How did the population of rural Midwestern towns become so overwhelmingly White?
Part of the answer to the question of why Black families disappeared from rural Midwestern towns like my hometown is embedded in a story I have known, in a stripped-down version, for most of my life. The story is one I learned as a small child while playing with cousins and friends in the town where my mom grew up, the town of Pana, sixty miles to the south and nearly identical in size and demographics to my hometown, Clinton, Illinois.
The story of why there were no Black people in Pana, the version of the story I learned as a child, goes something like this: A long time ago, the coal miners in Pana went on strike. Black people were brought to Pana to work in the mines and break the strike. After a big fight, the Pana miners made all the Black people leave town and got their jobs back. That’s why Pana does not allow any Black people to be in town after dark.
As you might expect, the version of the story I learned as a child from other children in Pana was fragmentary and distorted and only barely scratched the surface of actual events. I didn’t know the full story until I dug deep looking for details in the historical archives as an adult.
Learning about coal mining and labor wars and race riots in rural Illinois was never part of my schooling. As a child, my awareness of coal mining in the region came from driving through Moweaqua on the way to Pana and seeing the memorial there to the fifty-four men who had died in a gas explosion in a local mine on Christmas Eve in 1932.
I had also visited the fake coal mine shaft at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. We entered the exhibit by taking a special elevator which shook and rattled on its slow descent to make us feel like we were traveling deep below ground when, in fact, we were only descending to a black-walled tunnel in the museum basement. The exhibit was all about the technology of coal mining — it included a simulated dynamite blast.
Like a lot of the history I learned in school, the coal mine exhibit in Chicago was safe and far removed from reality. Though the Moweaqua memorial helped me understand how dangerous mining could be, I learned nothing from the memorial or in school or at the museum about how back-breaking the work of coal mining was or how badly the miners were treated by mine owners and operators. I had no inkling of the centrality of Illinois coal mining in American labor union history and learned absolutely nothing about the racial hatred and violence embedded in that history.
The technology of U.S. coal mining changed in the late nineteenth century and, not coincidentally, so did the ethnic and racial make-up of the coal mining labor force. In the early days, as the coal mining industry was just getting started in the period after the Civil War, most of the miners in the American East, Midwest and West were English or Scottish or Irish immigrants or Americans with British or Irish ancestry.
At the time, mining was considered skilled labor requiring artisanal knowledge and expertise. Later, by 1890, around the time the mines in Pana were opened, the work of coal mining was transformed by new undercutting machinery which increased production and reduced demand for skilled “pick mining.”
Reduced skill demands opened mining work to lower-wage workers, many of whom were recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. In the South, Black people also worked in the coal mines, segregated from White miners, and typically at lower wages or as convict labor. In Alabama large numbers of Black men were imprisoned, many on the flimsiest of Jim Crow legal charges, and forced to work in the coal mines. It was slavery by another name.
The United Mine Workers of America union was formed in 1890, not long after the first coal mine opened in Pana, and Pana miners were unionized from the start. By the late 1890s, there were four large mines in or near Pana employing about a thousand miners. The Pana coal mines tapped into thick seams of coal, averaging six to eight feet wide, lying a little more than 700 feet below the surface beneath layers of slate.
The slate ceiling was a blessing for the owners and operators because it meant less timber was needed to shore up the shafts and prevent cave-ins, but it was not a blessing for the miners (or their mules); large chunks of slate were occasionally dislodged, falling on and injuring or killing miners and mules.
With or without undercutting machinery, coal mining was dirty, dangerous, and hard work. Mine owners and operators prospered, but they shared very little of their wealth with the miners.
In early January 1898, coal mine operators representing mining companies throughout the state of Illinois gathered in Chicago to discuss a unified strategy to address the demands of the unionized miners in the state for better wages and working conditions.
Representatives of the companies operating the four coal mines in Pana were among the handful of operators attending the January 1898 meeting in Chicago who refused to accept an agreement to establish uniform pay scales across all coal mines in Illinois. Specifically, they refused to accept the 40 cents per ton pay scale that was agreed upon for miners in Springfield and other Central and Southern Illinois mines.
The Pana operators, perhaps thinking their mines were safer and easier to work than others, offered their miners a pay scale of 30 cents a ton. The miners in Pana countered the lowball offer with demands to be paid at the same rate as the miners in Springfield. The miners also asked for improvements in working conditions, including an eight-hour work day.
In April 1898, failing to reach an agreement with the operators, the UMW miners in Pana went out on strike.
