Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (102 page)

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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83
Tillamook did have 28 African American residents in 1970, however. I have not studied race relations in Tillamook after 1970.
84
Eric Wetterling, “An Interview with Ernie de la Bretonne,” 5/4/1997, “The Tri-Cities,”
users.owt.com/rpeto/wet/tri-cities.html
, 10/2002.
85
The number of confirmed sundown towns later rose to nearly 200.
86
Joseph Lyford,
The Talk in Vandalia
(Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962),34; professor from Vandalia, 10/2002.
87
Former Granite City resident, e-mail, 10/1999; Manchester College administrator, 11/1997.
88
Stephanie Simon, “Segregation Still Strong in North,”
Los Angeles Times,
1/19/2003, reprinted in
Holland
(MI)
Sentinel,
3/30/2003,
hollandsentinel.com
, 4/2003; Daniel P. Henley Jr., “Study Says Suburbs Violate Agreement on Fair Housing,”
Milwaukee Journal,
7/11/1990.
89
One of the 34, Smith Valley, listed as unincorporated in 1970, was no longer a census town.
90
Betty Canright, e-mail, 1/2003; John Gehm,
Bringing It Home
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1984); David Mitchell, “A Struggled Balance of Hope and Fear,”
Valparaiso Times,
6/29/2003.
91
Gordon Trowbridge and Oralandar Brand-Williams, “The Past: A Policy of Exclusion,”
Detroit News,
1/14/2002, at
mumford1.dyndns.org/cen2000/othersay/detroitnews/Stories/Blacks
. . . , 7/2003.
92
Helen Harrelson, 10/2002.
93
D has no utility
within
a sundown town or suburb, because such towns are monoracial.
94
Taeuber, “Research Issues Concerning Trends in Residential Segregation,” 6; Farley and Frey, “Changes in the Segregation of Whites from Blacks During the 1980s,” 30.
95
Gary Orfield,
Public School Desegregation in the U.S., 1968–1980
(Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political Studies, 1983), 4; Simon, “Segregation Still Strong in North”; Mendell, “Midwest Housing Divide Is Still Race”; Kathryn P. Nelson,
Recent Suburbanization of Blacks
(Washington, DC: HUD Office of Economic Affairs, 1979), 13; John Logan, “Ethnic Diversity Grows, Neighborhood Integration Lags Behind,” Lewis Mumford Center, 12/18/2001, 7,
mumford1.dyndns.org/cen2000/WholePop/WPreport/page1.html
, 1/2003.
96
Ellen defines “integrated”—which I think she uses as a synonym for “racially mixed”—as 10 to 50% black. This can be problematic for cities such as Washington, D.C., or Jackson, Mississippi, both more than 60% black, or Willingboro, New Jersey, two-thirds black, for in such jurisdictions, neighborhoods that mimic the city appear “segregated.” Ironically, only if some neighborhoods are overwhelmingly black will others be white enough to appear “integrated.” To be sure, these cities’ metropolitan areas are much less than 50% black, and that is the appropriate overall area to analyze. Nevertheless, since I live in a stably integrated 80% black neighborhood, I would be happier if Ellen had widened her definition to include it.
97
Patti Becker, 7/2004; Cynthia Mills Richter, “Integrating the Suburban Dream: Shaker Heights, Ohio,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1999, 110; Ingrid Gould Ellen,
Sharing America’s Neighborhoods
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1.
98
Chevy Chase, Chevy Chase Village, Section Three, and Section Five. Note that not all nineteen were necessarily black.
99
Kenilworth native, e-mail, 12/2002; Ellen,
Sharing America’s Neighborhoods,
21; Kenilworth realtor, 10/2002.
100
America’s seven FDR towns, all sundown from the start, exemplify this unevenness. Greenbelt, Maryland, is now 41% black, while Greenhills, Ohio, is 2.6% black. Richland, Washington, the atomic town, allowed African Americans to live within its city limits in the 1950s; in 1971 it hired a black assistant city manager; and by 2000 it was 1.4% black. Greendale, Wisconsin, is just 0.3% black but does have fifteen different African American households. Boulder City, Nevada (the Hoover Dam town) had eight black households by 1998, but Norris, Tennessee (the TVA town) may still be sundown: in 2000 it had exactly one black couple and a black child. Arthurdale, West Virginia, is very small; in 2000 it had at most two male African American individuals. On Richland, see Bob Carlson, post to The Sandbox #102 (11/1/2000),
the.sandbox.tripod.com/BOXarchives/BOX2000-05.htm
, 7/2003.
