General
This is an opinion column.
“Didja see the hitching post outside?”
I’d never been asked that before. Never. And I’m from Oklahoma, which is why I’m familiar with hitching posts. Even if I’ve never used one to park a horse.
It wasn’t a trick question, I presumed because the questioner was wearing a cowboy hat. A nice one, I could quickly tell. I’m from Oklahoma.
I presumed he was serious, too, because I was in Cullman.
It was my first time there. First time in the city — the capital of Cullman County — less than an hour north of Birmingham, where I’ve lived now for almost 11 years. But I never went to Cullman.
Never went because, frankly, Black people didn’t go to Cullman. That’s what I was told in whispers and head shakes as I settled in after living in New York for more than three decades.
Cullman? Nah.
Because it was once a “sundown” town, they’d say.
I was only peripherally familiar with the term, to be frank. Even being a history junkie. Even being from Oklahoma, which supposedly had sundown towns, too.
I quickly learned its dark truth: Black people weren’t to be in “sundown” towns after the protection of sunlight faded beyond the horizon. Not in the middle of the 20th century when Jim Crow legal segregation, vile racial hatred and lynchings were at their peak.
But not even now, I was told in whispers and head shakes.
Nah.
Being from Oklahoma — from Tulsa, many of you know — I’m familiar with the ugliest vestiges of segregation’s darkest truths. With its indignities and crimes. My youth was in the last days of legal segregation, so I saw some things.
My dad and I once stopped at one of those drive-ins where they hung a tray from your window so you could eat in your car. A woman brought the food out in a bag but no tray. “You can’t eat here,” she said (or something close). Dad paid for the food, opened the bag to ensure the order was correct, then held it out the window and dumped the food at the woman’s feet. Then we left.
I was too young to know why he did what he did. Only later did it make sense: Proud Black men only had so many ways to confront Jim Crow’s knee on their neck. That was dad’s way.
My mother and other Black women in Tulsa were forced to put tissues inside hats before trying them on in downtown department stores. Try on clothes? They couldn’t do that at all.
This and much worse happened throughout the country in the years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made segregation illegal in public spaces. Though, according to generations of lore among Black families, laws didn’t matter after sundown in some cities throughout the South.
Don’t get caught in those “sundown” towns after the sun falls below the horizon. Or you might be caught dead.
This horrid warning was shared by elders, passed down to their children and then to theirs. Passed down to keep them safe.
Whether still containing a nugget of truth, or not.
Late last year, Cullman, founded by five German families in 1873, saw its history stirred up in a blaring TikTok video that skewered Southern Living’s designation of it as one of the “cutest Christmas towns in the South” and “the perfect small town.” Well, that’s an impossibly high bar.
Other TikTok users (not all, though) jumped in defending the city. When AL.com shared a story about the Southern Living kudo on Facebook, commenters were split on whether its ‘sundown’ rep lingered.
Social media banter around Birmingham was primarily among Blacks too young to have ever choked on the stench of segregation or hit the gas to cross the city line before dark. Some commenters were defiant, owning the right to protect themselves (read: open carry) just like everyone else. Others were kindred to those who whispered and shook their heads.
Nah. I’m good.
I decided to go.
Dr. Joy DeGruy calls it “post-traumatic slave syndrome” (P.T.S.S.). That’s the title of her 2005 book, which describes it as “a condition that exists as a consequence of multigenerational oppression of Africans and their descendants resulting from centuries of chattel slavery.”
I call it generational trauma — the curse of fears passed down from our ancestors, fears that too often breathe far longer than they deserve to live. So long that they become self-diminishing, preventing us from entering spaces we have every right to be in, all because our ancestors once feared those spaces.
Either P.T.S.S. or generational trauma explains why some Black folks still won’t enter Cullman.
Not me.
Truth is, sundown towns are enticing lore borne of the racial intimidation that rose from the ashes of the Civil War. In his 2005 book Sundown Towns, A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, the late historian and sociologist James W. Loewen, mentions Cullman among dozens of cities in the south and in northern states reputed to be sundown towns or incubators to the vestiges of the pervasive racism of the late 1800s through, well, who knows when?
