When Signs Said 'Get Out'

James W. Loewen, author of "Sundown Towns," says he found reports of thousands of such places. (Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post)

In 1922, when college students in Norman, Okla., hired a black jazz band to play at a dance one night, a white mob carrying guns and nooses attacked the dance hall.

"Negroes are occasionally seen on the streets of Norman in the daytime, but the 'rule' that they leave at night is strictly enforced," the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, a black newspaper, reported, and noted, "Several other Oklahoma towns have similar customs."

Among those other towns was Marlow, Okla. In 1923, a mob killed a Marlow hotel owner and the black man he'd hired as a janitor. The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, reported:

"Marlow's unwritten law, exemplified by prominent public signs bearing the command: 'Negro, don't let the sun go down on you here,' caused the death Monday night of A.W. Berch, prominent hotel owner, and the fatal wounding of Robert Jernigan, the first colored man who stayed here more than a day in years. Marlow, one of the several towns in Oklahoma which has not allowed our people to settle in their vicinity for years, has abided by the custom of permitting no members of the race to remain there after nightfall."

Nearly 40 years later, in 1962, black rocker Fats Domino played a gig in Rogers, Ark., and the Rogers Daily News ran a front-page editorial congratulating the town on its tolerance:

"The city which once had signs posted at the city limits and at the bus and rail terminals boasting 'Nigger, You Better Not Let the Sun Set on You in Rogers,' was hosting its first top name entertainer -- a Negro -- at night!"

Loewen found references to sundown signs in newspaper articles, memoirs and local histories as well as several works of American literature -- Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending," William Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions."

The stories are invariably grim and depressing. Except for one.

That one was told by Herbert Aptheker, a pioneer of African American history, author of the seven-volume "A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States." But it's not a story Aptheker uncovered. It's a story he lived. He told it to the Los Angeles Times in 1994, nine years before he died in 2003 at 87.

It happened during World War II, when Aptheker, a white Jewish Communist from New York, commanded a group of black solders stationed at an Army base near Pollock, La., a town with a nasty sundown sign.

As part of their training, the soldiers were required to complete a 25-mile march. Aptheker and a black sergeant decided to march through Pollock -- at midnight.

"It was all arranged by the men," Aptheker recalled. "As we approached Pollock around midnight . . . we all began singing 'John Brown's Body' at the top of our voices -- a hundred black men with rifles and one crazy white man in front with a pistol."

Telling the story, Aptheker burst out laughing.

That might be the only comic moment in the long, grim history of sundown towns.