I met him while he was playing basketball with his young son in the park. James W.. The Klan was started in Indiana so no surprises with the distribution of red dots. Most people I met in Anna, Illinois, wish the racist lore behind the citys name would go away. Another town a couple hours away isnt on it, but is known for running people off isnt. But after hearing A-N-N-A said aloud that night, I realized my race made me a sort of insider, too. Before the family moved to Anna, Smith sat her kids down and discussed how to respond if someone called them the N-word, if they were discriminated against at school or if they didnt feel comfortable. 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.. Being surrounded by water already gives this town an eerie and isolated feel. The Gazette wrote that the only colored man who has ever lived in this city, died at his home Sunday night. Emily Sales died in Anna in 1932. Although one of the young men told police they attacked the victim because he was black, the police did not charge the four men with a hate crime. The map does not speak for itself, it is a community project, albeit a bit slow to update considering the loss of James Loewen. The Union County Museum sits about five miles north of Anna in Cobden, a community known for its apple and peach orchards. Most people said they wished the A-N-N-A reputation would just go away and were quick to say Anna wasnt like that anymore. A 'sundown town,'" Riley said, a term for thousands of rural towns of the era where Blacks were excluded by law or intimidation. 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 are so named because some marked their city limits with placards warning specific groups of people to stay away after the sun went down. 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. It is time these stories become a more visible part of our states history. Smith told me her family feels pressure to always be on its best behavior. AP Road Trip: Racial Tensions in Americas Sundown Towns. AP NEWS, 20 Apr. Not sure why everyone is interpreting your town being on this map as it being a Sundown Town. It's by no means a complete list, but this map of sundown towns is perhaps the most accurate picture of their overwhelming presence. I talked with public officials, historians and longtime residents. And the dog whistling over, but Chicago! is tired. 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. More generally, sundown town is used to describe a place where the resident population was through deliberate action made to be overwhelmingly composed of white people. How fortunate we are to have so little of darkest Africa among us, the Gazette wrote in January 1903, adding that it would be presumptuous to place the negro in the places where only white men should fill as long as this is a white mans country.. 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. Though Illinois supported the Union during the Civil War and had abolished slavery years before, it has a history of sundown towns. Giacomazzo, Bernadette. Smith, 38, moved to Anna in 2016 with her six children: Arieh, 19; Atarah, 18; Amiyah, 16; Arojae, 15; Asaiah, 12; and Aseana, 11. If you know of other similar efforts around Illinois, Id love to hear about those as well. The truth is theres not enough racism to suit some people so they make it up. Illinois Sundown Towns Central IL has many sundown towns. 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.. Category:Sundown towns in Illinois Pages in category "Sundown towns in Illinois" The following 19 pages are in this category, out of 19 total. Thats why shes interested in looking at how sundown towns operate. But the stories of how these communities became or stayed mostly white are often unknown, ignored or not fully told. After a white supremacist mob intimidated Black schoolchildren on the banks of Lake Lanier in 1968, a WSB-TV reporter interviewed Cumming citizens about the incident. Over the past two years, I visited the town several times to try to understand where Annas history had left the town today. Loewen (emeritus, sociology, U. of Vermont) exposes the history and persistence of "sundown towns," so-named for the signs often found at their corporate limits warning African Americans and other minorities not to be found in the town after dusk. Smith never thought she would live here. Hes been Annas mayor for nearly 20 years, and he served in its Police Department for 15 years before that. A sundown town is a community that for decades kept non-whites from living in it and was thus "all-white" on purpose. On the first day of Amiyahs senior year at Anna-Jonesboro High, students gathered before class outside the school for impromptu group photos. They dont want to come here, Gavin added. Sunset in Anna, Ill. He now comes to town to go to Walmart and to get his car washed. "I'm 67, and for 66 years I always heard about the riot." The. Somebody just drove by and yelled out the window, Youre a nigger lover, Gavin said. The Weekendest - Real-Time New York City Subway Map shows you the real-time location of trains on New York's vast subway network. Youd better be safe, they tell him. Sundown towns are communities in which Black people were not welcome. It was new since the last time I had been in town. Sundown Towns. On another map, dots help users understand whether an area is a sundown town, with a legend that includes "don't know," "surely," "unlikely/always biracial," and "Black town or township." (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 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. They then dragged his body through the streets, set it on fire and later cut off his head and stuck it on a hitching post. People around the area, not just in Anna, have called him derogatory names based on his race, he said. 