Vidor, Texas--a Sundown Town--can't shake its past
THE only thing that’s black and white in the book is the color of the photographs,” said Billy Hartman, a 37-year-old lifelong resident of this small town. “You couldn’t get anything out of the book as being prejudiced.”
Not all of Mr. Hartman’s neighbors are inclined to agree.
The book is “Rough Beauty.” The photographer is Dave Anderson, a former communications aide in the Clinton White House and “MTV Choose or Lose” tour manager. And the town is Vidor, population 11,440, whose labyrinthine back roads spread out from Interstate 10, about an hour and a half east of Houston.
The 2000 Census listed eight black residents in Vidor, or one-tenth of 1 percent of the population. It was the scene of a 1993 protest against an attempt to integrate a local housing project, and it is the hometown of James Byrd Jr., a black man who, the day after he moved out of Vidor, was dragged to his death in nearby Jasper. The town has a mystique both nationally and locally as a surviving bastion of the Ku Klux Klan. There hasn’t been a racially motivated incident in Vidor in years, yet when it’s mentioned, many Houston residents still respond with warnings, concern and jokes about white hoods....
Vidor, as the sociologist Jim Loewen, author of “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,” said, is a town that “takes the heat” for what he found to be many other racially charged towns in Texas and the rest of America.
Vidor is well aware of its reputation. Residents were generally wary of a reporter’s approaches, and asked, invariably, if the resulting article would finally be the one to show Vidor’s good side. They were tired of misrepresentation, they said....
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Not all of Mr. Hartman’s neighbors are inclined to agree.
The book is “Rough Beauty.” The photographer is Dave Anderson, a former communications aide in the Clinton White House and “MTV Choose or Lose” tour manager. And the town is Vidor, population 11,440, whose labyrinthine back roads spread out from Interstate 10, about an hour and a half east of Houston.
The 2000 Census listed eight black residents in Vidor, or one-tenth of 1 percent of the population. It was the scene of a 1993 protest against an attempt to integrate a local housing project, and it is the hometown of James Byrd Jr., a black man who, the day after he moved out of Vidor, was dragged to his death in nearby Jasper. The town has a mystique both nationally and locally as a surviving bastion of the Ku Klux Klan. There hasn’t been a racially motivated incident in Vidor in years, yet when it’s mentioned, many Houston residents still respond with warnings, concern and jokes about white hoods....
Vidor, as the sociologist Jim Loewen, author of “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,” said, is a town that “takes the heat” for what he found to be many other racially charged towns in Texas and the rest of America.
Vidor is well aware of its reputation. Residents were generally wary of a reporter’s approaches, and asked, invariably, if the resulting article would finally be the one to show Vidor’s good side. They were tired of misrepresentation, they said....