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AP Road Trip: Racial tensions in America's 'sundown towns'


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The New York Times
SOURCE: https://apnews.com/db28a9aaa3b800d91b65dc11a6b12c4c
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Summary

(AP) — Ask around this time-battered Midwestern town, with its empty storefronts, dusty antique shops and businesses that have migrated toward the interstate, and nearly everyone will tell you that Black and white residents get along really well.“Race isn’t a big problem around here,” said Bill Stevens, a white retired prison guard with a gentle smile, drinking beer with friends on a summer afternoon. Around here, almost no one talks openly about the violence that drove out Black residents nearly 70 years ago, or even whispers the name these places were given: “sundown towns.” Unless they’re among the handful of Black residents.“It’s real strange and weird out here sometimes,” said Nicholas Lewis, a stay-at-home father. “Every time I walk around, eyes are on me.” ___Sunset in Anna, Ill. The rules of a sundown town were simple: Black people were allowed to pass through during the day or go in to shop or work, but they had to be gone by nightfall. “But also something that our parents taught us growing up.” In places still seen as sundown towns, many Black people now follow their own rules: Avoid them if possible, and lock your car doors if you have to drive through. “Every time you come into town, or you go into a gas station, or in a store, people look at you,” said Victoria Vaughn, a biracial 17-year-old who has been coming to Vienna for years to visit her white grandparents.“You can feel them looking at you, feel them staring,” she said. But not for long.“Bullshit!” an older white man shouted at Vaughn, after she said Black people aren’t treated equally. Black people had lived in and around Vienna since the late 1820s or early 1830s, said Dexter. Or when an elderly woman walked past the family at a church dinner and loudly called the children “damn half-breeds.” There was the day the 10-year-old came home with a painful question: “Grandma, why do I have to be Black?” She and her husband moved to Vienna about 10 years ago from northern Illinois, chasing work and a cheaper cost of living. I had Black people who took care of me through my childhood,” he said. “When they burned them out that time, a lot of them just packed their bags and went up north,” said Stevens, who said he hated to see Black classmates driven from town.

As said here by TIM SULLIVAN and NOREEN NASIR