Taken back, taken aback

The Virtues of Giving Credit

Of all books ever published in the United States, only two directly treat the subject of Elliot Jaspin's new book at length. One, When Hatred and Fear Ruled by Millie Meyerholtz, treats Pana, Illinois, which drove out its black population in 1899, an expulsion Jaspin does not cover. The other is my book, Sundown Towns.

It treats eight of Jaspin's twelve expulsions at some length and mentions the other four (two are only mentioned as sundown counties). As he implies, our books complement each other. His provides greater detail on twelve expulsions; mine describes expulsions from at least 30 additional counties and cities. Sundown Towns is also broader in that it treats places that prevented blacks from entering from the start. Also, I mostly use town rather than county as unit of focus, hence come up with far more locales. And it is analytic as well as descriptive.

Nevertheless, we do both discuss expulsions. Since my book came out two years before Mr. Jaspin's, in newspaper parlance I "scooped" him.

In the greater scheme of things, this is not so significant. There were so many sundown towns and counties in the U.S. -- by my estimate about 10,000 -- that room remains for many books on the topic. After all, there have also been about 10,000 lynchings in American history, and about 1,000 books on the subject. I am happy that Jaspin's book came out. I look forward to a fourth and fifth and sixth book, so we can all learn more about this astonishing topic.

However, it is still astonishing that he did not cite my work. He claims this is because he never used it. If so, he should have! His analysis of the causes of the expulsions would have benefitted from my wider discussion (chapters six, "Underlying Causes," and seven, "Catalysts and Origin Myths" of Sundown Towns), for example. Still more importantly, the greatest weakness of his book lies in his thinking that he has discovered most if not all expulsions. He writes:

Like an archipelago, the counties where racial cleansings occurred form a rough arc that begins in North Carolina, crosses the Appalachians, and extends into the Midwest.

While the expulsions he found do lie in that crescent, that's because he looked in that crescent. Had he looked farther -- had he cited my book -- he would have found expulsions in Oregon, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New York, and many other places.

This is important because most of his expulsions occurred in formerly slave states. His only exceptions are two in Indiana, one of which, Jaspin emphasizes, was just 33 miles from Louisville, Kentucky. Once again, as with Hollywood's depiction of this phenomenon, we can infer that severe racism in America is mostly a Southern problem. But it isn't. Sundown towns and expulsions are not "long ago and far away." Many took place far from the South.

They are also not so long ago. Many took place more recently than Jaspin's book implies. His chapters are in chronological order from 1864 to 1923; chapter 12 then drops back to 1906. Many expulsions took place after 1923, however, some as recently as 1954, and whites have retaliated violently against families trying to move in as recently as the last fifteen years.

I think Jaspin avoided citing Sundown Towns because his story line is not only that many places expelled their black populations, but also that Elliot Jaspin brought this to light. Indeed, the first sentence in his book reads, "The story of how I found America's racial cleansings begins ..."

As soon as his newspaper stories came out, I put up a link to them at my website and had a conversation with him inviting him to link to mine. He expressed no interest in so doing. Any reader of Sundown Towns might want to learn more on the topic, was my reasoning, like any reader of Jaspin's work. Besides violating accepted rules of scholarly citation, Jaspin's more insular approach also leads him to violate standards common in journalism, or so I infer from Jerome Week's article, "Taken Aback, Taken Aback."

Let me close positively. Buried in the Bitter Waters makes an important contribution to the story of America's racial cleansings and resulting sundown towns. Not only is there room for us both on this topic, there is room for both our books on your bookshelf. Indeed, isn't it interesting that there are only two?

I read the blog by Prof. Loewen with great interest and to borrow a word "astonishment."

Prof. Loewen was less than forthcoming about our conversations. We met once for lunch while we were working on our respective books. After lunch he asked to look at my research and I declined. However, I did take him back to my office and made copies of the files I had on four expulsions I knew I was not going to use. One of them - Montlake, Tennessee - eventually made its way into his book. Whether he already knew about it, I have no idea. A few days later he called and told me there had been an expulsion in Comanche County, Texas. He did not supply any "materials" or documentation and we never talked about Comanche County again. Neither of us gave the other an acknowledgement in our books nor should we have. I would hope acknowledgements are reserved for those people who went out of their way to help an author.

Prof. Loewen is also surprised that I did not cite his book in my work. As Jerome Weeks noted, "Mr. Jaspin and Professor Loewen discuss two different things." Precisely so. I wanted to give a name - "racial cleansings" - to the practice of forcibly removing blacks from entire counties, a phenomenon that plagued America from the civil war until at least the 1920s. To do this I did a detailed study of a dozen cases. Prof. Loewen was interested in "sundown towns," communities that excluded blacks either by covenant or coercion. His book ranges over scores of examples.

As part of my focus on racial cleansings, I devoted a chapter to the KKK expulsion in Vermillion County, Indiana and another chapter to the expulsion in Sharp County, Arkansas. Prof. Loewen skipped Vermillion County entirely and only noted there were no blacks in Sharp County. How that came about is never explained. He cited the racial cleansing in Unicoi County, Tennessee as an example of how interracial assaults sparked mob violence. He did not mention that the NAACP never objected to the expulsion, an issue that I think is very significant. I spent a great deal of time tracing the land stolen from blacks during the Forsyth County racial cleansing. Loewen did not. The list of differences is almost endless. That is not astonishing because these are very different books with very different objectives. Given that, I did not cite his book because I did not use it in my research. It is that simple.

Jaspin's failure to cite my book, SUNDOWN TOWNS, in his, is indeed astonishing.
Nor does he acknowledge my help anywhere, even though I supplied him with the expulsion of African Americans from Comanche County, TX, that forms the second chapter of his book.

I remember one of those "sundown towns" very well since I grew up only 15 miles from it. Vidor, Texas, between Beaumont and Orange going toward the Louisiana state line, was one such place and even today it's known as one of the most segregated cities in that part of the state.

Nothing that happened there would surprise me in the least.