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. Our local, county and state police would never tolerate that, and neither would our governor nor the people of our great state. The mob pulled him up to hang him, but the rope broke, so they shot him repeatedly instead. Today, Emily and John share a small tombstone in the Anna cemetery. There are no laws based on your race. 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 are still 90% white. How do you dance like that? That meant a lot to her. "Green Book" takes its title from a travel guide book published between 1936 and 1966 called "The Negro Motorist Green Book" that helped Black people avoid particularly hostile areas, such as sundown towns, as they drove through the country. With a rope around his neck, the Bulletin reported, James confessed. 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. Hartline grew up in Cobden, the town just north of Anna. 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. (Hindman died in 1998.). Trust me, I have lived in many states, and traveled to all, and know that racism exists. This still shot actually comes from the 2018 movie "Green Book," which was set in 1962. Thank you for the list! Longmont, CO, where I live, is listed in the database, but the entry for the town has no, zero, information, other than the comment that "Longmont, CO, has joined The Inclusive Communities Partnership of the National League of Cities" and the statement that Longmont is "surely not" still a sundown town.I have no evidence either way, but if you're going to list a town in the database, I'd think you should have SOMETHING to go on. Your membership is the foundation of our sustainability and resilience. She previously was an embedded mediamaker with The New York Times Race/Related newsletter in collaboration with the documentary showcase POV, in which she reported and produced an audience-driven project confronting the pervasiveness of racism through everyday objects. HAYS, Kansas On the night of Jan. 6, 1869, Luke Barnes, Lee Watkins and James Ponder sat in jail accused of shooting a white railroad worker in this northwest Kansas town. I wish we had more diversity on our staff, said Brett Detering, the schools principal. Sundown towns, or grey towns, were all-white neighborhoods in the United States that used discriminatory local laws, intimidation, or violence to keep their town all-white. Design and production by Vignesh Ramachandran, Logan Jaffe, Jillian Kumagai and Agnes Chang. 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. The practices declined since the Civil Rights era, when laws banning such discriminationwere passed. 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. I did notice that California and Illinois were really really high on this list. Nearly everyone I met knew what Anna stands for whether they heard it first as a joke at school or from their grandparents or just from living here long enough. 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. Out of 5,000 people up there, you come up with one family? he said, laughing. Its pure fiction. ". Among his questions: "Do you think Forsyth is a county for whites only?" Courtesy of Walter J. While the assertion that sundown towns still exist in America is generally accurate, the above-displayed example does not show sign on display in the United States in 2022. Ill be bookmarking and avoiding all of these towns, and passing the info onto friends, family, and social media. Tripps 18-year-old son, Gavin, graduated from Anna-Jonesboro High in the spring. 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. 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. He complains that black soldiers are treated better than white soldiers. . That (especially in the Northeast) has everything to do with immigration and climate, not racism. He historically situates the rise of the sundown town movement in the years following the Civil War; describes the mechanisms of violence, threats . Or check out the most ghetto cities and the most dangerous cities in Illinois. Things do change. We are people of colour too.. just like the light-skinned Spanish-speaking people. American stopped counting lynchings in 1968 and it wasn't because they stopped happening. 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. Get ready to tell your congregation's story. So it makes me wonder if others have been wrongly labeled. Pekin's legacy includedKu Klux Klan activity and a high school's nickname abolished more than 30 years ago that was a racial slur used to refer to people of Chinese origin. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, The New York Times Race/Related newsletter. The whole world., Annas Walmart draws a more diverse crowd. The term meant. But after a series of incidents that made her feel unsafe in Murphysboro, Smith said, she wanted out. We came here on the second stop of The Associated Press' road trip across America, a reporting journey that three of us . The green ones with white letters. Sundown towns were all over America. I added layer filtering functionality to help users tailor what data to view. The Amtrak/VIA Live Map shows the live position of Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada trains. A Historic Travel Guide to Jim Crow America. Sign up to get ProPublica Illinois investigations delivered to your inbox. Even though it may never have been codified, I found references to the fact that black people werent allowed to live in Anna in newspaper articles from as early as 1903. The information surrounding upstate New York is slightly inaccurate. Please fix the dot on the map. Independent businesses run up and down Main Street. We came here on the second stop of The Associated Press' road trip across America, a reporting journey that three of us are taking to look at how the U.S. has been shaken and shaped by months of protests, the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic crisis and the looming November elections. 