101
Logan quoted in Simon, “Segregation Still Strong in North.”
102
John C.Boger, “Toward Ending Residential Segregation: A Fair Share Proposal for the Next Reconstruction,”
North Carolina Law Review 71
(1993): 1583; Nancy Denton, “Are African Americans Still Hypersegregated?” in Robert D. Bullard, et al., eds.,
Residential Apartheid
(Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, 1994), 62
103
In this sense, our thinking has not yet returned to the understanding that Republicans had reached when they passed the Civil Rights Amendments around 1868: that slavery and postslavery discrimination, not “the Negro,” was the problem.
104
Jargowsky, “Concentration of Poverty Declines in the 1990s,” 1.
105
Jackson Preparatory Academy,
jacksonprep.edu
, 5/2003.
106
Census Bureau statement on Forsyth County at Chamber of Commerce web site,
forsythchamber.org/800/community/history.php
, 1/2004.
107
Estimates of the proportion of the wealth owned by given proportions of the population differ notoriously from country to country, depending on who did them, using what methodology.
108
Anthony Faiola, “Brazil’s Elites Fly Above Their Fears.” For U.S. figure, see, inter alia, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele,
America: Who Stole the Dream?
(Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1996), 4–5, 8; Foundation for the Mid South, “The Mid South IDA Initiative, Request for Proposals,”
fndmidsouth.org/PDFs/Grant_Guidelines.pdf
, 7/2003, 2; Social Security Network, “Social Security Testimony: Balanced Capitalism,”
socsec.org/opinions/testimony/leone_capitalism.htm
, 7/2003; Institute for Washington’s Future, “Precarious Prosperity: Washington’s Economy in 1999,”
forwashington.org/pub/reports/pp-2.php
, 2,7/2003. Interestingly, income is distributed more equally in the United States, where the highest 10% of earners gets 30.5% of the income; in Brazil they get 46.7%. Jon Jeter, “New Generations Face Old Struggles in Brazil,”
Washington Post,
11/13/2003.
109
This is similar to the 80% that Ingrid Ellen calculated.
110
Samantha Friedman, 5/2002.
111
See John Logan, “Choosing Segregation,” Lewis Mumford Center, 3/2002, mumford1 .
dyndns.org/cen2000/SchoolPop/SPReport/page1.html
, 1/2003.
CHAPTER 15: THE REMEDY
 
1
Ending sundown towns and suburbs will not cure all our nation’s racial problems; other approaches, such as working to improve minority neighborhoods and schools, make sense too. See, inter alia, Sheryll Cashin’s suggestions in the last chapter of
The Failures of Integration
(New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
2
Moreover, almost 30% of their respondents, having been told that neighborhoods are segregated, did
not
agree that this was “a bad thing.”
3
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press,
people-press.org/cen01rpt.htm
, 4/2003; David Herr, e-mail to H-South, 11/2002.
4
Anne B. Shlay, review of Alice O’Connor, Chris Tilly, and Lawrence Bobo, eds.,
Urban Inequality,
in
Contemporary Sociology
31, 5 (2002): 510;
Meredith v. Fair,
305 F.2d, 344–45.
5
For an example of work on race relations produced by middle-school students, see Bernadette Anand et al.,
Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in Our Town
(New York: Teachers College Press, 2002).
6
I hope this book spawns a genre of “sundown studies,” because much remains to be investigated. My web site,
uvm.edu/~jloewen/sundown
, has a page for posting your findings. It also suggests topics for further research, including studies of the moment-by-moment process by which a town went sundown, the contagion by which many did at once, why white supremacists locate in sundown towns and whether their expectations of support are met, communities that refused to go all-white, what prompted towns to relent, and how they desegregated successfully.
7
States might usefully require an honest historical marker in every sundown town within its borders, telling the origin of its policy, summarizing its population by race over time, and relating incidents that kept it all-white. States might also require towns to include a unit in a middle- or high school history course about their history, including their racial history. Since no black citizens exist to prompt such steps in sundown towns, such a nudge from outside might be in order.
