Copyright 1996-2023 Unitarian Universalist Association.All Rights Reserved. So that always bothered me, that that was their perception. Racism is not a problem in Anna, he said, at least no more than it is in the rest of the country. Its a shame that wording is even out there when it comes to Anna, Hartline said. Incorrigible people incapable of empathy or evolution. The proposal was never brought up for a vote, in part because commissioners said they didnt believe it was their job to address such concerns. I love all the obvious white (and racist) people coming in here telling Black people about our experience and that we need to provide proof as to why their beloved sundown town shouldnt be on the list. Hartline grew up in Cobden, the town just north of Anna. Also, cant close or minimize the key, which covers a large block of the map at all times. To advertise their actions, the towns sometimes posted sundown signs on the highway or in the railroad station. Smith, 38, moved to Anna in 2016 with her six children: Arieh, 19; Atarah, 18; Amiyah, 16; Arojae, 15; Asaiah, 12; and Aseana, 11. James Loewen clearly set it up for us to do further investigation into our towns. I beg to differ. Michael Hunter leaned forward in his camouflage-printed office chair. Its kind of almost a prison gerrymandering that is happening, Taylor says. Category:Sundown towns in Illinois Pages in category "Sundown towns in Illinois" The following 19 pages are in this category, out of 19 total. So stupid to publish this crap. In a way, though, it doesnt matter. Various mechanisms, from restrictive . Stories of intimidation and violence against black people and against white people who tried to employ them in Anna continued for decades after the war. He declined to be interviewed for this story. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, WSB-TV newsfilm . This site was created by Matt Cheney, revised by OddBird, copyrighted by James W. Loewen and heirs (Nick Loewen), and is maintained by Phil Huckelberry and Stephen Berrey. In 1930, 44 out of the 89 counties that lined Route 66 were all-white communities known as "sundown towns"places that banned black people from entering city limits after dark. Sundown Towns by State. History and Social Justice, https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns/using-the-sundown-towns-database/state-map/. A Anna, Illinois B Benton, Illinois C Calhoun County, Illinois Cicero, Illinois D De Land, Illinois Deerfield, Illinois E Effingham, Illinois Eldorado, Illinois G 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. "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. Agree the map is kind of worthless. Once known as a 'sundown town' and KKK stronghold, Pekin tries to move past racist history, 100-year-old Peorian recalls overcoming racism to start half-century teaching career, Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. The sundown towns team figured out a way to serve the database records through an API that I could add as a data layer on the new map. 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. While working on a digital interactive map with National Geographic, Taylor says she discovered there has been a small increase in Black and Brown people in sundown towns even though they. Smith never thought she would live here. Privacy Policy. Some of the white people who left Cairo blamed changes in the city its population loss, the flight of business, episodes of violence during the civil rights era on black people. It's by no means a complete list, but this map of sundown towns is perhaps the most accurate picture of their overwhelming presence. A couple towns in upstate new york, including the town I live in, are listed. Smith got Facebook messages from people shed never met. 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. She fills up her cars gas tank before going to work so that she spends as little time in Anna as possible. By Shannon Harper Working in youth ministry, supporting young people in their search for identity, voice, and calling, is at best incredibly gratifying. Learning and Affirmation, When UUs of Color Convene. Overcoming racism's legacy: 100-year-old Peorian recalls overcoming racism to start half-century teaching career. Taylor says during her travels she came across so-called sundown towns all-white communities or neighborhoods that intentionally exclude Black people and other minorities through discriminatory systems. Sundown towns also range across the income spectrum. When I met him last year, Hunter was the chief of Annas Police Department, and I was curious whether the A-N-N-A reputation affected how local officials did their jobs. You can take up the call to study sundown towns. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/26/sundown-towns-black-travel. If you could adjust that, it would prove safer for travelers. Anna, Illinois in 2020 is trying to shed the reputation that it has of being a sundown town. He purposely listed towns with few Black people in past Census because he says that is a great starting point. The term meant. Please contact. We are people of colour too.. just like the light-skinned Spanish-speaking people. the laws and practices. 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. People around the area, not just in Anna, have called him derogatory names based on his race, he said. One afternoon in Anna during my second visit, in May 2018 I approached two postal workers, both of them white, loading mail trucks behind the towns post office and asked them where I could find someone who wasnt white. Out of 5,000 people up there, you come up with one family? he said, laughing. 