We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language. 1995 - 2023 by Snopes Media Group Inc. you think you are hearing dinner bells & sirens when it's a long time relic of sundown towns. There, children glided on bicycles from the levee road along the Ohio River, down through the intersection where the steel arches stood. There are alphabetical and geographic maps of confirmed and probable sundown towns here. But after a series of incidents that made her feel unsafe in Murphysboro, Smith said, she wanted out. Its a part of our heritage, but were changing that, Dexter said. Senate Bill No. Instead, he found hundreds, from neighborhoods on Chicagos North Shore to suburbs in the center of the state to small towns in southern Illinois, such as Anna. But these incidents happened. Winchester. At the time, he was dating a girl who was biracial. I did notice that California and Illinois were really really high on this list. Nokomis. But he said he gets asked every so often about A-N-N-A by outsiders like me. Ralph Smith, 30, has been employed there for two years. I don't think America is worth saving. Like many other small towns, Anna has lost industry. State Champ #1, read another. Smith still tears up thinking about it. Flickr/David Wilson. "I imagined I would find maybe ten of these communities in Illinois, where I planned more research than in any other single state, and perhaps fifty across the country. The Union County Board of Commissioners is all white. Onibada, Ade. They dont want to come here, Gavin added. This list may not reflect recent changes . Smith got Facebook messages from people shed never met. But I also feel like it takes all of us that dont feel that way to step forward and to be brave enough to say, No, that is not what were about.. Yeah, I definitely remember sundown towns being a thing throughout my early childhood in the 1980s . Around 1980, Annas black population grew to about a few dozen residents. I got into town just after sunset. It uses live data from Amtrak's Track-A-Train During the colonization of the United States museums and the federal government routinely stole the human remains of Indigenous people. Sundown towns are communities that for decadesformally or informallykept out African Americans or other groups. Why do so many people have this weird desire to act like a victim? Its okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. These towns openly discriminated against Black residents and visitors, and violence was a common tactic. Loewen said sundown towns sprang up all around the country from 1890 to 1940, a period he calls the nadir of race relations in America. In March 2015, the City Council of Goshen, Indiana, voted 6-0 to pass A Resolution Acknowledging the Racially Exclusionary Past of Goshen, Indiana, as a Sundown Town. In late 2016, the mayor of La Crosse, Wisconsin, formally apologized for the citys history of racial exclusion and signed a proclamation to work toward racial equality. Not sure why everyone is interpreting your town being on this map as it being a Sundown Town. Independent sundown towns range in size from hamlets like Alix, Arkansas, population 185, to large cities like Appleton, Wisconsin, with 57,000 residents in 1970. Illinois had almost 150 sundown towns in the state alone. I looked at the one's listed near me and can tell you that it's all fabrication. History and Social Justice Website Copyright 2023, Using Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened, Resources for Teaching with Lies My Teacher Told Me, Teachers Corner: Teaching with Lies My Teacher Told Me, Contact Jim Loewen to Speak to Your Group, Causing Change With Lies My Teacher Told Me, Works Inspired or Influenced by Lies My Teacher Told Me, Useful Quotations about History and Social Justice, Native American Issues, Including the Explorers, Teaching Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, Civil Rights Movement to Modern Times: c. 1945 Now, Alphabetical Map of Sundown Towns by State, How to Research and Teach About Sundown Towns, Using Research Information to Help a Sundown Town Overcome Its Past, Loewens Work on Standardized Testing Used by Others, Embarrassing Questions about Standardized Tests. Anna, Illinois in 2020 is trying to shed the reputation that it has of being a sundown town. Bloodhounds, after picking up the scent from a piece of cloth used to gag her, led Cairo police to arrest a black man named William James, an employee of the Cairo Ice and Coal Company, according to the Cairo Bulletin. It was hosted by the Sangamon County Historical Society in partnership with the Springfield and Central Illinois African American History Museum, and, between those two organizations, the room was packed! Youve come to the wrong town, one of them said. Most people I met in Anna, Illinois, wish the racist lore behind the citys name would go away. There are hundreds of these. What Sundown Towns Represent For Black Drivers Today. We recognize this is a problem and need to do something about it.. Nevertheless, three years after Smith moved to Anna, her family still has to deal with racist comments. Dr. John Aden is the Executive Director of the African American Historical Society Museum in Fort Wayne. As it visually illustrates the pervasiveness of sundown towns across the country, it . Ignorance? The Green Book coincided with the second wave of the Great Migration, when 1.5 million Black people fleeing racial terror in the South headed North, she says. Author James Loewen. The sundown town database is an interactive map where you can select any state and see a list of all its possible current and historic sundown towns. The makers of Bunny Bread Thats what I said, Bunny Bread, as an old jingle went and Florsheim shoes both closed factories in the early 1990s. Snopes and the Snopes.com logo are registered service marks of Snopes.com, A photograph shows a sign in a "sundown town" in 2022 that reads "Whites only within city limits after dark. There are no laws based on your race. Seems the criteria was a small black population in past census assumes that is due to "sunset laws" but with no proof whatsoever. Logan Jaffe is the engagement reporter for ProPublica Illinois. In the familys first few months in Anna, Atarah and Amiyah received some naive questions from their white classmates. Hes been Annas mayor for nearly 20 years, and he served in its Police Department for 15 years before that. I didnt think it would come