8
Robby Heason,
Trouble Behind
(Cicada Films, 1990).
9
Jacqueline Froelich, “A City Confronts Its Ghosts,”
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
4/27/2003.
10
Pinckneyville resident and cemetery worker, 9/2002.
11
Virginia Yarwood with Clayton E. Cramer,
Depression Life: A Memoir of Growing Up in Texas
(manuscript in possession of Cramer, 2002), 6.
12
Murray Bishoff, 9/2002; Bishoff, “The Lynching That Changed Southwest Missouri,” part 2,
Monett
(MO)
Times,
8/15/1991; “The Eldorado, Illinois Affair,”
Indianapolis Freeman,
7/19/1902; “Race War in Illinois,”
New York Times,
6/17/1902; Gordon D. Morgan, “Black Hillbillies of the Arkansas Ozarks,” Department of Sociology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 1973, ii, 10.
13
Cleveland Bowen quoted in Morris S. Thompson, “Marchers Descend on County that Progress Forgot,”
Washington Post,
1/24/1987.
14
Roberta Senechal,
The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 182; Sucheng Chan,
Asian Americans
(New York: Simon & Schuster/Twayne, 1991), 50; “N.C. to Aid Sterilization Victims,”
Washington Post,
9/29/2003; Donald E. Skinner, “UUs Lead as Riot Survivors Receive Payments in Tulsa,”
UUWorld,
5/2002, 45; cf. Alfred L. Brophy,
Resurrecting the Dreamland
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Scott Gold, “Judge Weighs Suit on Tulsa’s ’21 Riot,”
L.A. Times,
2/14/2004,
latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-riot14feb14,1,3332317.story
, 2/2004.
15
Winifred M. Henson, “History of Franklin County, Illinois,” M.A. thesis, Colorado State College of Education, 1942, 144;
Marion Daily Republican,
8/13/1920, 1.
16
Zimmermann quoted in Laurinda Joenks, “Roughness of Citizens Blamed on Lean Times,”
Springdale
(AR)
Morning News,
5/7/2000.
17
Metro. Hous. Dev. Corp. v. Arlington Hts.,
558 F.2d 1283 (7th Cir. 1977),
cert. denied,
434 U.S. 1025 (1978). Cf.
Huntington NAACP v. Huntington,
844 F.2d 926, 938 (2d Cir.),
aff ’d,
488 U.S. 15 (1988) (per curiam).
18
State courts are also important because the present makeup of the Supreme Court discourages some lawyers from seeking redress there. Ironically, the Fourteenth Amendment to our national constitution, guaranteeing “equal protection” without regard to race, is now used by whites to blunt attempts to redress past discrimination against nonwhites, so state courts may be more hospitable than the Supreme Court to anti-discrimination cases.
19
Of course, Sunnyvale did not zone its residential areas whites-only. But it did engage in a pattern of acts—requiring one-acre (or more) lots throughout the entire town, banning apartments, and refusing to cooperate with nearby towns in accepting government-assisted Section 8 renters—that the court found had “a discriminatory effect on African Americans
and
are motivated by a discriminatory purpose.” In the 1990 census, the most recent when the case was decided, Sunnyvale had 16 African Americans among its 2,228 residents, including four households with black householders, so it did not quite qualify as a sundown suburb by my definition, but the court found that “the statistics speak for themselves.” 109 F.Supp.2d 533–34.
20
Kenneth T. Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 301;
South Burlington County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel,
336 A.2d 713 (NJ 1975), “Mount Laurel I”; same, 92 NJ 158, 456 A.2d 390 (1983), “Mount Laurel II”; cf. Osborne Reynolds Jr.,
Handbook of Local Government Law
(St. Paul: West, 1982), 371–74, David Kirp, John Dwyer, and Larry Rosenthal,
Our Town
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 9, and Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumers’ Republic
(New York: Knopf, 2003), 236–37;
Dews v Bluffdale,
109 F. Supp. 2d 526; cf. “Litigation and Grassroots Advocacy to Promote Affordable Housing,” National Low Income Housing Coalition: The NIMBY Report, 11/2000;
nlihc.org
, 2/2003; 109 F.Supp.2d 526; cf. “Fiscal Zoning Struck Down in Texas,” NIMBY Report, 12/2000,
nlihc.org
, 2/2003, and Westlaw KeyCite History.

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