Soon after the strike began, the Pana mine operators threatened to hire Chinese miners to break the strike. Anti-Chinese sentiment was running hot in the 1890s. The Chinese Exclusion Act became federal law in 1882, the first U.S. law to specifically prohibit immigration based on race or nationality.
The Pana mine owners might have raised the specter of Chinese strikebreakers to scare the union miners into settling. The September 1885 massacre of Chinese coal miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming was still fresh in everyone’s memory. In the aftermath of the mass murder of at least 28 Chinese miners and the burning of 78 Chinese homes by a White mob, the U.S. Government eventually gave the Chinese Government a “gift” of $147,784.74 to compensate for “damaged property.”
The plan to break the Pana strike by hiring Chinese replacement workers was nixed by the Republican Governor of Illinois, John Riley Tanner. Undoubtedly, Tanner wanted to avoid a repeat in Illinois of the shameful events of Rock Springs, Wyoming. The Pana operators tried recruiting local men to break the strike — including, no doubt, some of my Culberson and Hamilton relatives living in or near Pana at the time. But the union miners persuaded or intimidated most local men and kept them away from the mines.
By midsummer, the Pana mine operators, still unwilling to pay miners the Springfield scale of 40 cents a ton, came up with another plan for breaking the strike. They sent agents to Birmingham, Alabama to entice Black coal miners to leave the Jim Crow south and come to work in Illinois, in what the operators, at first, falsely advertised as newly opened mines.
To prepare for the arrival of the Black miners from Alabama, the Pana operators fortified their mines and bought arms and ammunition to give to the Black miners to defend themselves against attacks from the union men and their supporters. I can well imagine the sinking feeling the Black miners must have felt soon after they arrived in Pana, many accompanied by wives and children, the moment they realized they had been hired as strikebreakers and saw the inevitable violence to come.
The bloodletting in Pana began in the spring and summer of 1898, before the first Black miners from Alabama arrived, and when large numbers of Black miners began to arrive in July, the violence escalated. By October, as the numbers of Black miners in Pana increased to nearly 700, the striking White miners began stopping trains headed to Pana and forcing any blacks on board to disembark and march in the opposite direction. By this point, the Pana strike had become national news, reported in newspapers from coast to coast.
At first, Governor Tanner took the side of the mine owners and operators. In the late summer of 1898 he sent the Illinois National Guard to Pana with two Gatling guns to preserve the peace and keep the striking miners from attacking the Black miners and disrupting their work at the mines. However, an incident on October 12, 1898 related to another coal miners’ strike, this one in Virden, Illinois, forty-five miles west of Pana, caused the Governor to alter his stance.
Coal mine operators in Virden, following the lead of the Pana operators, attempted to bring in Black miners from Alabama to break the strike at the Virden mines. The result was a bloodbath that became known as the Battle of Virden or the Virden Massacre. Striking miners knew the train bearing Alabama coal miners was coming and a large and heavily armed crowd of union miners was waiting at the Virden Station to prevent the Black miners from disembarking.
Expecting trouble, the Virden operators hired private security guards to ride the train and protect the Black miners and their families on board. As the train pulled into the Virden Station it was met by a barrage of gunshots. For twenty minutes, the train sat motionless as hundreds of shots were fired at the train and gunfire was returned by the guards on the train.
In the end, the train was forced to pull out of the station. Five guards and seven striking miners were killed and dozens more were wounded. Casualties among the fifty or so Black miners and their family members aboard the train were never tallied and are unknown.
An outpouring of grief and sympathy for the dead and injured union members convinced the governor that the political winds had shifted. An article published in the New York Times on October 15, 1898, reported that Governor Tanner had promised he would allow no more “imported negroes” to enter Virden or Pana. The same Times story also quoted Captain Harris of the Illinois National Guard stationed at Pana:
The Governor’s orders shall be strictly obeyed, and if any negroes are brought into Pana while I am in charge, and they refuse orders to retreat when ordered to do so, I will order my men to fire. All armed guards will be similarly dealt with. If I lose every man under my command no negroes shall land at Pana.
But several months later, the Governor pulled the National Guard out of Pana, taking the word of the local sheriff that his deputies could control the situation and, in effect, sealing the fate of the Black miners and their families.
On the morning of April 10, 1899, Black miners at the Pana Coal Company mines learned that a large body of union miners had come to Pana to join local miners in an attack to drive them out. The trigger that began the bloodshed that day was the accidental misfire of a gun in the hands of one White union miner killing another, a killing that rumors quickly pinned on Henry Stephens, the leader of the Black miners, leading to the formation of a lynch mob and a chaotic, daylong gun battle as the Black miners defended themselves against the White mob.
