Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (15 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Again, these declines were hardly voluntary. We have already seen how, especially in the West, expulsions and prohibitions have been directed not only at African Americans, but also at Chinese Americans and sometimes others. Indeed, western locales established a bewildering variety of rules. Some towns in the West excluded Native Americans but not Chinese Americans. Minden and Gardnerville are adjoining towns south of Carson City, Nevada. In the 1950s, and probably for many years prior, a whistle sounded at 6 p.m., audible in both towns, to warn American Indians to be gone by sundown. William Jacobsen Jr., an anthropologist who lived in Gardnerville in 1955, says it worked: “Indians made themselves scarce.” A Chinese American family didn’t have to leave. On the other hand, Esmeralda County, two counties to the southeast, allowed black residents but not Chinese. Meanwhile Fallon, Nevada, had a big sign at the railroad depot that said “No Niggers or Japs allowed,” and the newspaper in Rawhide, Nevada, bragged in 1908 that “Dagoes” from southern Europe, as well as African Americans, “have been kindly but friendly [
sic
] informed to move on.”
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South Pasadena, a sundown suburb of Los Angeles, let in Native Americans while keeping out Mexican and Asian Americans. Historian Fred Rolater relates how Professor Manuel Servin at the University of Southern California became the first Mexican American to break the taboo, in about 1964. Servin bought the Loomis House, a historic mansion. South Pasadena thought he was Native American, which was OK; “what the city did not know,” Rolater went on to point out, was that his family was from Mexico and had come to the United States in the 1920s. “Thus the anti-Mexican restrictive covenant was broken by a Ph.D. American Indian who happened to be Mexican.”
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Other California towns also kept out Mexican Americans, including Chester, a lumber mill town north of Sacramento, and Palos Verdes Estates, an elite oceanfront suburb of Los Angeles. Historian Margaret Marsh points to the irony of its sundown policy: “Palos Verdes excluded Mexican-Americans . . . from living in the estates, yet Mexican-inspired architecture was mandated in most of the area.” According to the University of Colorado Latino/a Research and Policy Center, in the late 1930s Longmont, Colorado, sported signs saying “No Mexicans After Night.”
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In 1907, whites in Bellingham, Washington, drove out its entire “Hindu” population—Sikhs, actually, numbering between 200 and 300—during three days of lawlessness. The chief of police, according to a pro-police account written years later, “recognized the universal demand of the whites that the brown men be expelled,” so he had his men stand by while a mob did the work. “Like the Chinamen, who have never returned to Tacoma,” the account concludes, “the Hindu has given Bellingham a wide berth since.” The Bellingham newspaper editorialized against “the means employed,” but expressed “general and intense satisfaction” with the results. “There can be no two sides to such a question,” the editor concluded. “The Hindu is a detriment to the town, while the white man is a distinct advantage.”
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Despite the West’s patchwork policies—barring Native Americans but not Chinese here, Chinese Americans but not blacks there, Jews somewhere else—for the most part, as in other regions, racism has long been strongest toward African Americans. The West is dotted with independent sundown towns that kept out blacks—places such as Duncan and Scottsdale, Arizona; Murray, Utah; and Astoria, Oregon. California had just eight potential sundown counties but scores of confirmed or likely sundown towns and suburbs. Most suburbs of Los Angeles and San Francisco and most communities in Orange County were established as white-only.
Sundown Subregions and “Dead Lines”
 
We have seen that entire subregions of the United States, such as the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and the suburbs of Los Angeles, went sundown—not every suburb of Los Angeles, not every county in the Ozarks or the Cumberlands, but enough to warrant the generalization. In several subregions of the United States, signs in rural areas, usually on major highways, announced “dead lines” beyond which blacks were not to go except at risk of life itself. In Mississippi County, Arkansas, for example, according to historian Michael Dougan, a “red line” that was originally a road surveyor’s mark defined where blacks might not trespass beyond to the west. That line probably continued north into the Missouri Bootheel and west beyond Paragould, encompassing more than 2,000 square miles. In southern Illinois, African Americans were not permitted “to settle north of the Mobile & Ohio switch track. This has been a settled feeling for years,” according to a 1924 newspaper report that described a series of attacks—arson, attempted murder, and dynamite—against blacks who tried to move north of that line and against a white farmer in Elco who hired them. Unconfirmed oral history in east Wisconsin holds that there was a sign outside Fond du Lac along Highway 41 warning that blacks were not welcome north of there. This sign sighting needs corroboration but is credible, because in addition to Fond du Lac itself and confirmed sundown towns Appleton and Oshkosh, all towns north of that point were overwhelmingly white.
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The Arkansas and Illinois dead lines may still be in effect; as recently as 1992, a black friend said, “I can’t go into that town,” to reporter Jack Tichenor when he proposed buying a bag of charcoal after dark in Karnak, just north of the Illinois dead line. However, African Americans do live north of the Wisconsin line without difficulty today.
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From west to east, other confirmed sundown subregions—not just individual counties or towns—include:
• A 4,000-square-mile area southwest of Fort Worth, Texas, including Comanche, Hamilton, and Mills counties, where whites drove out African Americans in 1886
• A thick band of sundown counties and towns on both sides of the Iowa-Missouri border
• Virtually every town and city along the Illinois River, from its mouth at the Mississippi northeast almost to Chicago, except Peoria
Still other subregions need confirmation. More research is needed, everywhere.
The Great Retreat from Prime Real Estate
 
