A Anna, Illinois B Benton, Illinois C Calhoun County, Illinois Cicero, Illinois D De Land, Illinois Deerfield, Illinois E Effingham, Illinois Eldorado, Illinois G 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.. Hindman, in his interview, said any black people who worked or lived in Anna were driven out of town after the Anna Pelley incident in 1909. Shortly after the city water tower was erected in 1914, residents mounted a siren on the tower. Years before, when she was new to Illinois and living in Murphysboro, about 25 miles north, she got lost driving somewhere on U.S. Highway 51 after dark and called her husband for directions. So is the Anna City Council, the Anna Police Department and every teacher at Anna-Jonesboro High School, the public high school serving Anna. 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. That meant a lot to her. Bloodhounds, after picking up the scent from a piece of cloth used to gag her, led Cairo police to arrest a black man named William James, an employee of the Cairo Ice and Coal Company, according to the Cairo Bulletin. Nothing could be further than the "truth" found on this ridiculous map. James Taylor, a 61-year-old known as Big T in Cairo, where he lives, was shopping there on a Saturday afternoon when I met him. I first learned about Anna in a book called Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, about the thousands of communities across the country that, for much of the 20th century, kept themselves white. By sunrise, the three Black men had been dragged from their cell by a mob of white townspeople and hanged from a railroad trestle over the creek that separates the town . kori. It's the American Way. https://www.uua.org/files/includes/snippet-important-message.txt, Anti-Racism, Multiculturalism, and Belonging, Forgotten story of America's whites-only towns, Reparations for the 1921 Tusla OK Race Riot, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century. 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 man was white. When Easter Smith opened the door, her house smelled like dinner. I talked with people going about their lives in the library, the Farm Fresh milk store, the Blue Boar restaurant, the citys park, the Walmart parking lot and other pockets of Anna. For much of the 20th century, Anna was almost entirely white, except for a handful of black residents at different times. Most of these are confirmed. Also known as "Egypt," southern Illinois' abandoned town of Cairo, Illinois sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and is on a peninsula with water on three of its four sides. We mourn the loss of our friend and colleague and remain committed to the work he began. Taylors latest book, Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America," examines the historical role and the impact of the Green Book a travel guide printed from 1936 to 1967 to help Black Americans find safe places to stay, shop and eat on the road. Im just sorry we have to talk about that. He added: That is not the Anna I know.. The Union County Museum sits about five miles north of Anna in Cobden, a community known for its apple and peach orchards. Not surprising, but still horrifying nonetheless. Other spots in Illinois with reputations as sundown towns or of racial discrimination include Benton, Effingham, Salem, Vienna and Granite City in southern Illinois. Seeing this honestly gives me hope that people can and do change.. In 2017, in the aftermath of the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white Anna resident named Tabitha Tripp said at a Union County board meeting that she was concerned about hate incidents in the county, and she asked the county commissioners to consider a resolution, identical to one that had recently passed the Illinois House, condemning hate groups. Racial covenants in the deeds. Patrick Brumleve, who oversees the museum as the president of the Union County Historical and Genealogical Society, said Anna was named after Anna Davie, the wife of the man who founded the town in 1854. In Chicago, she was a recipient of Chicago Filmmakers Digital Media Production Fund for Battle Flag, an interactive documentary which questions the meaning of the Confederate battle flag in America. 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. The question is: How? Also, cant close or minimize the key, which covers a large block of the map at all times. If Anna has changed, how? While the details of each incident are often vague or contradictory, newspaper accounts, oral history archives and other documents chronicle a narrative of Annas emerging reputation as A-N-N-A. 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. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sometimes entire counties went sundown, usually when their county seats did. Glens Falls, does NOT. Copyright 1996-2023 Unitarian Universalist Association.All Rights Reserved. Ive lived in many states all over the USA. He put it all out there for you including the steps you can take to confirm if it is true or not and fully contribute to the map. Act like the cameras on, act like somebody is following you, act like somebody is watching you, because nine times out of 10, they are.. I always knew I grew up in a pretty racist area, but I went through the list of TX sundown towns on this map and there were 10 within a 30 mile radius of my hometown. He said he hadnt witnessed that kind of public racism in Anna before. Sundown towns also range across the income spectrum. Like you know all these people commenting THIS ISNT TRUE are deff white and have had no racist experience happen to them in their lives. Then, in a moment that would lodge itself in regional memory, a 23-year-old white woman from Anna was found dead in November 1909 in an alley in Cairo. Anna resident Takiyah Coleman, 19, agreed. For the small, independent towns all around the state that are still all white or almost all white, its like the civil rights movement never happened, he told me. Not 100% sure.. Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you. The map does not speak for itself, it is a community project, albeit a bit slow to update considering the loss of James Loewen. Keep up the hard work! Nokomis. And I think it has to be said that what your son has done is nothing short of a miracle. There are many people admitting to it in the thread. The semiconductor industry has brought diversity there. The package took five days to wing it's way f A couple of week's ago I released Worlde , a Wordle type game which requires you to guess the names of countries and major global cit On February 24th last year Russia lauched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Thank you for your interest in republishing this story. Annas historical resistance to black people is, and has long been, well known in the region. I did notice that California and Illinois were really really high on this list. Taking information from James W. Loewen's database at http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/sundowntownsshow.php?state=IL, this map gathers together two categories, towns and counties that. 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. Smith got Facebook messages from people shed never met. Various mechanisms, from restrictive . In fact the database comes with a note which states that there are "too many sundown towns for us to have found them all". 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. 24 Farnsworth Street | Boston, MA 02210 Some of the white people who left Cairo blamed changes in the city its population loss, the flight of business, episodes of violence during the civil rights era on black people. Flickr/David Wilson. Right?? Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence. Just own it. And that's what I'm really fascinated with because that to me is again more covert operations that are very difficult to fight.. He added, It was just a racist town.. They ask him what hes doing out there; doesnt he know Anna is a sundown town? 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). The map above shows the paths of a dozen spy balloons as they travel across the United States. Accessed 3 May 2022. You are are free to republish it so long as you do the following: Copy and paste the following into your page to republish: Lincoln Library, The Public Library of Springfield, Illinois, Springfield and Central Illinois African American History Museum, The Legend of A-N-N-A: Revisiting an American Town Where Black People Werent Welcome After Dark, A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline, Barricaded Siblings Turn to TikTok While Defying Court Order to Return to Father They Say Abused Them, This Climate-Friendly Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk, COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a Complex and Grave Situation Inside a Wuhan Lab, Tennessee Lobbyists Oppose New Lifesaving Exceptions in Abortion Ban, How We Found That Sites of Previous Ebola Outbreaks Are at Higher Risk Than Before, Help Us Report on Assisted Living Facilities in Maine, If youre republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our. That's the proof. When Atarah made the high school basketball team, someone sent her a screenshot of a message telling her teammates to be nice to her because she is black. Most people I met in Anna, Illinois, wish the racist lore behind the citys name would go away. Smith told me her family feels pressure to always be on its best behavior. That seems to be on the rise here in the past couple of years. Weve got issues and are not shirking away from those issues, Mayor Tim Kabat, who is white, told the La Crosse Tribune. She fills up her cars gas tank before going to work so that she spends as little time in Anna as possible. The authors of the sundown towns website explain that the first urgent need is for work that confirms or disconfirms probable sundown towns. Smith still tears up thinking about it. On the first day of Amiyahs senior year at Anna-Jonesboro High, students gathered before class outside the school for impromptu group photos. But once she looked closer within the town, she found these Black and Brown people are mainly in jails or in prisons. It's a skill.I did a thread for those saying there is no proof. Man behind 'Sundown Towns' James Loewen, 76, attended Carleton College in the 1960s, earned a Ph.D. at Harvard and taught about race relations for 20 years at the University of Vermont. Growing up near Phoenix, Smith said her familys friends called them the Huxtables, a reference to the upper-middle class black family of The Cosby Show. She feels her parents, and the high standards they set, prepared her well for her current life: If anybody was going to come to Anna, God picked somebody that had the right credentials to be able to come here, she said. But after hearing A-N-N-A said aloud that night, I realized my race made me a sort of insider, too. What a bunch of manure. Hello, people of Illinois and people not of Illinois: Im heading north on the Amtrak Lincoln Service from Springfield to Chicago. @Anonymous I didn't use the term 'colored people'. I talked with public officials, historians and longtime residents. He purposely listed towns with few Black people in past Census because he says that is a great starting point. I love mapping. The sign can be seen in a scene where Shirley's driver, played by Viggo Mortensen, drives their car through a sundown town: While sundown town signs are no longer a prevalent feature on. To advertise their actions, the towns sometimes posted sundown signs on the highway or in the railroad station. Cicero had such a reputationin the late 1960s that civil rights marches were held there on the subject of housing discrimination. Things do change. 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. 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