With deep reporting and creative visual storytelling, an AP all-formats team captures the lingering racial divide in a southern Illinois ‘sundown town.’
Many white Americans have likely never heard of “sundown towns,” where Black people were forbidden to go after dark. So Tim Sullivan, Maye-E Wong and Noreen Nasir visited one such Midwest town on the second stop in AP’s “Looking for America” series, to see how it is faring in a year marked by racial protests across the nation. Their multiformat package is in fact an examination of the larger issue of systemic racism that is obvious to some people but invisible to others.
The team ended up in Vienna, Illinois, thanks to a confluence of factors. Minneapolis-based enterprise reporter Sullivan found the town’s story referenced in a book, then dug into newspaper reports from the 1950s, when racial violence erupted and the town’s Black community was driven out. A scholar put him in contact with a local high school teacher and sometime historian who knew more of the history.
While there is no longer a rule against Black people in Vienna after dark, the habit persists for many out of fear and tradition. Of some 1,434 people in Vienna, only 16 were Black or biracial in the 2010 census. The journalists’ earliest hurdle was meeting people of color in the community.
During an initial visit, the team could find no one, but Chicago video journalist Nasir eventually found a source. Sullivan reached out and learned there had been a recent racial incident at the high school and a Black Lives Matter-type protest was planned. Through the organizers, he found Black residents and white relatives of biracial kids, but they would speak only off the record because they feared community reaction. To fully tell the story, the team needed Black or biracial people who would speak about their life in the small southern Illinois town.
Nicholas Lewis holds son, Nick Jr., Sept. 27, 2020, near their home in the Vienna, Ill., once a “sundown town” where Blacks were not allowed at night. Sixteen of Vienna’s 1,434 residents were Black in the 2010 census. Lewis says: “I feel scared or just even strange going around to the store, because I know all eyes are on me.”
AP Photo / Noreen Nasir
Doris Miller 86, left, adjusts her cap after getting off the back of a motorcycle belonging to Jeff Bundren, 60, in Vienna, Ill., Aug. 2, 2020. In this deeply conservative part of southern Illinois 77% of the county voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 elections; just 19% went for Hillary Clinton.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
Doris Miller, 86, tends to her makeshift store selling Trump souvenirs in front of her home in Vienna, Ill., Aug. 2, 2020.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
Mailboxes line a street in Jonesboro, Ill., about 20 miles west of Vienna, Ill., on Rt. 146, Aug. 2, 2020.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
Victoria Vaughn, second from right, 17, a student at nearby Marion High School, poses with her grandmothers, Nancy Maxwell, second from left, and Vickie Higgins, right, and her aunt, Janae Maxwell, left, during a rally for racial justice held in support of biracial students at Vienna High School in Vienna, Ill., Sept. 27, 2020. Vaughn, who is biracial, grew up visiting Higgins in Vienna on the weekends and over the summers, and noticed people staring at her in the grocery store or when she walked around town.
AP Photo / Noreen Nasir
Takiyah Coleman 19, who organized a Black Lives Matter protest, poses at Anna City Park, Aug. 4, 2020, in Anna, Ill., once a “sundown town.”
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
Bill Stevens, 76, stands in The Gunsmoke Club in West Vienna, Ill., August 4, 2020. The clubhouse, a few miles outside Vienna, is an old gas station-turned convenience store that is now a gathering place for a dozen or so friends. It’s part workshop, part bar, part informal store.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
Donald Trump supporters, from left, Jim Rainbolt, 57; Rick Warren, 65; Bill Stevens, 76; and Roger Plott, 65, stand outside The Gunsmoke Club Tuesday, in West Vienna, Ill., Aug. 4, 2020.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
Rick Warren 65, poses for a portrait in The Gunsmoke Club in West Vienna, Ill., Aug. 4, 2020. “I’ve had Black friends. I’ve had Black babysitters. I had Black people who took care of me through my childhood,’ he said. But the easygoing race relations of his youth were lost, he said, when President Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through some of the most important civil rights legislation of the 20th century, “came along and turned it into a bunch of racial bullshit!”
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
Milton L. McDaniel Sr. attends a service at Boskydell Baptist Church in Carbondale, Ill., Aug. 2, 2020. McDaniel spent decades working as a railroad engineer in southern Illinois. He says as the only Black man on a full crew, he was often turned away from restaurants in the towns known as “sundown towns,” while his white coworkers were served.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A 1967 portrait of a Milton L. McDaniel Sr. sits on newspaper clippings and other photos of him when he was younger, in Carbondale, Ill. , Aug. 2, 2020. After graduating from high school and getting injured while playing basketball, he went to work on the railroad in southern Illinois as the only Black man on a full crew.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A dead end sign is posted on the far end of 7th Street in Vienna, Ill., Aug. 2, 2020. There was once a cluster of houses along 7th Street; everyone who lived there was Black. But the homes were burned when violence erupted in 1954 over a Black man accused in the beating death of an elderly white woman. Blacks left the small town in southern Illinois. Today, the settlement is an overgrown field.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
The sun sets over a field outside of Anna, Ill., Aug. 1, 2020. “Sundown towns” like Anna were places where Black people had to be gone by nightfall. Today, some still exist in various forms, enforced now by tradition and fear.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
The moon shines through clouds along a highway in New Columbia, Ill., near Vienna, Ill., Aug. 1, 2020.
AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
So Nasir drove down from Chicago for the protest in the hope that people demonstrating would speak openly. And they did, as Nasir connected with both demonstrators and others who agreed to be interviewed on camera.
That opened the door to telling the deeper story. But the team faced another challenge: how to capture the violence and fear Black people experienced if they were in a sundown town after dark?
As part of this visually rich project, Nasir and New York enterprise photographer Wong looked to the sky. Wong put together a slow-motion time-lapse video as the sun set one evening along a road in nearby Anna, Illinois, a well-known sundown town. She also recorded the moon rising along a dark road, capturing the story’s ominous theme. The work of conveying that theme fell to multimedia journalist Samantha Shotzbarger, who brought all the package’s elements together in a striking presentation.
The story was used widely across the U.S. and garnered more than 40,000 page views on AP social media channels.
For a probing but nuanced package that speaks to a lingering thread of systemic racism, the all-formats team of Sullivan, Nasir and Wong earns this week’s Best of the States award.
