Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (21 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Some independent sundown towns bought out their African Americans to achieve all-white status. Especially in suburbia, buyouts were also often used to get rid of black would-be residents. I have collected examples of buyouts to keep blacks from completing purchases in Somerset, New Jersey; Astoria, Oregon; and many points in between. Indeed, buying out the lone African American family that dared to buy in a sundown suburb was so common that Lorraine Hansberry made such an offer the central plot element in her play
A Raisin in the Sun.
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Buying out was not always kinder and gentler, because usually the offer was not to be refused, accompanied by a clear threat. In 1922, residents of Liberty Township in northern Indiana “have been worked up to a frenzy regarding the removal of a colored family, consisting of six persons into that vicinity,” as reported in the
Chesterton Tribune.
“The race problem, as far as Liberty township is concerned,” was “amicably settled” when the black would-be resident sold the property to a trustee of the township and returned to Gary “with his wife and four children.” Now “Liberty township is at peace with the world again,” the newspaper concluded. “Amicably settled” may be a euphemism for the resale process, however, given that all of Porter County was sundown at the time and for five decades thereafter. Perhaps the “frenzy” played some role in inducing the black family to sell.
Often, as in Porter County, the offer came from the local government. In that case, the black family usually had no choice; if they refused to sell, the jurisdiction then claimed that the land was required for a park or other public purpose, condemned it, and bought it.
Chapter 7 tells how Sheridan, Arkansas, induced its black population to leave in 1954 in response to
Brown v. Board of Education.
One man, Jack Williams, owner of the local sawmill and the sawmill workers’ homes, was principally responsible. He made his African American employees an extraordinary buyout offer: he would
give
them their homes and move them to Malvern, 25 miles west, at no cost to them. This turned out to be a proposition they couldn’t refuse, according to my source, who lived in Sheridan at the time, for if a family refused to move, he would evict them and burn down their home. Another longtime resident corroborated this account: “He wouldn’t have them in school here. He had little shacks for them. He told them they could have the shacks and move them out, or he would burn them down.” Not unreasonably, blacks “chose” to accept the buyout and move to Malvern in response to this ultimatum. A few other African Americans lived in Sheridan— not in Williams’s employ—but what could they do? The preacher, the beautician, and the cafe owner suddenly found themselves without a clientele. They left too.
Creating Sundown Suburbs
 
Suburbs used the largest array of different weapons for becoming and staying all-white, beginning around 1900, although ultimately they too relied on violence. It is important to understand that the whiteness of America’s suburbs was no accident. On the contrary, all-white suburbs were
achieved.
As Dorothy Newman wrote in 1978, “Residential separation rests on a system of formal rules (though no longer worded in racial terms—the words are illegal) and informal but carefully adhered-to practices which no amount of legislation has been able yet to penetrate.”
Moreover, the suburbs weren’t always so white. Between 1870 and 1900, African Americans lived more widely scattered across metropolitan areas than they did by 1930 or later, just as African Americans lived more scattered across northern states in 1890 than they did by 1930 or later. When suburbanization set in, African American families already resided on the fringes of many cities. In many places—across the South, of course, but even as far north as Dearborn, Michigan, and Edina, Minnesota—developers had to get rid of African Americans, who already lived where the suburbs were being formed, to create the white suburbs we now take for granted. In 1870, before Dearborn township incorporated, among its 2,300 people lived 30 black residents, but by 1920, incorporated Dearborn’s 2,470 residents included just one African American.
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When they sought to establish the town of Edina, for example—now the richest suburb of Minneapolis–St. Paul—developers faced the problem that a Quaker village already existed in Richfield Township where the new suburb was to be built. Throughout the North, Quakers had welcomed African Americans after the Civil War. Many black families now lived in the western half of Richfield Township. “Over the ensuing decades,” according to Deborah Morse-Kahn, whose history of Edina is exceptional for its willingness to discuss the community’s racial past, African Americans “became very involved in community life—very often as leaders.” Indeed, “Edina Mills was a fully integrated and color-blind community well before the turn of the century.” Whites attended black weddings. An African American woman founded the first PTA in Edina in the late 1880s and served as its first vice president. B.C. Yancey was a justice of the peace and village recorder.
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Then, just after World War I, Samuel Thorpe developed “the elegant Edina Country Club residential district,” as Morse-Kahn correctly describes it, “with restrictive deed covenants in place.” Now Edina’s African American community “would feel estranged. Thorpe Brothers’ building restrictions guaranteed to any buyer, in an era when municipal zoning was nonexistent, that their property would be ‘safe’ from devaluating circumstances, stating that blacks were explicitly ineligible to buy in the district.” According to Joyce Repya, associate planner for Edina, deeds carried various restrictions such as “No fuel storage tanks above ground,” “No shedding poplars, box elders, or other objectionable trees,” and, most important, the racial exclusionary clause quoted at the head of this chapter. And unlike all other restrictions, which phased out in 1964, the restriction to “the white or Caucasian race” continued in force forever. “By the late 1930s,” in Morse-Kahn’s words, “virtually all of Edina’s black families had moved into Minneapolis and an historic era had ended for the village.” At that point, Morse-Kahn goes on, anti-Semitism, which had been “virtually unheard-of in Edina before the First World War, became a haunting hallmark of Edina life. As late as the end of the 1950s, potential buyers known to be Jewish were often openly turned away by realtors and requested to look for residential property elsewhere.”
