Racism in small towns: Acknowledge, apologize, act
Anna activists declare need for more protests
Protesters march against racism and police brutality last month in Anna. (Facebook)
By Ted Cox
Racism needs to be confronted across America both in its overt forms and its hidden forms, with an emphasis on concrete action and reforms in response, according to a panel including activists in southern Illinois.
ProPublica Illinois held a webinar Tuesday on the topic of “From Sundown Towns to Black Lives Matter: Race and Racism in Small-Town America.” Its primary focus was on Anna, a former “sundown town” south of Carbondale that was recently the site of a Black Lives Matter march of about 200 people.
ProPublica reporter Logan Jaffe took part in the webinar after writing a piece last year on Anna’s infamous acronym, said by locals to stand for “Ain’t no (N’s) allowed.” The term “sundown town,” meanwhile, means an area where African Americans were not allowed after dark. Jaffe said Tuesday that everyone she interviewed in the town was familiar with the acronym, and some were less than shameful. Yet protesters last month turned that on its head, chanting, “Ain’t no negativity allowed.”
“That is our new motto,” said Jessica Moore, who grew up in the area and was one of the organizers of last month’s march.
Both Moore and fellow organizer Takiya Coleman, however, said there is a need for more protests.
“Anna needs another one,” Moore said.
“They won’t take it serious,” Coleman said, until protesters prove it wasn't just an isolated event and that they have widespread support among local residents.
Moore said she had received “a lot of good responses, but mostly negative” in the aftermath. She estimated about 30 percent of residents remained devoted to the old ways. Coleman said she’d been glared at in stores by people who clearly recognized her as a march organizer.
Along with Jaffe, they said there was something of a counterprotest the week after, with a caravan of cars — some bearing Trump signs or rebel battle flags from the Civil War — winding through Union County, sometimes with drivers and passengers shouting racial slurs.
The webinar was moderated by ProPublica’s Mick Dumke, formerly with the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Sun-Times, who enlarged the conversation to cover racism as a whole across America.
James Loewen, a sociologist who’s written the definitive book on “Sundown Towns,” as well as the influential “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” said Anna was one of three “poster children for sundown towns” in Illinois, also including Pekin, a Ku Klux Klan bastion, and Cicero, which went through a series of “riots by white people to keep black people out.”
Loewen said he had documented hundreds of sundown towns across Illinois, and that he later found, much to his surprise, that 20 of the 23 towns surrounding his boyhood home of Decatur were among them.
“It’s very hard to find the evidence,” he said. “Most sundown towns never even had a sign.” But that message was conveyed, orally or through other nonverbal threats, or enforced sometimes through quasi-legal means like redlining in real estate. Loewen called the well-to-do Chicago suburb of Kenilworth “just as much a sundown town as Anna ever was.”
Asked about all-white towns in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon, Loewen said, “Most towns in Oregon that are all white are not all white by accident,” although they’d likely deny any racial bias. He said, “The whiteness of a town is a burden” the residents have to deal with, with no clear way out.
Jaffe said she’d confronted the same attitude in Anna, where some people told her there were no racial issues because there were no African Americans. She called that “willful blindness” to racism.
“Nobody is just a racist,” Loewen insisted, pointing out that Calhoun County in Illinois was a “sundown county,” with no African American residents, yet voted in a majority for President Obama. He added there are inherent contradictions in most racists and “we have to understand that and appeal to their unracist side.” He said the march in Anna was a perfect example of that.
Loewen said there are very few examples of towns that made it a point to overcome their reputations as sundown towns, although he pointed to Goshen, Ind., and La Crosse, Wis., as a couple. He said there are typically three steps to that rehabilitation process: admit the history, apologize for its effects, and take concrete action to address reforms.
“I still want them to acknowledge ... that it’s still going on, so we can find ways to stop it.”
“We don’t do it anymore,” he said. “That needs some actual steps,” perhaps beginning with the hiring of minority teachers or other city workers.
“Yes, you have to acknowledge it,” Coleman said, adding that some in Anna, even among the town leaders, had never gotten that far, although both she and Moore were encouraged that about half the recent Black Lives Matter protesters were Anna residents.
“I still want them to acknowledge,” Coleman said, “that it’s still going on, so we can find ways to stop it.”
Loewen said he was encouraged nationally by the recent movement to tear down the monuments of Confederate Civil War heroes. He said the Reconstruction era immediately after the Civil War was a similar period of the nation confronting racism, resulting in the election of African Americans to Congress and state governments, but that the backlash of the Jim Crow era — when many of those monuments were installed, from the 1890s through the 1940s — had set the country back a century or more. “We’re still fighting our way back up from that movement,” he said.
But Loewen added that, at 78, the last few weeks had been among “the most fun” of his life, seeing those monuments torn down. “It’s just been wonderful,” he said.
Moore said she would not be deterred in organizing and attending marches, and she offered advice to others doing the same. “You need to have a strong mindset,” she said. “You have to realize that people are going to test your patience out there. They’re going to try to push your buttons. They’re going to call you every name. But you cannot react the way they want you to. So my advice is stay strong, keep a level head, push forward, and not give up. Don’t let the peoples’ negative comments stop you from doing what you believe in.”