Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Hinton, WV – During his research for “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism” (The New Press, $29.95, 576 pages, illustrated, indexed, annotated) sociologist James W. Loewen stopped at a convenience store in the southern Illinois town of Anna. He asked the clerk if the name was indeed an acronym for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed” – as he had heard. He got an affirmative answer. This was in 2001.
Ever since the small community’s black population had been forcibly driven out of town in 1909, Anna was among the estimated 70 percent of towns in Abe Lincoln’s home state – and mine – that became “Sundown Towns” in the process that came to be called by historians as “The Nadir.”
Sundown Towns – and I’m going to capitalize the combination and similar ones to emphasize the implied hatred — were places that allowed no blacks to live inside the community or be in the community during the nighttime hours. Illinois – also Loewen’s home state – had and may still have one of the largest percentages of Sundown Towns – and Sundown Suburbs – of any state in the nation, Loewen writes. Only California rivals it in the percentage of towns that from 1890 to about 1950 and beyond – the height of the “Nadir” –excluded blacks, Asians, Jews and often Catholics from buying or renting property.
The traditional South was racist, writes Loewen (“Lies My Teacher Told Me”), who lived in and taught in Mississippi, but Sundown Towns were largely a Midwestern, Border State (including Southwestern Virginia and the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina), Northeastern and Western phenomenon.
Before “The Nadir” (nadir means “lowest point…point of greatest adversity or despair”) blacks not only were not excluded but were welcomed in places like Fond du Lac, Wis., later one of the many Sundown Towns in a state not widely known for racial exclusion. Other Wisconsin Sundown Towns included Appleton and Manitowoc, each comparable in size to Charleston, WV. After the exclusion began, Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, California, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Arizona became as racist as any state in the South, Loewen writes.
Today, he lives in a neighborhood he describes as 80 percent black in Washington, D.C. and is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Vermont – a state that had Sundown Towns. Maybe that’s why it has a tiny percentage of black residents. Maine and Minnesota had – and probably still have Sundown Towns and suburbs. The wealthiest suburb of Minneapolis, Edina, was a Sundown Suburb from the start, with restrictive covenants banning blacks and Jews from owning property.
To those who ask why would any black want to live in a hellhole like Anna – (growing up in Rochelle, Ill., 35 miles south of the Wisconsin-Illinois border, I considered everything south of LaSalle-Peru a hellhole! L-P, twin cities, were both Sundown Towns) – Loewen responds by saying why should blacks – and Jews, Hispanics, Asians, Hindus, Sikhs, Italians – be asked this question if it wasn’t required of WASPs. Why do I live in Hinton, WV (not now and never a Sundown Town)? Because I like it and can afford to live here but not in some other places I like a lot, such as Chicago.
West Virginia’s Sundown Towns include Follansbee, near Weirton in the Northern Panhandle, Loewen writes. He vividly describes a black resident of Bluefield, WV, which has a substantial black population, of being sure to exit Grundy and Buchanan County, VA (a Sundown Town in a Sundown County) before nightfall. I have a feeling that Union (Monroe County) and Lewisburg-Fairlea (Greenbrier County) were or still are Sundown Towns; more research is necessary. White Sulphur Springs isn’t, largely because The Greenbrier resort needs the valuable service of blacks to stay in business!
Now that I look back, Rochelle, about 25 miles south of Rockford and 80 miles west of State and Madison in Chicago was a Sundown Town. There were no black students in Rochelle Township High School which I attended from 1953 to 1957. The first blacks I came in contact with were in college 17 miles to the east at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.
Rochelle was a solidly Republican town; most Sundown Towns, Loewen writes, were solidly Democratic, the white man’s party and the party of the Ku Klux Klan right up to 1964. Pekin, Illinois, home of the “Chinks” and later the “Dragons” was a KKK center in Illinois; Pekin was a Sundown Town, as were most of the cities along the Illinois River – except for Peoria.
Martinsville, Indiana, between Indianapolis and Bloomington, was also a Sundown Town and Kluxer haven. Its development director today laments its virtual exclusion by companies seeking to locate factories and businesses; Loewen correctly says that few companies today will locate in or near a Sundown Town.
