(14 Oct 2020) 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.
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."
Vienna is one of hundreds, possibly thousands, of mostly white towns across America that were known as "sundown towns" _ where Black people could pass through during the day but had to be gone by nightfall.
Anyone breaking the rules could risk arrest, a beating or worse.
These towns were an open secret of racial segregation that spilled across much of America for at least a century, and still exist in various forms, enforced more today by tradition and fear than by rules.
Across America, some of these towns are now openly wrestling with their histories, publicly acknowledging now-abandoned racist laws or holding racial justice protests.
Some old sundown towns are now integrated.
But many also still have tiny Black communities living alongside residents who don't bother hiding their cold stares of disapproval.
This part of southern Illinois had at least a half-dozen sundown towns.
They were called "grey towns," in some parts of America, "sunset towns" in others.
Very often, especially in well-to-do suburbs that didn't want to be known as racist, they had no name at all.
"The term 'sundown town' meant that Black people could come into the community and work or they could come into the community to do business, to shop and spend money, but before the sun went down, they had to be out of town," Darrel Dexter, Historian and teacher said.
But they still kept out Black people.
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. If you stop for gas, look for a well-lit gas station with security cameras.
Victoria Vaughn, a biracial 17-year-old who has been coming to Vienna for years to visit her white grandparents, was in town on a recent Saturday to join a rally organized after a group of Vienna High School students created a social media account that included the phrase "hate Black people" in its title.
Vaughn and her grandmother were among the 50 or so people who turned out for the rally, along with about 25 counter-protesters.
At first things went well. Protesters and counter-protesters prayed together.
They talked calmly about race. But not for long.
"Bullshit!" an older white man shouted at Vaughn, after she said Black people aren't treated equally. "They get the same as the white people get!"
Vaughn said Vienna's white residents may not see racial issues around them because they are far more subtle today.
Vienna's racial history goes back to the 1954 arrest of a 31-year-old Black resident, Thomas Lee Latham, who was accused of brutally beating an elderly white woman with a soft drink bottle and trying to rape her granddaughter.
A few weeks after his arrest, Latham escaped from jail.
Dozens of armed men burned down Vienna's Black community.
The 1950 census showed 54 Black people living in Vienna. In 2000, it showed one.
Just a few blocks away from where the Black community once lived, now lives Nicholas Lewis, the Black stay-at-home father.
He came to town two years ago, expecting a short visit, but staying after his girlfriend got pregnant.
"This is a small, southern town," he said. "They don't like change."
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20 авг 2024
