In an America struggling over questions of race, the AP Road Trip team goes to a Midwestern town where so much is left unspoken, examining an open secret of racial segregation that spilled across much of America.
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-race-and-ethnicity-violence-db28a9aaa3b800d91b65dc11a6b12c4c
But in Vienna, as in hundreds of mostly white towns with similar histories across America, much is left unspoken. Around here, almost no one talks openly about the violence that drove out Black residents nearly 70 years ago, or even whispers the name these places were given: “sundown towns.”“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.
Very often, especially in well-to-do suburbs that didn’t want to be known as racist, they had no name at all. But they still kept out Black residents. There were hundreds of such towns, scholars say, reaching from New York to Oregon. Perhaps thousands. “It was something that was known,” said James Davis, 27, a Black truck driver from the nearby town of Cairo, which is largely Black. “But also something that our parents taught us growing up.”
“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, whose grandmother gently pulled her back from the confrontation with the angry older man, isn’t surprised that Vienna’s white residents don’t see racial issues around them. The situation is far more subtle today than when Black residents were forced out.
A few weeks after his arrest, Latham escaped from jail. Dozens of armed men took to the streets of Vienna and the surrounding fields, backed up by bloodhounds and spotters in low-flying planes. A couple of blocks from the field where Vienna’s Black community once lived, down a narrow dead-end street, a grandmother with pink fingernails and an easy laugh watches over an extended family that spans much of America’s Black-white divide.“It’s our sanctuary,” Maribeth Harris said of the street. One of her daughters lives next door. Another lives across the street with her boyfriend, Nicholas Lewis.
“We want to get out of here,” she said. “We have to figure out what’s good for them. And Vienna won’t be good for them.” “That’s what formed this nation!,” said Rick Warren, a 65-year-old in blue jeans and a T-shirt, only partially joking. “’Gunsmoke’ and John Wayne!” Then there’s former President Barack Obama, who speaks regularly about his white mother from Kansas and his Black father from Kenya, but who personally identifies as Black.
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