California has an undeserved reputation for tolerance. It has redneck towns like Taft, near Bakersfield, settled by whites from Oklahoma, one of the most racist states in the nation, Loewen writes. Norman, home of the University of Oklahoma, was a large Sundown Town until recently. California infamously drove its Chinese population out of towns like Eureka and Rocklin, a suburb of Sacramento, in the 19th Century. The whole Palos Verdes Peninsula – except for the port community of San Pedro – was off limits to blacks and Jews. Hawthorne, Maywood, San Marino, Burbank, Glendale are just a few of the communities in the Los Angeles area that were or still are Sundown Suburbs. In the San Fernando Valley, where I lived when I worked for the Los Angeles Times, Pacoima was a designated black ghetto; few blacks – other than a celebrity or two, like Michael Jackson in Encino – lived in other parts of the Valley until well into the 1980s.
The nation’s two most segregated metropolitan areas are in my native Midwest: Detroit and Milwaukee. I can personally attest to Milwaukee’s segregation, where 96 percent of the metro area’s black population lives within the city of Milwaukee. Whitefish Bay, an affluent northern suburb of Milwaukee, was often called “Whitefolks Bay.” I covered the ‘burbs and real estate for The Milwaukee Sentinel from 1967 to 1976, so I saw firsthand the total exclusion of blacks – and often Jews – from the desirable suburbs with their excellent schools.
The Milwaukee area also included the federal new town of Greendale, built in the 1930s with racial exclusion from the start. The nation’s other “Green” towns included Greenbelt, Md. and Greenhills, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. All had restrictive covenants forbidding blacks from purchasing property in the city limits. West Virginia had a new town called Arthurdale (Preston County) that also excluded blacks. Another was Boulder City, Nev., built to house workers – but not black workers – building Boulder (Hoover) Dam. Black workers had to commute from their Sundown Ghetto in Las Vegas.
From the start, the three Levittowns (Long Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey) excluded blacks – including black World War II veterans – from buying houses in developments created by a Jew, William Levitt, who lived in the exclusive and mostly Jew-free North Shore Long Island community of Manhasset. Levitt, under pressure from fair housing groups and the government, later changed his policy, but only the New Jersey Levitttown – now called Willingboro – has a substantial black population.
Loewen debunks the myth of a steady pace of “uninterrupted progress” that textbooks posit to describe race relations in America – what Swedish writer Gunnar Myrdal described in 1944 as “The American Dilemma.” During the Civil War, in 1863, Anna, Illinois – in Union County, no less — ethnically cleansed its black population, only to have the blacks returned by the Union Army and the town reprimanded. This didn’t occur after the lynching of a black man for allegedly murdering an Anna woman in 1909 that returned the town to its all-white status.
I recommend this book to those whose minds have been warped by textbooks – a category that includes all of us. Loewen holds out more hope than do I for an integrated America, what with everyone worried about property values today and in the past. Property values haven’t dropped in Oak Park, Illinois, west of Chicago, as the town has become successfully integrated. On the contrary, house values in the city with the most Frank Lloyd Wright houses of any in the nation have risen more rapidly than any other Chicago suburb as the population of Oak Park has grown to be about 20 percent black, Loewen says.
Publisher’s web site: www.thenewpress.com Author’s web site: www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/sundown
* * *
The year 1938 was notable for two sporting events that have become iconic: The match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral at Pimlico in Baltimore Nov. 1, 1938 was ably chronicled by Laura Hillenbrand in a book and later hit movie; the June 22, 1938 heavyweight title fight between champion Joe Louis (he won the title from “Cinderella Man” Jimmy Braddock) and German fighter Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
Vanity Fair contributor David Margolick ably describes the fight and the events leading up to it and its aftermath in “Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink” (Knopf, $26.95, 432 pages, illustrated and indexed). It’s a cultural history of Depression America that reads like a well-crafted thriller and is worthy to be placed next to Hillenbrand’s opus on any sports fan’s bookshelf.
Schmeling, who died earlier this year a few months shy of his 100th birthday – he was born in 1905, nine years before Louis – was an unlikely “Aryan.” Glorified by the Nazi regime, especially propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Schmeling (pronounced Schmayling) was a dead ringer for Jack Dempsey, with a heavy-browed, almost Neanderthal visage (fittingly enough, the Neanderthal is a valley in Germany!). He never joined the Nazi Party and had among his entourage an observant Jewish manager, Joe Jacobs. The 1938 fight – a rematch of the bloody 1936 pummeling of Louis by Schmeling – was promoted by another Jew, Mike Jacobs, no relation to Joe Jacobs.
