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Dec. 8, 2005
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Sundown Towns’ Captures ‘Hidden’ Racism Outside the South;
‘Beyond Glory’ Depicts Boxing’s ‘Undercard’ to World War II: The 1938
Louis-Schmeling Fight
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – 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
