remained overnight. Thus were created thousands of “sundown towns”—
probably a majority of all incorporated communities in Illinois, Indiana,
Oregon, and several other Northern states. Sundown towns ranged in size from
DeLand, Illinois, population 500, to Appleton, Wisconsin, 57,000, and Warren,
Michigan, almost 200,000. Many suburbs kept out Jews; in the West many
towns excluded Chinese, Mexican, or Native Americans. Entire areas—most
of the Ozarks, the Cumberlands, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—became
almost devoid of African Americans. Within metropolitan areas, whites pushed
blacks into what now became known as “black neighborhoods” as cities grew
increasingly segregated residentially!^78
African Americans were excluded from juries throughout the South and in
many places in the North, which usually meant they could forget about legal
redress even for obvious wrongs like assault, theft, or arson by whites.
Lynchings offer evidence of how defenseless blacks were, for the defining
characteristic of a lynching is that the murder takes place in public, so
everyone knows who did it, yet the crime goes unpunished. During the nadir,
lynchings took place as far north as Duluth. Once again, as Dred Scott had
proclaimed in 1857, “a Negro had no rights a white man was bound to
respect.” Every time African Americans interacted with European Americans,
no matter how insignificant the contact, they had to be aware of how they
presented themselves, lest they give offense by looking someone in the eye,
forgetting to say “sir,” or otherwise stepping out of “their place.” Always, the
threat of overwhelming force lay just beneath the surface.^79
The nadir left African Americans in a dilemma. An “exodus” to form new
black communities in the West did not lead to real freedom. Migration north
led only to segregated urban ghettoes. Concentrating on Booker T.
Washington’s plan for economic improvement while forgoing civil and
political rights could not work, because economic gains could not be
maintained without civil and political rights.^80 “Back to Africa” was not
practicable.
Many African Americans lost hope; family instability and crime increased.
This period of American life, not slavery, marked the beginning of what some
social scientists have called the “tangle of pathology” in African American
society.^81 Indeed, some historians date low black morale to even later
periods, such as the great migration to Northern cities (1918-70), the
Depression (1929-39), or changes in urban life and occupational structure after