Occurring as it did during a period of racism and anti-Semitism that was as virulent in much of the U.S. as it was in Europe, the fight was more than just another boxing match, Margolick says: it was a seminal cultural event in the last year of what passed for peacetime in the awful 20th Century – the bloodiest in the history of mankind.
Joe Louis was promoted as the anti-Jack Johnson, the flamboyant black fighter who won the heavyweight title in 1910 and who openly dated white women, drove flashy cars and lived large. Alabama-born and Detroit reared Louis, a worker in the Ford plant, was touted as a “good Negro,” a man who was happily married and who stayed away from liquor and white women.
I have to admit that I’m no fan of boxing, a brutal dehumanizing sport that is unfairly called the “sweet science”; be that as it may, Margolick’s book is an outstanding re-creation of a period in American history when we were looking for heroes in the Joseph Campbell mode.
In the 1936 bout, the previously undefeated Louis was felled by Schmeling spotting a flaw in the “Brown Bomber’s” technique. He was aided in his quest by observation of fight films and by Joe Jacobs, a consummate manager.
Just as Hillenbrand captured an era when everybody knew about horse racing, so does “Beyond Glory” portray what passes for a Golden Age of boxing. It was probably the most ethnically diverse era for the “sweet science,” with Jews like Kingfish Levinsky and Barney Ross and a man who may or may not have been part Jewish, Max Baer, competing against blacks and white ethnics like the Cinderella Man. It was an oddball era, when Gentile boxers pretended to be Jews, especially in heavily Jewish places like New York! When Louis knocked out the Asiatic-looking “Aryan” in less than a round, he struck a blow for both blacks and Jews. Margolick doesn’t portray Schmeling as a hero – as so many revisionist writers have done – but as a man who was interested in accumulating as much wealth as possible. This aspect was played down by Goebbels and other Nazis, who considered it to be a Jewish characteristic. Schmeling was an opportunist with good qualities; not long after the Seabiscuit-War Admiral race, during the Kristallnacht pogrom, Schmeling sheltered two young Jewish boys in his Berlin hotel room. One who survived the war as a refugee in the U.S. attested to the German boxer’s good qualities and love of America.
After his service in the German Army’s paratroopers, Schmeling parlayed his good connections in the States to a Coca-Cola distributorship in West Germany. He was a lifelong friend of Louis. His complexity is captured by Margolick.
Publisher’s web site: www.aaknopf.com
This review was originally published in HNN on Dec. 8, 2005
GUEST COMMENTARY: Retired Flag Officers Conference Mulls Modular Brigade Concept, Fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan
Posted by kinchendavid on July 22, 2006
By A Navy Rear Admiral (2-star) Retiree
Earlier this week a retired general and flag officer conference at FortCarson, hosted by MGen Bob Mixon, the 7th Infantry Division Commander whichcalls the Fort its home. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Fort Carson, it is a huge installation located to the south of Colorado Springs;its in the process of becoming one of the larger Army installations in thecountry (26,000 soldiers); and it is the test location for the new modularbrigade concept that will reflect the Army of tomorrow by 2008. It is also the home post of the largest number of troopers who have served multipletours in Afghanistan and Iraq and, regrettably, the largest number oftroopers who have died in combat there over the past three years. There areFort Carson units going to and returning from the combat area virtually on amonthly basis. The conference was primarily organized to explain the modular brigadeconcept, and it featured a panel of officers who had either very recentlyreturned from commands in the combat zone or were about to deploy there inthe next two months. Three of the recent returnees were Colonel H.R.McMaster, Colonel Rick S., and Captain Walter Szpak. McMaster is thecommander of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, the unit that, through veryinnovative and population-friendly tactics, rid the city of Tal Afar ofinsurgents. The mayor of Tal Afar came back to Carson two weeks ago to thankthe troopers and their families personally for freeing his people. (You sayyou didn’t hear about that in the mainstream media?) McMaster is considered the foremost U.S. expert on modern insurgent warfare, has written a book onthe subject which is widely circulated at the war colleges and staffcolleges, and he was asked to testify before Congress when he returned fromthe 3rd ACR combat deployment. He is obviously one of the great combatleaders that has emerged from the war and is highly respected(some would say revered) by his troopers and his superiors alike. Colonel S. is assigned to the 10th Special Forces Brigade and he headed upall of the 31 special forces A-teams that are integrated with the populaceand the Iraqi Army and national police throughout the country. Many of theseare the guys that you see occasionally on the news that have beards, dressin native