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. The Sundown Towns Database does not claim to be a complete record of all sundown towns in the USA. Independent businesses run up and down Main Street. The Union County Museum sits about five miles north of Anna in Cobden, a community known for its apple and peach orchards. Our forefathers have gone through and made decisions that werent the greatest things in the world, Miller said. However, ALL of the towns in Vermillion, Vigo (Terre Haute), and Parke counties should be on this map. Im just sorry we have to talk about that. He added: That is not the Anna I know.. 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. In fact, the Columbus region is well known for its ethnic diversity. About 100 steps away is the grave of Anna Pelley, marked by a sculpture of a woman on her knees, crying, with the inscription: A life sacrificed but remembered by friends.. Some time later, a few students at Anna-Jonesboro High made an Instagram account and anonymously made fun of classmates by posting photos of them along with derogatory captions, Smith said. Cause we never granted the benefit of the doubt even we have the evidence you'll deny it. Was Your Town a Sundown Town? But the stories of how these communities became or stayed mostly white are often unknown, ignored or not fully told. In 1990, the median owner-occupied house in Tuxedo Park, perhaps the wealthiest suburb of New York City, was worth more than $500,000 (the highest category in the census). We recognize this is a problem and need to do something about it.. James W. Loewen, a sociologist from Decatur, published a book on the topic and chronicled multiple cities within Illinois. PEKIN For years, some Illinois towns had the reputation of being a "sundown town," a city where it wasn't safe for Black people to be after dark. But, he said, its not something people there are proud of. 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. The Sundown Towns interactive map uses the Sundown Towns Database to show the distribution and location of sundown towns across the United States. 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. Get ready to tell your congregation's story. Sundown Towns. Then, in a moment that would lodge itself in regional memory, a 23-year-old white woman from Anna was found dead in November 1909 in an alley in Cairo. But there aren't any "sundown" places, including the one's marked on the map near me, that I would tell someone to not visit because of the color of their skin. Most of these are confirmed. I talked with people going about their lives in the library, the Farm Fresh milk store, the Blue Boar restaurant, the citys park, the Walmart parking lot and other pockets of Anna. Somebody just drove by and yelled out the window, Youre a nigger lover, Gavin said. In fact the database comes with a note which states that there are "too many sundown towns for us to have found them all". ANNA, it reads. I have to do what women and mothers have to do, Smith said. Yeah, I definitely remember sundown towns being a thing throughout my early childhood in the 1980s . Ashley Lockeproduced and edited this interview for broadcast withTinku Ray. 43 would require employees prove that their protected characteristics were a motivating factor for being discriminated against when previously the requirement was that simply showed it was a contributing factor., The NAACP also referenced anecdotal examples of hate crimes, and data which showed Black motorists were 75% more likely to be pulled over and stopped and searched by police enforcement than their white counterparts. I think this in itself is a form of cultural erasure. Well, it's history and I like to learn. 1995 - 2023 by Snopes Media Group Inc. I think even he got out when it got too violent. Right?? Glens Falls, does NOT. Hunter told me that when hed pull over black motorists, they would sometimes tell him during traffic stops that they knew what Anna stood for and why hed stopped them. Sundown towns in North Carolina (5 P) O. Sundown towns in Ohio (8 P) Sundown towns in Oklahoma (14 P) T. Sundown towns in Tennessee (3 P) The Klan was started in Indiana so no surprises with the distribution of red dots. And thats what I love.. A new ProPublica Illinois story examines the racist legacy of one such town in Illinois called Anna. Even today, southern Illinois has more in common culturally with Kentucky and Missouri than with its other neighbors; for years, Confederate battle flags were draped on a storefront on Annas Main Street without much objection. This is the kind of thing that makes her wish she had moved to Anna sooner. He kept his composure. I know many black families who live here, and none of them ever mention racial incidents. Thank you for the list! Like you know all these people commenting THIS ISNT TRUE are deff white and have had no racist experience happen to them in their lives. I visited a grave in the Anna cemetery that belongs to the man deemed by a local newspaper in 1916 to be the only colored man who has ever lived in this city and I spent some time with one of the few black families (if not the only one) living in Anna today. Sundown towns are communities in which Black people were not welcome. Anna is a city of a little more than 4,000 people located in the middle of Union County, where soybean fields and flatlands to the north give way to the forests and sandstone canyons of southern Illinois. Other