Cullman’s rep is largely based on the believed existence of a sign either at the city border or the railroad tracks (could have been one and the same) warning Blacks (not the term used): “… don’t let the sun set behind your back.”
Well, there’s no physical (or even photographic) proof the sign was real – though it was very real in the hearts and minds of many, whites and Blacks told of the sign by their elders.
Former Alabama House Speaker Rep. Tom Drake, who grew up in Cullman County and died in 2017, once told the Tuscaloosa News his parents and grandparents saw the signs: “I have no doubt about the signs,” he said.
Interestingly, Loewen didn’t mention the signs in his book. He did note, though, that a very real feeling of unwelcomeness in Cullman helped spur the birth of Colony, Alabama, just a few miles away.
Many formerly enslaved Blacks were given land in the area deemed too rocky to be fertile as “compensation,” Wallace State Community College history professor Robert Davis told NPR. Yet they transformed the land into fertile farms. Other Blacks were also lured to work in the fertile coal mines discovered there in the early 1900s.
Over decades, Colony grew into a clone of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street. “African-Americans from all over the state would move to the Colony. It was like Harlem was to New York or Ensley was to Birmingham,” Davis said. “The Black community in Cullman County owned more land than any other community.”
Some Colony residents, Leowen wrote, worked during the day in Cullman as domestics and such but made sure to leave town before dark.
Earlene Johnson, one of Colony’s oldest residents and once its mayor, told NPR: “Blacks were afraid to come through Cullman, even on the trains. And they would pull the shades down when they rolled through Cullman.”
Cullman is still white-white, with just 1% of its 20,000 residents being Black. The city wasn’t helped, either four years ago when the white son of school board president Amy Carter appeared on a vile 11-second video spewing “white power” and “kill all the n—–s” that was shot by another white student and shared for a good Snapchat chuckle.
I decided to go. With my wife. We were going to visit Cullman and stay after sundown.
Let’s be real: There’s not a whole lot to do in Cullman. It’s as “small town” as small towns get, which is not at all a knock.
We began our visit at Ave Maria Grotto at St. Barnard Abbey, a fascinating outdoor display of 125 small stone-and-cement-and-whatnot creations from the hands of Brother Joseph Zoetl, a monk at the Abbey in 1961.
Okay, so strolling through a popular art exhibit — and buying a loaf of the monks’ abbey-made raisin bread, which is sinfully good — isn’t exactly diving headfirst into the deep-end of Cullman. We stayed there, walking through the cemetery on the grounds where the Abbey’s monks, including Brother Joseph, are buried.
Stayed there long enough for the sun to fall below the horizon.
“Well, here we are,” I said to my wife. She didn’t laugh.
Here’s the dive: We rolled into the city’s most popular restaurant — All Steak. On a Friday night. Without a reservation. (That’ll get you run out of just about any city.)
The two young people at the host station were pleasant, telling us there’d be about a 30-minute wait. We asked if there was a bar where we could wait. There was, right through the door across the dining room.
There were a few glances as my wife and I walked through. Pleasant glances, but glances, nonetheless. Movie scene well, well, well glances.
As we made our way to two empty seats at the bar, one of the bartenders looked up. She was Black. I don’t know who was more surprised, her or us.
Suddenly, it was a fam reunion. Of a sort. In the room, the three of us were still the one percent.
We decided to eat at the bar since the kitchen serviced it and the dining room. Before long we were chatting with an anesthesiologist, his wife and son next to us. (Also from Birmingham, alas, they were vacationing at nearby Smith Lake.) Others at the bar were as friendly as you’d want. One guy even shared his dozen oysters on the half-shell with us.
Our meals were great and the bartenders were geniuses.
“Didja see the hitching post outside?”
Cowboy Hat was the “mayor” of the bar cast, a regular, as were many there. He owned a few horses (showed me a picture) and sometimes rode one to All-Steak, though not on this night. I was in Cullman.
Generational trauma and P.T.S.S. are very real for many, but we should not shut ourselves from anyplace, anywhere, merely because it shunned our ancestors. History isn’t destiny unless we allow it to be, unless we don’t turn the page.
We’ll go back — and stay well past sundown.
Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at rjohnson@al.com, and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.
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