regalia, usually speak Arabic and don’t like to have theiridentities revealed for fear of retribution on their families (thus theColonel S.) Captain Szpak was the head of all the Army explosive ordnanceteams in Iraq. He and his troops had the job of disarming all the improvisedexplosive devices (IEDs) and explosive formed projectiles (EFPs) that were discovered beforethey were detonated. They also traveled around the country training thecombat forces in recognizing and avoiding these devices in time to preventdeath and injury. IEDs and EFPs are responsible for the vast majority ofcasualties experienced by our forces. Despite the objective of the conference (i.e., the modular brigade concept),it quickly devolved into a 3-hour question and answer period between thepanel and the 54 retired generals and admirals who attended: I wish I had avideo of the whole session to share with you because the insights wereespecially eye opening and encouraging. I’ll try to summarize the highpoints as best I can. All returnees agreed that we are clearly winning the fight against theinsurgents but we are losing the public relations battle both in the warzone and in the States. (I’ll go into more detail on each topic below.) All agreed that it will be necessary for us to have forces in Iraq for atleast ten more years, though by no means in the numbers that are there now. They opined that 80% to 90% of the Iraqi people want to have us thereand do not want us to leave before the job is done. The morale and combat capability of the troops is the highest that thesenior officers have ever seen in the 20-30 years that each has served. The Iraqi armed forces and police are probably better trained right now thanthey were under Saddam, but our standards are much higher and they lackofficer leadership. They don’t need more troops in the combat zone but they need considerablymore Arab linguists and civil affairs experts. The IEDs and EFPs continue to be the principal problem that they face andthey are becoming more sophisticated as time passes. Public Affairs: We are losing the public affairs battle for a variety ofreasons. First, in Iraq, the terrorists provide Al Jazeera with footage oftheir more spectacular attacks and they are on TV to the whole Arab worldwithin minutes of the event. By contrast it takes four to six days for astory generated by Army Public Affairs to gain clearance by Combined ForcesCommand, two or three more days to get Pentagon clearance, and after allthat, the public media may or may not run the story. Second, the U.S. mainstream media (MSM) who send reporters to the combatzone do not like to have their people embedded with our troops. They claimthat the reporters get less objective when they live with the soldiers andmarines they come to see the world through the eyes of the troops. As aconsequence, a majority of the reporters stay in hotels in the Green Zoneand send out native stringers to call in stories to them by cell phone whichthey later write up and file. No effort is made to verify any of thesestories or the credibility of the stringers. The recent serious injuries toBob Woodruff of ABC and Kimberly Dozier of CBS makes the likelihood of theuse of local stringers even higher. Third, the stories that are filed by reporters in the field very seldomreach the American public as written. An anecdote from Col. McMasterillustrates this dramatically. TIME magazine recently sent a reporter tospend six weeks with the 3rd ACR as they were in the battle of Tal Afar.When the battle was over, the reporter filed his story and also includedclose to 100 pictures that the accompanying photographer took. TIME published a cover story on the battle a week later, allegedly using thestory sent in by their reporter. When the issue came out, the guts had beenedited out of their reporter’s story and none of the pictures he submittedwere used. Instead they showed a weeping child on the cover, taken fromstock photos. When the reporter questioned why his story was eviscerated,his editors in New York responded that the story and pictures were tooheroic. McMaster had read both and told me that the editors had completelychanged the thrust and context of the material their reporter had submitted. As a sidebar on the public affairs situation, Colonel Bob McRee, who wasalso on the panel and is bringing a Military Police Battalion to Iraq nextmonth, invited the Colorado Springs Gazette to send a reporter with thebattalion for six weeks to two months. He assured the Gazette, in writingone month ago, that he would provide full time bodyguards for the reporter,taking the manpower out of his own hide. The Gazette has yet to respond tohis offer. Ten More Years: The idea that we will have troops in Iraq for ten more yearssounds rather grim, even though by contrast, President Clinton sent troopsto Bosnia and Kosovo nearly ten years ago. And they’re still there with noend in sight. While Iraq is clearly a different situation right now, thepanelists believe that within a few years at the most, it will become verymuch the same a peacekeeping, nation-building function among factions thathave hated one another for centuries. There is factionalism and there wasbitter fighting in the Balkans before NATO! intervened and with