spots in Illinois with reputations as sundown towns or of racial discrimination include Benton, Effingham, Salem, Vienna and Granite City in southern Illinois. Europeans first came across it in the late 1600s . I told him I was a journalist from Chicago and asked him to tell me about this town. For more information contact multicultural@uua.org. Sundown Towns Still Exist in the U.S. Distractify, 28 Apr. I got into town just after sunset. For more information about canonical metadata, You cant edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. So most people assume it was the South that was the problem, but that really wasn't the case.. Smith still tears up thinking about it. Nothing could be further than the "truth" found on this ridiculous map. Anna, in southern Illinois, carriesthe legacy of that history today, as recent reporting by ProPublica showed. I don't think America is worth saving. Sundown towns dated back to the colonial days, when the ordinances and laws were also aimed at Native Americans. In the years leading up to the Civil War, family lines in the South still existed with these people of the new Midwest, wrote the late Anna resident George E. Parks in 1983 in History of Union County, and some residents remained sympathetic to their southern home states. They came into existence in the late 19th century and were scattered throughout the nation, but more often were located in the northern states that were not pre-Civil War slave states. Sundown Towns. Author Candacy Taylor spent all summer documenting Green Book sites and exploring how Black Americans can travel safely across the U.S in 2021. Patches of tiled sidewalk that once led into storefronts now faded into dirt. (Whitney Curtis, special to ProPublica Illinois), (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library via The Library of Congress), Anna is a city of a little more than 4,000 people, (Source: Mapbox. I was in Springfield this week to talk about my reporting in Anna, Illinois, and sundown towns like Anna. Still, Im not going to claim I know Annas full story Im an outsider. https://twitter.com/digitalsista/status/1411762780718391296. But the activity spread after the Civil War and during the Reconstruction era. Nevertheless, three years after Smith moved to Anna, her family still has to deal with racist comments. When he returned home and resumed his role as editor, he wrote that he and the other officers were perfectly satisfied of the fact that fighting to free the nigger is no wise [or] desirable task.. They posted a photo of Arieh and wrote a caption calling him the N-word and Annas Jackie Robinson. The school disciplined the students behind the account. Logan Jaffe is the engagement reporter for ProPublica Illinois. Winchester. [It looked] just like that, he added. Annas historical resistance to black people is, and has long been, well known in the region. How do you run so fast? For much of the 20th century, Anna was almost entirely white, except for a handful of black residents at different times. My talk was held at the Springfield public library which, I must point out, is officially named Lincoln Library, The Public Library of Springfield, Illinois. 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. Credit: ProPublica Illinois), (From Without Sanctuary: A History of Lynching Photography in America, courtesy of Twin Palms Publishers). Seeing this honestly gives me hope that people can and do change.. Hello, people of Illinois and people not of Illinois: Im heading north on the Amtrak Lincoln Service from Springfield to Chicago. Thats why shes interested in looking at how sundown towns operate. I took a seat at the bar. There were thousands of these sundown communities and most of them were predominant in the Midwest, in the West and in the North, Taylor says. The green ones with white letters. Sorry for all the hate. Local historians and historical societies can sometimes be reluctant to engage, acknowledge or tell stories about the difficult or shameful parts of their communitys history. I picked up the book in part because its author, James W. Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont and at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, is from Decatur, Illinois. While that's largely gone by the wayside, the reputations earned by cities remain and still cast a pall over their locales. Smith told me her family feels pressure to always be on its best behavior. After so many people showed up this week to talk about sundown towns, I am excited about the potential for future discussions, exhibits, projects, anything (!) Sundown Towns redraws the map of race relations, extending the lines of racial oppression through the backyard of millions of Americans and lobbing an intellectual hand grenade into the debates over race and racism today. about sundown towns across Illinois. sundown town, also called sunset town, in U.S. history, a town that excluded nonwhite peoplemost frequently African Americansfrom remaining in town after sunset. If you select a town on the map you can then view its entry in the Sundown Towns Database. You cant state or imply that donations to your organization support ProPublicas work. Tripps 18-year-old son, Gavin, graduated from Anna-Jonesboro High in the spring. Logan Jaffe is a reporter for newsletters at ProPublica. Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcast on Dec. 22, 2021. Arieh said he was called the N-word once during a football game against nearby Du Quoin High School. Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you. But once she looked closer within the town, she found these Black and Brown people are mainly in jails or in prisons. In his book, Loewen profiles three Indiana towns; Elwood, Huntington and Martinsville. Sundown towns were all over America. Nathan Bedford Forrest. What Im talking about is seeing him bring that community together. Black people also work at Choate Developmental Center, a state mental health facility in Anna. I think it needs more flavor around here for sure, but everything needs to be more mixed, he said. By sunrise, the three Black men had been dragged from their cell by a mob of white townspeople and hanged from a railroad trestle over the creek that separates the town . You cant republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. Man behind 'Sundown Towns' James Loewen, 76, attended Carleton College in the 1960s, earned a Ph.D. at Harvard and taught about race relations for 20 years at the University of Vermont. With a rope around his neck, the Bulletin reported, James confessed. In my younger days you werent allowed up here after dark, period, Taylor said in the parking lot as he loaded grocery bags into his car. But it was also the home of U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen, whose support helped ensure the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Sunset in Anna, Ill. In 2017, in the aftermath of the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white Anna resident named Tabitha Tripp said at a Union County board meeting that she was concerned about hate incidents in the county, and she asked the county commissioners to consider a resolution, identical to one that had recently passed the Illinois House, condemning hate groups. Sundown Towns are all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that exclude Blacks and other minorities through the use of discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence. HOME OF ARIEH HART, it reads. ", In May 2022, an image went viral that supposedly showed a sign in a modern-day "sundown town" that read "whites only within city limits after dark.". @Anonymous I didn't use the term 'colored people'. Loewen discovered that many of the sundown towns would burn signs and that theres no official record that some existed at all which shows people continue to erase the dirty parts of our history that we dont want to remember, Taylor says. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc. Hosted by Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, MS, 39174 and facilitated by Pantheon. What a bunch of manure. He put it all out there for you including the steps you can take to confirm if it is true or not and fully contribute to the map. Smith thought hers was the only black family in Anna when she arrived, though she thinks a few more families have moved in since. But there are some black people here, and more, it seems, during the workday. Sundown towns are communities that for decadesformally or informallykept out African Americans or other groups. AP Road Trip: Racial Tensions in Americas Sundown Towns. AP NEWS, 20 Apr. Some people still do. 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 . But these incidents happened. Later that night, I realized what shook me most about our conversation: He didnt pause before he said what he said. As his mother followed the van carrying him and other members of the Anna-Jonesboro wrestling team back into town after the finals, people lined up on Main Street to wave and clap and cheer. Please fix the dot on the map. Travelers had no way of knowing where the sundown towns were located because there wasnt a map until James Loewen researched and wrote the book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, she says. Your membership is the foundation of our sustainability and resilience. They want to see racial tensions so they lie. Walker told me about a sign he said used to be posted near Annas city limits. Ill be bookmarking and avoiding all of these towns, and passing the info onto friends, family, and social media. If I had a document for every racist experience towards me, I'd fill out at least a good half inch binder (I'm not black). 2018 IHSA 1A 152 LB WRESTLING CHAMPION.. "Green Book" was inspired by the true story of a 1962 concert tour by African American pianist Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali). I love mapping. Ralph Smith, 30, has been employed there for two years. I did notice that California and Illinois were really really high on this list. One woman who works in the area and who is black told me she hates it when shes assigned a shift in the town. While unofficial "sundown towns," a term for a town that prohibits Black people after dark, still reportedly exist in the United States, a viral image of a sign reading "Whites only within city limits after dark" was taken from a scene in the movie "Green Book. Illinois had almost 150 sundown towns in the state alone. 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. And that's what I'm really fascinated with because that to me is again more covert operations that are very difficult to fight.. The sisters have a slew of similar stories. Sunny to partly cloudy. The name derives from the posted and verbal warnings issued to Blacks that although they might be allowed to work or travel in a community . Color Convene tell me about a sundown towns in illinois map he said fact, the towns sometimes sundown! Of being a sundown town adjust that, it 's history and I like to learn was on... 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