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. A new ProPublica Illinois story examines the racist legacy of one such town in Illinois called Anna. I was in Springfield this week to talk about my reporting in Anna, Illinois, and sundown towns like Anna. Less than 72 hours later, without a trial and after the county sheriff unsuccessfully tried to spirit James out of town to safety, residents took the law into their own hands. Yet when Smith ran the idea by friends and school guidance counselors, just about everyone asked her the same thing: Dont you know what A-N-N-A stands for? Around 1980, Annas black population grew to about a few dozen residents. When I called James Taylor, the man I had met at the Anna Walmart months before, he told me there was someone in Cairo I should meet. Here, Illinois is no longer the Prairie state, a correspondent for New Yorks Evening Post wrote in 1858 while covering the third Lincoln-Douglas debate, which was held in Jonesboro, a small town that shares a border with Anna. He didnt like it when people assumed he was racist. Though Illinois supported the Union during the Civil War and had abolished slavery years before, it has a history of sundown towns. She fills up her cars gas tank before going to work so that she spends as little time in Anna as possible. About 10 workers fled to the woods. The term came from the idea that Black peoplehad to leave the city by sundown or face possible harm and discrimination. Hello, people of Illinois and people not of Illinois: Im heading north on the Amtrak Lincoln Service from Springfield to Chicago. Like many other small towns, Anna has lost industry. They dont deserve the economy. And all the sidewinding typical tropes like using Jussie and Chicago are all tells that you know the truth. There are hundreds of these. 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. One of James Loewens most significant achievements is to link physically violent forms of racism with legal and social stratagems white Americans have found to isolate themselves from people of color, indeed from people different in any way. The Interactive Map of Sundown Towns In the United States some neighborhoods and towns have traditionally managed to largely exclude non-white residents. The map above shows the paths of a dozen spy balloons as they travel across the United States. Sundown towns are rare in the South but common in the rest of the country. We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language. Illinois had almost 150 sundown towns in the state alone. He had a friend who lived in Anna and had spent weekends there. 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. Not 100% sure.. The sundown town was really a way that the North and West patrolled and monitored race without having the dirty signs of saying 'colored only' or 'whites only,' she says. I hopped into the backseat of Taylors blue station wagon, and a man named Gregory Walker, 69, sat in the passenger seat. [It looked] just like that, he added. @Anonymous I didn't use the term 'colored people'. Anyone who knows the history of Anna-Jonesboro would never in a million years imagine something like this would ever happen. Its kind of almost a prison gerrymandering that is happening, Taylor says. 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. Shortly after the city water tower was erected in 1914, residents mounted a siren on the tower. (For example, yesterday can be changed to last week, and Portland, Ore. to Portland or here.), You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. In March 2013, four young white men attacked a black 16-year-old in a parking lot behind a furniture store on Main Street. 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. ANNA, it reads. Just own it. These were towns across the United States where black Americans knew they weren't welcome after dark. It's good for a laugh but that's about it. Yes, Sundown Towns Are Still A Problem For Black Travelers In The United States. Travel Noire, 28 July 2021, https://travelnoire.com/sundown-towns-2021. Assumption. The term "sundown town" is familiar to many African Americans. Changing reputation: Once known as a 'sundown town' and KKK stronghold, Pekin tries to move past racist history. 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. Cicero had such a reputationin the late 1960s that civil rights marches were held there on the subject of housing discrimination. How do you run so fast? De facto sundown towns existed at least into the 1970s and there may still be towns today that try to keep people of color away. This material may not be reproduced without permission. He didnt look around the room to see whether anyone could hear us. The foundation of any map project is data. He said people his age in the surrounding counties know about the lore of A-N-N-A and consider Anna to be just a bad place for people that are different.. They were not to lash out or fight. When you click Albany, it states Albany, Pennsylvania. Albany, New York has a higher black population, about 29% (https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/albany-ny-population). Sunny to partly cloudy. 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. While that's largely gone by the wayside, the reputations earned by cities remain and still cast a pall over their locales. The look on their faces was terror, Smith said. Safety is a priority and this is sadly, still needed. He said he hadnt witnessed that kind of public racism in Anna before. If you could adjust that, it would prove safer for travelers. If one came here from a link, they expected a recent map, not historical data. 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