peacekeepers, the panelists believe that Iraq will be a parallel situation. This,by the way, is why they all believe that linguists and civil affairsmilitary personnel are so necessary for the future. Colonel S. went out on a limb by suggesting that if most of the troops inIraq were deployed home tomorrow he could have the entire country pacifiedand the terrorist situation brought under control with just one brigade ofspecial forces. Since these guys are linguists, civil affairs experts, amongmany other skills and talents, he may not be too far wrong. Iraqi Attitudes: The panelists agreed that the public affairs problemmanifests itself most significantly in the American public belief that thepeople of Iraq want us out of their country which we are occupying. Theyhave served in different parts of the country but each agreed that we arewanted and needed there. I refer you to the anecdote from Col. McMaster andthe thousands of pictures available on the Internet of the U.S. forces shownin very cordial relations with the locals. Of course, our media’s obsess ionwith Abu Ghraib and, if the initial reports regarding the small group ofMarines at Haditha prove to be true, then those attitudes will changesomewhat. But as one of the panelists pointed out, the atrocities sufferedunder Saddam were much worse and much more common. Morale and Capabilities: Two weeks ago, the local TV channels showed a 3rdACR re-enlistment ceremony held at Ft. Carson and officiated by ColonelMcMaster. Mind you, this unit has just returned from a one-year combat tourof hard and bloody fighting in Iraq and will likely return there again ineight to ten months. Of the 670 soldiers eligible for re-enlistment, 654 ofthem held up their right hands and signed on for another four years.Incredible! The Army goal for re-enlistments for fiscal year 2006 was for40,000 soldiers to extend their active duty commitments. With four monthsremaining in the fiscal year, they have already exceeded their goal of40,000 and may have to go back to Congress for authorization to exceed theirforce structure manning limitations. Since Congress has been pontificatingfor the past couple of years that the Army is woefully under strength, thatshould not pose any difficulty. Iraqi Forces: Every one of the returning commanders had experience in jointoperations with the Iraqi soldiers and in the case of some of them, with thelocal and national police. They are all are supportive of the quality of theforces, but culturally, they believe that we may be expecting too much fromthem as a pre-condition for handing over greater responsibility for areacontrol. McMaster said that he worked with the army and the police at TalAfar and was not the least bit reluctant to assign major responsibilities tothem in the operations that were conducted. Col. S.’s Green Berets, on the other hand, caught a national policelieutenant who was directing the emplacement of an IED by cell phone inorder to disrupt a convoy immediately after the lieutenant had been briefedon the convoys route. The good news in this situation was that they wereable to reroute the convoy, safely, and track the lieutenants entire networkthrough the use of the speed dial on his phone. Having terroristinfiltrators in both the army and the police force remains a problem. But byno means does that detract from the courage and determination of those whoare loyal to the new Iraq. Explosive Devices: The combined command in Iraq is becoming increasinglyeffective in countering the significant threat posed by the IEDs and EFPs.The frequency of attacks has decreased in large part through training torecognize the threat, the new technology (UAVs unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, for example) which help todiscover where the devices are emplaced, the infiltration of some of theterrorist cells, etc. However, the technology being used by the terroristsare also improving measurably. In the past six weeks, two bomb making siteswere found, raided and the bad guys arrested. In both cases, the head bombmakers were masters degree graduates (one in chemistry and one in physics)from American universities. That’s a lot of brain power to bring into thefight, but we also have some pretty talented people in the military,industry and academia who are doing their best to even the odds. Conclusion: This is more than I had intended to write on the subject sowhat’s new a lot of you might say but it is a subject that doesn’t get theproper balance from other sources, in my judgment at least. I trust theinformation that we received far more than anything that I have heard orseen in our usual news sources. The most disturbing thing that I heard wasthat our MSM is changing the stories filed by their own people on the scenebecause they sound too heroic. The overriding opinion that I came away from the conference with is that wehave incredibly talented and professional leaders who are facing up to thechallenges and are making inexorable progress toward the goals of ournation. We’re fortunate to have courageous and valorous people on the combatfront, even though there seems to be a serious dearth of these same types ofpeople in Congress and the mainstream media.
Posted in Guest Commentaries | Leave a Comment »