“By 1970, exclusion was so complete that fewer than 500 black families lived in white suburban neighborhoods in the entire metropolitan Chicago area.” James W. Loewen, “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism” (2005)
Most famous for “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” first published in 1995, James W. Loewen in the 1970s had a textbook turned down by Mississippi educators on the grounds that it was too controversial. Sundown towns, Loewen discovered, existed from Maine to California, including the Hoosier state. Sometimes the discrimination was blatant, and in Southern Indiana it was not uncommon for motorists to come across signs crudely addressed to African-Americans, warning, “Don’t let the sun go down on you.” Jews and other minority groups sometimes encountered similar hostility when attempting to move into suburban communities.
Indiana Humanities kicked off a ten-city film series tour (on March 6 the venue will be at IUN’s Bergland Auditorium) at Valparaiso University by showing two documentaries of particular interest to me, “From Sundown to Sunrise” by Pat Wisniewski (left) and Tom Desch and “Larry from Gary” by Miller resident and Columbia College professor Dan Rybicky (below). I sat with Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette, who introduced me to two VU students connected with the Welcome Project and Jon Hendricks, VU director of photography, whose wife Becca works for IUN in University Advancement. A large crowd was on hand, including former Post-Trib columnist Jeff Manes, a good friend whom I hadn’t seen in over a year, IUN Vice Chancellor John Novak, and Katherine Arfken, a Performing Arts professor who knew Pat Wisniewski from when she was an IUN student. Once a steelworker, Wisniewski returned to school in her 40s and graduated in 2009. She and Jeff Manes collaborated on “Everglades of the North” (about the Kankakee March) and she worked with Lee Botts in producing “Shifting Sands” (about efforts to save the dunes). I'm in it, and when people tell me they saw me on TV, I'm fairly certain that's why.
“From Sundown to Sunset” told the story of the Cotton family becoming the first African Americans to live in Valparaiso. They were residing in Chicago’s segregated housing project Cabrini Green, where close to 15,000 African Americans lived, when the met Walt and Loie Reiner. A navy veteran and former VU football coach, Walt had moved his family to Chicago after founing a group called Prince of Peace Volunteers interested in working with Cabrini Green residents. Four years later, when the Reiners prepared to move back to Valparaiso Robert’s mother expressed regret that her family couldn’t do so as well, it became the Reiners’ mission to make that happen. When realtors refused to deal with the Cottons, the Reiners arranged for volunteers to construct a house for them near their own. As a result, both families received death threats and other forms of harassment. Volunteers guarded the Cotton home at night for over a year. Appearing on the film, Robert Cotton, who was 12 at the time of the move, recalled her sister being fearful upon spotting a stranger lurking outside their home and his deciding, bare-chested, to guard the door with a machete in his hand. Cotton went on to graduate from VU, and there’s a clip of him speaking to students in Allison Schuette’s class. In 2015 residents elected Cotton to the Valparaiso City Council; he was re-elected in 2019. The film ends with him first being sworn in and his mother wiping tears from her eyes as he recited the oath.
above, Reiners; below, Robert Cotton
Larry Brewer
Renaldo Maurice
“Larry from Gary” highlights teacher Larry Brewer’s efforts to teach dance to young people despite great obstacles. Brewer graduated from Gary’s Horace Mann High School and taught for 35 years at Emerson School for the Visual and Performing Arts, which closed down last year. Brewer is interviewed outside the ruins of Horace Mann, where as a student he participated in a demonstration on behalf of Martin Luther King Day becoming a national holiday, inside the ruins of City Methodist Church’s Seaman Hall, where he once performed, and at the two former sites of defunct Emerson School. He’s seen working with dancers, and the film includes performances by former students, including Reginald Maurice, who went on to study at Juilliard School and dance with the prestigious Alvin Ailey Company. I was pleased to see Larry, sitting in front of me, be greeted by numerous well-wishers. A few years ago, he directed a program at the old Miller School that grandson James participated in, learning hip hop dance moves.
A third film showed the tremendous effort it took to put out a small-town paper. It reminded me of the Chesterton Tribune, in existence since 1882 and performing a vital community service. It’s probably destined to survive, if at all, as an online publication. At intermission IUN performing arts professor Kathy Arfken greeted me warmly. Sensing I was trying to place, she said that, inspired by former colleague Anne Balay’s example, she recently decided to let her hair go naturally white. It looks great. We talked about photography professor Gary Wilk, who retired a few years ago. I told her we used to party with him during the 1970s when artist Larry Kaufman was his mentor.
It was harsher, more anarchic and, in a way, more hedonistic than its better-known progenitor. There was none of the philosophical posturing, little of the youthful idealism. If a Fonda was admired, it was not Jane (who was despised even by the antiwar veterans) but brother Peter and his motorcycle. Steel workers didn’t “experiment” with drugs; they used them; they weren’t searching for illumination, just escape.
They tended to favor the wilder fringes of rock music, disdaining the existential angst of Simon and Garfunkel for the less subtle pleasure of Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad. They grew their hair long (and left it that way, long after most of the campus radicals returned to the fold and discovered the 25-dollar hairstyling parlor), and they began using some of the words they’d heard on television: the police became the “pigs,” the factory bosses the “establishment,” and “party” became a verb as well as a noun. Their rage was diffuse; they weren’t rebelling against their parents so much as the utter dreariness of factory life itself. Those who talked revolution were mostly interested in tearing the old mess down.
David Rubenstein included an interview with A. Scott Berg, author of “Lindbergh,” in his new book “The American Story.” “Lucky Lindy” was the world’s first mega-hero after his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic at age 25. Previously, he’d performed dare-devil feats, including wing walking and parachute jumping, as a barnstorming pilot and survived close calls delivering mail between Chicago and St. Louis. Berg claims that Lindbergh turned down all endorsement offers upon his triumphant return from Europe and that in 1929 the shy Minnesotan and his bride Anne Morrow were virgins on thei wedding night. They went on to have six children, the eldest who was abducted from his crib and killed. Between 1958 and 1967, unbeknownst to his wife or author Berg until after his biography was completed, Lindbergh fathered seven children by three German women. Because he was an isolationist prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt rejected his efforts to serve in World War II. Nonetheless, Lindbergh advised American pilots in the Pacific and with General Douglas MacArthur’s blessing flew on 50 combat missions. Somewhat of a racist, he was no doubt more comfortable fighting Japanese than Germans.
Since IUN only carried Elizabeth Keckley’s “Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House” as an ebook, Anne Koehler ordered it for me inter-library loan. A copy arrived from VU that contained an informative foreword by historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I was most interested in Keckley’s relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln, for whom she made over a dozen dresses and became a close companion of the First Lady. After publication of the book, Keckley was criticized for revealing White House secrets, but the anecdotes were tame compared to present-day gossip. Mary Todd Lincoln was very suspicious of the men around her husband, in particular Salmon Chase and William Seward. When Lincoln was about to appoint Andrew Johnson military governor of Tennessee, she told him, according to Keckley, “He is a demagogue and if you place him in power, mark my words, you will rue it some day.” She also detested generals George McClellan as a “humbug” and Grant as “an obstinate fool and a butcher.” She was uncomfortable with Abe interacting with comely women during social engagements. One story has Mary telling the President prior to a reception not to flirt with the ladies and saying, “You know well enough, Mr. Lincoln, that I do not approve of your flirtations with silly women, just as if you were a beardless boy, fresh from school.”
