It’s all about power and wealth.

Was sundown town in 1920s; John Gehm, Bringing it Home (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1984), tells how it desegregated c. 1970.

David Mitchell’s article, “A Struggled Balance of Hope and Fear,” in Valparaiso Times, 6/29/2003 includes remembrances from Barbara Frazier-Cotton that she “began sleeping with the lights and television on to dissuade would-be intruders. For nearly a year, she slept in her clothes to save time in case they needed to leave in a hurry.” “To help her, Valparaiso University students set up night patrols outside the house.”

“The phone rang often in the middle of the night. ‘Go home,’ the voice on the other end would say. ‘You don’t belong here.’” “Many Valparaiso University students befriended the family. Others in the city also accepted Frazier Cotton into the community.” She earned her BA from Valparaiso. All of her surviving children are successful. Her stepson was killed, ten years after she arrived, an unsolved murder from a vehicle, and the family moved back to Chicago.

The KKK tried to buy Valparaiso U. in the 1920s. Valparaiso U. was in financial trouble. During a huge KKK rally in Kokomo, 7/4/1923, the KKK bought the college, but never came up with the money. Atlanta didn’t want to pay for Stephenson’s project, apparently. So in 1925 Lutherans bought it. Valparaiso University purchase failed either because of some clause in the original charter that prevented it, or because Evans refused to commit funds to Stephenson’s purchase.

The Pittsburgh Courier wrote on 9/15/1923: “K. K. K. Decides It Won’t Take Over Valparaiso U.” “Negotiations for purchase of Valparaiso University by the Ku Klux Klan have been dropped, because of technicalities in the charter and deeds of the university.”

See Lance Trusty, “All Talk and No ‘Kash,’” IN Magazine of History, 82 #1 (3/86), 19, 21; and Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan (Berkeley: U CA P, 1991), 213.

An Indiana resident remembered that her mother attended Valparaiso University in Valparaiso IN. She’s always told hert that, in the late 1940s, two of her fellow classmates were required to carry a note from the Valparaiso mayor if they ventured off the campus after sunset. The note gave them permission to be in town. These classmates were African Americans.

One of the first two blacks to attend Valparaiso disputed having to use a pass, but stated:

“Initially, we were scheduled to register in September, 1946. Our minister at the time, the late Rev. Joseph G. Lavalais, received a call from the president, the late Dr. O. P. Kretzmann, to inquire if Barbara and I were black. In response to Dr. Lavalais’s reply, Dr. Kretzmann advised that we would have to postpone our date of registration…. We did not register for classes until February, 1947. The reason for the delay is included in the following explanation: A section of the Valparaiso City Charter stated that ‘No blacks were allowed to sleep in Valparaiso overnight.’ Therefore, there would have to be a meeting of the city council to change that ruling.”

In the twentieth century Valparaiso and Morgantown, Indiana, were sundown towns complete with billboards; John Gehm wrote a graphic account of how Valparaiso finally desegregated around 1970. See John Gehm, Bringing it Home (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1984).

Valparaiso and Porter County had no blacks in the 1960s. Porter County gave Wallace 60% of its vote in 1964. Anstice Travers, black woman, moved to Valparaiso in about 1969. Others then followed. A family member was shot, and KKK crosses were burned.

Valparaiso had had a billboard, put up by the Klan at the city limits, “”NIGGERS OUT BY SUNDOWN” back in the twenties that had stood for some years.” (Gehm p. 94) “On more than one occasion, officials from V U had had to come down to the jail to pick up a Negro student who had wandered downtown after dark. Even as late as 1960, a representative from the school felt it necessary to contact all of the downtown merchants – and the police – to let them know that the university was going to be hosting some exchange students from Nigeria.” (p. 96)

“Between 1915 and 1944 the Ku Klux Klan had a greater memberhsip in Indiana than in any other state in the country.” “A Fourth of July rally of the Indiana Klan in 1920 drew over 100,000.” Nearly half a million statewide. (Gehm p. 96)

A black man who fought in the Civil War lived in Rochester, and other former soldiers provided his funeral and headstone in 1905. At the time there were only three families of blacks living in Rochester, and another single black man.

The KKK membership in Fulton County was significant.

Blacks visiting Rochester were not allowed in hotels or restaurants, including the famed Harlem Globe Trotters in 1945.

An Indiana resident remembered Rochester as a sundown town, and that even in the 1980s, blacks lived outside the city limits.

It is not clear whether Rochester was sundown; perhaps not quite.

I’m not ready to go deep into the weeds on Siun’s thread. Now into episode 2 of WW. What I would give to have that govt.!!!!

and bev–it’s been 10 years already????? man.

and i see what you mean at 97, but if you are using or applying something, you are keeping it ’alive’…….a dead document to me means it is no longer relevant or pertinent or being used, and seems a strange thing to say if you swear to uphold it, and it is ’dead’ in that framework……makes it an easy oath i guess.

that’s why i said, oh, makes sense…..but didn’t add makes sense, what they’re doing on the court./s

and my calico sunshine goes mewww ow…easy going, lays on my foot while i’m on the computer..

and ellie meows allll the time all different ways, a communicator, when she wants something, like outside, or inside, she sounds like a kitten, so of course i do it. when i won’t let her out, cuz i’m leaving or something, she gets mad and goes and opens the coat closet, flipping the door stop till it opens, glares at me, goes in there and sleeps.