Another way of characterizing the distribution of intentionally white communities in the United States is by type rather than location. From the Great Lakes, moving east to New England, then south to Florida, and then again in California and Oregon, we see the practice of keeping African Americans (and often Jews) off prime beauty spots such as islands, beaches, and coasts, and outside the city limits of oceanside towns. In mountain areas in the East, beginning in the late 1880s, many vacation destinations and retirement communities sprouted “Restricted” signs, meaning “white Gentiles only.” Elegant seaside suburbs such as Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, kept out all Jews and all African Americans except servants living in white residences. Long Island exemplified the process in microcosm: most of its beach communities kept blacks out, while the inside, the potato farm area, was interracial.
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Famous tourist spots such as Seaside Park, New Jersey, and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, were for whites only. African Americans and “Moors,” a local mixed-race people, worked in Rehoboth Beach but could not live there, according to Elizabeth Baxter, who resided in Rehoboth in the late 1930s; this was confirmed by an 84-year-old lifelong resident. Nor could Jews. Islands and beaches in the Carolinas and Georgia, including Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and Isle of Palms, South Carolina, were all-white into the 1990s. Florida is rimmed with sundown communities on both coasts. California had even more, especially clustered around Los Angeles and San Francisco. Some of these towns are elite, some multiclass, some working-class.
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Several Florida beach towns, such as Delray Beach, between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, kept out Jews but not African Americans. In 1959, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith described Delray Beach as “one of the nation’s most completely anti-Semitic communities.” It quoted a leading Delray Beach realtor who proudly called it “the only city on the East Coast [of Florida] fully restricted to Gentiles both in buying and selling.”
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A longtime resident told me, “Mostly northerners lived there, not southerners, but they were just as prejudiced. They didn’t want Delray Beach to become majority Jewish and garish like Miami Beach.” At the time Delray Beach had 5,363 African Americans in its population of 12,230; in the North, rarely did a place keep out Jews while admitting African Americans. On the Pacific coast, La Jolla, California, legally part of San Diego but often thought of as an independent community with its own zip code, long kept out Jews, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. In 1925, the Parent-Teacher Associations asked the La Jolla Civic League to prevent “a Mexican Squatter” from occupying land he had leased in La Jolla. According to Leonard Valdez of Sacramento, La Jolla was still keeping out Mexican Americans in the 1960s. Of course, Valdez noted, many retired naval officers lived in La Jolla, and “there were no Mexican naval officers.”
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Almost All Suburbs Were Sundown Towns
 
Residential areas near cities are also valuable real estate, of course, owing to their proximity to jobs, cultural venues, up-to-date health care, and other big-city amenities. To a still greater extent than vacation areas, suburbs went all-white, beginning in about 1900. The so-called Progressive movement, beginning shortly thereafter, was for whites only. Among its tenets was the notion that the big city and its ward politics—dominated by immigrants and “the machine”—were “dirty.” The answer was to move to the suburbs, leaving the dirt, vice, pollution—and African Americans—behind.
Across the United States, most suburbs came into existence well after the sundown town movement was already under way. In suburbia, excluding African Americans (and often Jews) became the rule, not the exception. As we saw in Mississippi and Alabama, even the traditional South was not exempt, developing its share of sundown suburbs, mostly after World War II.
Like beaches and resort towns, suburbs added another ground for exclusion—religion—that most independent towns ignored. Many and perhaps most suburbs of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, as well as smaller cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, kept out Jews for decades. Long Island was especially vicious. Some suburbs kept out Catholics.
Sundown suburbs continued to be developed rather recently, many between 1946 and 1968. The peak for independent sundown towns was probably reached around 1940. Between 1940 and 1968, a handful of independent towns went sundown, such as Vienna, Illinois, which burned out its black community in 1954, but African Americans successfully moved into a larger handful of sundown towns, such Portales, New Mexico, in about the same year. Thus the overall number of independent sundown towns dropped a bit after 1940. Not so for sundown suburbs. Until 1968, new all-white suburbs were forming much more rapidly than old sundown towns and suburbs were caving in. Thus 1968 might be the peak year for independent sundown towns and sundown suburbs combined.
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To supply an exact number of sundown towns in the United States is hard, partly because it depends on the definition of “town,” but in many states outside the South, a majority of all towns
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can probably be confirmed as sundown in 1968.
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In all, I believe at least 3,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 independent towns went sundown in the United States, mostly between 1890 and about 1930. Another 2,000 to 10,000 sundown suburbs formed a little later, between 1900 and 1968.
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The range is broad because I could not and did not locate every sundown town in America; there are far too many. I have confirmed about 1,000 sundown towns and suburbs across the United States but have left many more unconfirmed.
Sundown Neighborhoods
 
White America’s new craze for all-white residential areas extended also into central cities and inner suburbs. As we have seen, African American were too numerous to be driven from larger cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., or medium-sized ones such as Omaha or Tulsa, but after 1890, neighborhoods within cities and inner suburbs increasingly went all-white.
As a rule, American cities had not been very racially segregated in the nineteenth century. During the Nadir, that began to change. Cities and towns that did not expel their African Americans after 1890 concentrated them into a few neighborhoods. Residential segregation increased dramatically within northern cities between 1900 and 1960. Even in places far removed not only from the South but also from any large population of African Americans, blacks now found themselves unwelcome. Historian Howard Chudacoff describes the increasing residential segregation in Omaha:
During the last decades of the 19th century Omaha housing was available to all who could meet the price, blacks included.... Beginning in 1902, however, the newspapers printed increasing numbers of housing advertisements specifying “for colored families.” For other groups, more freedom of choice prevailed.
 
Roy Stannard Baker found residential segregation growing everywhere, including once-liberal Boston: “A strong prejudice exists against renting flats and houses in many white neighborhoods to colored people. The Negro in Boston, as in other cities, is building up ‘quarters,’ which he occupies to the increasing exclusion of other classes
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of people.”
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