out of somebodys mouth, straight to my face, he said. James Taylor, a 61-year-old known as Big T in Cairo, where he lives, was shopping there on a Saturday afternoon when I met him. What particularly moved me about talking to a room of 150 or so people is that they wanted to understand how racism has shaped hundreds of communities throughout the state. B etween 1936 and 1967, the Negro Motorist Green Book was essential for the survival of thousands of Black Americans in an era of segregation cemented into the American legal system through Jim Crow laws, sundown towns where African Americans were under threat of violence after . Logan Jaffe is a reporter for newsletters at ProPublica. Its really sad. There are some shes decided not to have over: Im not that uppity friend that Im too good for them now, but Im not introducing them to my friends here. You may also be interested in exploring interactive maps exploring the enduring legacy of Redlining Maps on the racial distribution of American towns and cities. You are are free to republish it so long as you do the following: Copy and paste the following into your page to republish: Lincoln Library, The Public Library of Springfield, Illinois, Springfield and Central Illinois African American History Museum, The Legend of A-N-N-A: Revisiting an American Town Where Black People Werent Welcome After Dark, A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline, Barricaded Siblings Turn to TikTok While Defying Court Order to Return to Father They Say Abused Them, This Climate-Friendly Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk, COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a Complex and Grave Situation Inside a Wuhan Lab, Tennessee Lobbyists Oppose New Lifesaving Exceptions in Abortion Ban, How We Found That Sites of Previous Ebola Outbreaks Are at Higher Risk Than Before, Help Us Report on Assisted Living Facilities in Maine, If youre republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our. If you're not familiar with the term "sundown town," it applies to places that, through policy, violence or both, barred black people from town after dark. "A travel advisory has been issued to warn that any Black people in or traveling to San Antonio use increased caution when visiting the city due to the city's policing policies that put Black Lives in danger," wrote organizers in a press release. Sundown towns also range across the income spectrum. In fact, the Columbus region is well known for its ethnic diversity. I mean, at what point do we heal instead of coming back and going, Lets rip this wound open again? Theres got to be a solution, not just a revisiting of the problem. When he said this, he meant that everyone white people, black people, outsiders such as myself should focus on how to move forward. They led James to a pair of steel arches that spanned the intersection in the center of Cairos commercial district, which was crowded with thousands of onlookers, most of whom came as word spread about James arrest. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Its a shame that wording is even out there when it comes to Anna, Hartline said. According to police reports, one of the suspects allegedly tried to sodomize the victim with either a tire iron or an ax handle. The more you talk about it, it just creates that issue more, Max Miller, Union Countys board chairman, told me. Today, Anna is one of the whitest municipalities in southern Illinois according to the 2010 census, 95.7% of its citizens are white and its black population hasnt changed much since that modest uptick nearly 40 years ago, according to census data. Im scared that I will be looked at different for entertaining them. These kinds of calculations, she said, can be exhausting. Like what? Because whether or not that sign really existed, it exists in the minds of many black southern Illinoisans who know what the name of the town stands for. While that's largely gone by the wayside, the reputations earned by cities remain and still cast a pall over their locales. And most of you can't even stand ten toes down on the reality of this country cause you want to remove history instead.Keep up the good work!! He didnt lower his voice. Sundown Towns. The question is: How? Cairo has long been emblematic of a future that Anna fears: the decline of a once-thriving town. A sundown town is a community that for decades kept non-whites from living in it and was thus "all-white" on purpose. Each of you denying it's not your town isn't experiencing it. There are also uses of a derogatory racial term in documents and quotes cited in the story. Some residents of Anna describe their town as safe, family-centric and quaint, and contrast these features with the problems they perceive in bigger, less-white neighbors such as Carbondale, a city about 20 miles north of Anna that is home to Southern Illinois University, and Cairo, about 35 miles south of Anna, located at the states southernmost tip. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc. High 44F. That seems to be on the rise here in the past couple of years. You may be showing yours by using the term, colored people.. The map does not speak for itself, it is a community project, albeit a bit slow to update considering the loss of James Loewen. Also, by Sundown, you are inferring that a town was racist because the population was mostly white. Cicero had such a reputationin the late 1960s that civil rights marches were held there on the subject of housing discrimination. Hed grown to like it. It's a skill.I did a thread for those saying there is no proof. There are hundreds of these communities in Illinois. Somebody just drove by and yelled out the window, Youre a nigger lover, Gavin said. Well I was interested in this, but the town I grew up in Montana, is on this and it shouldnt be. Sunny to partly cloudy. The foundation of any map project is data. It was, from its founding up until 1968. So I went in, too. Giacomazzo, Bernadette. We have official accounts for ProPublica on. 'Sundown towns': Midwest confronts its complicated racial legacy Towns like Utica, Ohio, and Goshen, Ind., are beginning to come to terms with a legacy of racism that has largely evaded. The whole world., Annas Walmart draws a more diverse crowd. Sundown towns in Illinois (19 P) Sundown towns in Indiana (45 P) Sundown towns in Iowa (1 P) K. Sundown towns in Kansas (10 P) . 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