The fighting was most intense near the Penwell mine in the heart of Pana’s business district. Many of the dead and wounded were simply caught in the crossfire. Stephens, shot six times and arrested by the Sheriff, somehow managed to survive, but only because he was quickly taken out of town to avoid the mob intent on lynching him.
My Grandpa Culberson’s mother, Great Grandmother Anna (Hamilton) Culberson, turned thirteen in September 1899. She lived on a farm just south of town and went to school and church in Pana during the time of the coal strike and labor war. I like to imagine she kept her distance from the angry White mobs in Pana, but there is no way to know for sure.
It is harder for me to imagine Anna’s soon-to-be husband, Great Grandfather Amos Culberson, staying away from the excitement of the labor war and race riots in Pana. He turned fifteen in November 1899 and was out of school, working as a hired hand at the Hoffman family farm, just south of Pana.
Neither Anna nor Amos could have avoided experiencing the racial tensions and animosity that racked Pana in 1898 and 1899. But their lives do not seem to have been much altered by the turmoil of those two years, at least not on the surface. In 1902, for Christmas, Anna received as a gift, a “Cinderella Album,” an autograph book. Most of the inscriptions in the book written by Anna’s relatives and school friends are formulaic.
A girlfriend advised: “Be a good girl and live a good life. Merry [sic] a good man and be a good wife.” A nephew wrote: “Roses are Red, Grass is Green + Your [sic] the ugliest girl, I ever seen.” On New Year’s Eve, the book was signed by her future husband. He wrote: “Dec. 31, 1902. Some write for pleasure some write for fame but I write simply to sign my name, Amos Culberson.”
Amos Culberson and Anna Hamilton were married in Pana three years later, in 1905. Their second son (of seven), my Grandpa, Reginald Edwin (R. E.) Culberson, was born in 1908.
At the time my Grandpa Culberson was growing up in Pana, the violence and trauma of the coal strike and massacre of Black miners a decade or two earlier remained on peoples’ minds. But in Pana only the White side of the story was remembered.
In the decades following the Pana coal strike and massacre, throughout the time my Grandpa Culberson and my mother were growing up there, Pana was an all-White and overtly White supremacist town. My grandfather and mother grew up on stories about the Pana coal strike told exclusively from the perspective of the striking White miners, the White mine owners and operators, and the White government agents, lawmen, and soldiers who tried and failed to keep the peace. Black miners and their families had no voice in that story.
In the end, it was a story of the solidarity and triumph of the White mob that drove the Black people away and kept them away for generations by posting signs at the edge of town — signs my Grandpa (and later, my mom) would have seen almost every day as a child — signs that spelled out a racist warning to all Black people: “N[….]r! Don’t let the sun set on you in Pana!”
Although relatively few small towns in the U.S. used violence to force black residents to leave, thousands of small towns across the country found more subtle, but no less effective ways to keep out Black people and others who were not seen as White. They did so by passing ordinances or by adding language to property deeds prohibiting sales of land or homes to anyone who was not White.
Harassment, open hostility, and word-of-mouth were also common tactics used to let Black families know they were not welcome and would not be safe in small towns and rural areas.
James W. Loewen, the late sociologist and author of the popular book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, made it part of his life’s work to verify and document the existence of “sundown towns” in his home state of Illinois and elsewhere. In the preface to the 2018 edition of his book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, Loewen counted 507 current or former sundown towns in Illinois, two-thirds of all the towns in the state.
Loewen saw signs progress in the years since the book was first published in 2005, as many towns that were once sundown towns had changed laws to permit Black residency and home ownership. Such progress was most evident in the west, in California and Oregon. Loewen reported progress also in the American rural heartland, but noted continuing discrimination, especially in hiring in rural areas.
Loewen included a photo in the 2018 edition of Sundown Towns to illustrate the tight grip that the myth of White supremacy still has on rural America. The photo was taken in August 2015 and shows a large sign in front of a store in Farmer City, Illinois. Farmer City is in DeWitt County, just nineteen miles east of my childhood hometown, Clinton. The sign mocks the Black Lives Matter movement with a sick attempt to make comedy out of the tragic death of Michael Brown, the unarmed young Black man shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri a year earlier. It reads, in large letters, all caps:
CONGRATS MICHAEL
BROWN
ONE YEAR WITH NO
CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR
