I don’t usually write diaries in response to other diaries, but in his case, I also had seen this xwitter post and found it intriguing.
“so I’ve been noticing a troubling pattern. where Donald Trump has been holding his rallies the last few weeks has been egregious. Howell, Michigan. Lacrosse, Wisconsin. Johnstown, Pennsylvania — now what do these places have in common? they’re all sundown towns. this is where Donald Trump is choosing to hold his rallies. sundown towns. they want to go back to fuckin’ Dred Scott. make America great again. when was America ever great? you got a presidential candidate for the GOP doing a sundown town tour around the country. not looking for political gain. he’s fuckin’ rallying the troops. these crybaby bitches want nothing but a civil war again. make no mistake about it, folks, this is a real threat. these motherfuckers are domestic terrorists and they need to be treated accordingly.”
And I was going to write about it, but [since I care very f-ing deeply about accuracy] I first wanted to confirm what was being claimed. I just hadn’t done it yet.
Now I have.
Here's a scene from the horror show Lovecraft Country that explains exactly what a Sundown Town is. Vicerally. Not all the monsters have fangs and claws.
If you haven’t seen this series, they do make it out of the county in time and without speeding.
But the next county over is also a Sundown County and the officer radioed ahead so there are more officers waiting for them at the county line.
Using this historical list of Sundown Towns by state, I compared it to a list of Trump’s Rally locations and it is true that of his last two rallies at Johnstown, PA, La Crosse, WI and his next city Mosinee, Wi — Howell, MI was not on the wiki list of rallies but he did do a rally there— that those 4 cities were indeed all former Sundown Towns.
It’s also notable that Trump had previously done a rally in Tulsa Oklahoma, the site of one of the nation’s worst Racial Massacres on the anniversary of Juneteenth.
Donald Trump is facing a growing outcry for choosing to hold his first election rally during the coronavirus pandemic in Tulsa, Oklahoma – the scene of one of the worst race massacres in US history in 1921.
The rally will also be held on 19 June – known as “Juneteenth” – the anniversary of the day in 1865 when a general read out Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in Texas, freeing slaves in the last un-emancipated state.
The decision to hold the rally in Tulsa in the midst of nationwide protests over racist violence and discrimination, triggered by the police killing of George Floyd, has been criticised as all the more incendiary for the widely understood historic symbolism of the Tulsa race massacre in which up to 300 black Americans were killed by white mobs.
So intentionally or not, he’s not about to avoid some pretty serious racial insensitivity.
Then again, there was the time that he had a rally in Waco, TX on the anniversary of the infamous deadly Branch Davidian raid.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Former President Donald Trump picking Waco, Texas, for the first rally of his 2024 campaign Saturday will put him in the middle of a big Republican state that has reliably delivered him big crowds.
It will also put him not far from the grassy prairie where a standoff in 1993 between U.S. law enforcement and Branch Davidians infamously resulted in the deaths of more than 80 members of the religious cult and four federal agents.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the siege, which continues to hold deep symbolism and is still viewed by survivors of the compound as an act of unwarranted government intrusion.
Trump, who is facing the possibility of becoming the first president in U.S. history to be indicted, hasn’t nodded to Waco’s past since first announcing the rally last week. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the decision to hold the event at Waco’s regional airport was ideal because the city was “centrally located and close” to some of Texas’ largest cities.
Trump has also used terms with a racial history to describe the prosecutors — many of whom happen to be black — who have been prosecuting him.
NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s aggressive response to his fourth criminal indictment in five months follows a strategy he has long used against legal and political opponents: relentless attacks, often infused with language that is either overtly racist or is coded in ways that appeal to racists.
The early Republican presidential front-runner has used terms such as “animal” and “rabid” to describe Black district attorneys. He has accused Black prosecutors of being “racist.” He has made unsupported claims about their personal lives. And on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump has deployed terms that rhyme with racial slurs as some of his supporters post racist screeds about the same targets.
So it could be said that, whether deliberately or not, Trump does have a bit of a racial and social history of having his rallies at some fairly controversial sites.
But as I looked through the list what I also noticed is that there were approximately 250 of these cities in Wisconsin. There were 79 of them in Michigan and 49 of them in Pennsylvania. This is not exactly as uncommon as people might assume, particularly in the North where they still had racial animus against blacks but they didn’t have Slave Patrols in place to keep their black population “under control.”
When one thinks about policing in early America, there are a few images that may come to mind: A county sheriff enforcing a debt between neighbors, a constable serving an arrest warrant on horseback, or a lone night watchman carrying a lantern through his sleeping town. These organized practices were adapted to the colonies from England and formed the foundations of American law enforcement. However, there is another significant origin of American policing that we cannot forget—and that is slave patrols.
The American South relied almost exclusively on slave labor and white Southerners lived in near constant fear of slave rebellions disrupting this economic status quo. As a result, these patrols were one of the earliest and most prolific forms of early policing in the South. The responsibility of patrols was straightforward—to control the movements and behaviors of enslaved populations. According to historian Gary Potter, slave patrols served three main functions.
“(1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside the law.”[i]
Organized policing was one of the many types of social controls imposed on enslaved African Americans in the South. Physical and psychological violence took many forms, including an overseer’s brutal whip, the intentional breakup of families, deprivation of food and other necessities, and the private employment of slave catchers to track down runaways.
Slave patrols were no less violent in their control of African Americans; they beat and terrorized as well. Their distinction was that they were legally compelled to do so by local authorities. In this sense, it was considered a civic duty—one that in some areas could result in a fine if avoided. In others, patrollers received financial compensation for their work.
In the south, it was essentially redundant to declare an area as a “Sundown Town” because the entire State was a Sundown Town which was largely enforced by the Slave Patrols.
But in the North, there are so many former Sundown Towns in some of these states it could have been simply a coincidence that Trump had rallies there. Particularly in Wisconsin, it would frankly be more notable to NOT have a rally in a former Sundown Town.
For example I looked up California and they had 104 cities on their list including Inglewood, Compton, Torrance, Santa Ana, Hawthone and Manhattan Beach.
This is from the detailed entry for Inglewood (Note the N-word is used here, I’m just quoting).
When Inglewood broke in the 1960s, there was rapid white flight out of the town. It is now racially mixed.
“I grew up in Inglewood. The KKK was active there in the 1920s and apparently the city had ano rdinance which placed an 8 pm curfew on blacks. The city was certainly virtually all white when I lived there in the late 40s and the 50s.”
“I was born in Los Angeles, and raised near Inglewood. I strongly recall my father telling me that his sister lived in Inglewood, and no Negroes were allowed to own property within the area of Inglewood.This would be about 1948 or so.”
“When my sister graduated from Inglewood High School in 1957 there was not one Afro American, not one. The interesting irony is that the community is now about 90% black, maybe higher. When she was in high school the Town had signs posted that said that “all blacks (or maybe it said negroes) must be out of town by sunset”. When I asked my father (who is and was a racist) what that sign meant, he said that the city wanted to keep “those niggers” out of this nice, clean town. One of his favorite sayings was “you give a nigger a inch and they will take a mile” I heard this statement over and over during my childhood. It upset me then, as it does now.”
Sometimes we forget just how racism was openly displayed over much of this nation just a few decades ago.
Getting back to Trump, what I saw wasn’t a Sundown town was Butler, PA where someone tried to shoot Trump on July 13th.
Checking against the previous 10 cities that Trump has visited.
- Glendale, AZ
- Asheboro, NC
- Wilkes-Barre, PA
- Ashville, NC
- Bozeman, MT
- Atlanta, GA
- Harrisburg, PA
- St. Cloud, MN
- Charlotte, NC
- Grand Rapids, MI
I found that none of these cities appear on the Sundown Town list.
So if we’re going to try if we’re going to try and make the argument that has sought these towns out on purpose, we’re going to need more than just a few recent examples in states where there plenty of these types of cities.
For example, because it was a slave state and there were lots of black people living there as a result of the slave trade Georgia actually only has a few former Sundown Towns. (Although some of them are listed as only “Possibly” Sundown towns, and most of them are entire Counties)
What you don’t see here is Fulton County which includes Atlanta Georgia. Trump had a rally there on August 3rd.
I am not someone who normally defends or makes any excuses for Trump, but before we go out and try and make a case that Trump has a “habit” of deliberately placing his rallies at Sundown towns, I think we’re going to need more than 4 examples out of the 20 rallies that he’s scheduled for this year.
Let's keep an eye on this and see if he continues in this vein. It wasn't a habit of his earlier this year — but maybe it is now.