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Other suburbs across America had to force out already existing pockets of African American residents to achieve all-white status. Especially across the South, African Americans have long lived in rural areas. For all-white suburbs to be built, those residents must be cleared out. And although the traditional South had few independent sundown towns, after the 1930s it developed its share of sundown suburbs. By that time some white Southerners were beginning to abandon their traditional view of African Americans as subjects for exploitation in favor of the northern view of them as nuisances to be rid of. And of course, African Americans were not as essential to the southern suburban economy as they had been to its plantation economy.
Chamblee, Georgia, began as a small town outside Atlanta. In 1940, Chamblee had 1,081 residents including 222 African Americans. After World War II, Chamblee became a suburb of Atlanta. By 1950, its population soared to 3,445, while its black population shrank to 92. Ten years later, Chamblee had 6,635 people, including just 2 African Americans. And by 1970, it had 9,127, including just 1 black woman, probably a maid. Developers built brand-new all-white subdivisions in the 1950s, according to a woman who grew up in two of them. I could not locate anyone in Chamblee who knew why its African Americans departed. Schooling provides one possible reason. Until massive school desegregation, which took place around 1970, African American families in suburbs throughout the South found living there hugely inconvenient. Most suburbs with small black populations had no black schools; instead they paid tuition for their black children to attend black schools in the inner city. This policy motivated many African American families to move to that city rather than impose long commutes on their children, often with no school buses. African Americans in Chamblee had no school, according to a former mayor, and had to attend the nearest black school in Atlanta. After 1970, Chamblee desegregated all over again, a story we will pick up in a later chapter, but in the 1940s and ’50s, it seems to have embodied a “push-out” or “buyout” of its black population.
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The same thing happened outside Washington, D.C.; Gainesville, Florida; Memphis; New York City; and other expanding metropolises. Although southern white developers showed no more hesitation than northerners about removing black residents for new sundown suburbs, they usually respected black burial grounds. The result, found as far north as Maryland, is an occasional black church and cemetery standing isolated in an otherwise all-white suburb. Sometimes African Americans then abandoned their church and cemetery because they could not cope with repeated vandalism by white suburban teenagers.
Across the nation, according to a 1981 government report, “although white migration flows favored the suburbs throughout, until the late 1960s more blacks were moving to the city from the much smaller suburban base than were suburbanizing in the majority of the [metropolitan areas].” In other words, until about 1968, African Americans were getting displaced
from
still-whitening suburbs at a faster rate than they were moving
to
suburbia.
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Even maids and servants came to be seen as an unwanted presence after dark if they lived in independent households. In 1910, a committee of residents of Wilmette, an elite North Shore suburb of Chicago, asked all families unable to house their maids and gardeners on their own premises to fire them, especially if they lived in Wilmette, claiming that their presence had “depressed real estate values” in the village. According to Chicago historian Thomas Philpott, it worked: “Few blacks who did not have quarters in their white employers’ homes remained in Wilmette.” Even by 1970, Wilmette’s 32,134 residents included just 81 African Americans, and most of them were live-in maids.
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All Planned Suburbs Were Intentionally Created All-White
 
Elite suburbs that were built by a single developer were especially likely to begin life as all-white on purpose. Tuxedo Park, New York, perhaps the richest of them all, may have gone sundown first, even before 1890. Affluent whites founded it “as a club community and maintained that discipline for nearly 50 years,” as Albert Winslow put it in the town’s official history, published in 1992. “Anybody seeking to buy property in the Park would by necessity be required to be a member of the Club. The association also maintained a police department and six gate houses.” The gate houses were connected by barbed wire, according to historian Patrick McMullen, who credits Tuxedo Park with thus inventing the gated community in 1881. “Tuxedo Park also heralded the creation of a new entity, the homeowner’s association, meant to influence the appearance, population, and social character of the community.”
Just in case anyone tried to move in without being a member, Tuxedo Park developed additional methods for keeping out undesirables, primarily Jews and African Americans but also others who “did not enjoy the attributes for membership in the Club,” as Winslow put it. He goes on to tell of a wealthy buyer who purchased a large house in Tuxedo Park in the late 1920s and tried to move in. “He was told his membership in the Club was out of the question. He persevered and then had to be told that if he did indeed buy he would be denied access to water and sewer lines, which were owned by the Tuxedo Park Association. . . . He did not buy!”
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As the twentieth century wore on, Americans continued to build planned communities. Every planned town that I know of—indeed,
every community in America founded after 1890 and before 1960 by a single developer or owner—kept out African Americans from its beginnings.
Chronologically, these include Highland Park near Dallas in 1907–13 and Mariemont near Cincinnati in 1914, both of which won fame for their innovative shopping centers. Shaker Heights, east of Cleveland, was designed to be “utopian” and excluded blacks, Jews, and Catholics from its inception. Near Los Angeles, planned all-white suburbs set up around this time include Beverly Hills, Culver City, Palos Verdes Estates, Tarzana (developed by Edgar Rice Burroughs from the proceeds of his
Tarzan
novels), and several others. Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” concept, imported from England, influenced at least seven suburbs or exurbs built around World War II: Radburn, New Jersey, in 1929; Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., Greenhills, Ohio, near Cincinnati, Greendale, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee, and Norris, Tennessee, in the 1930s; Richland, Washington, in 1942; and Park Forest, near Chicago, in the 1950s. All of these planned communities were developed as sundown towns.
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The Franklin Roosevelt administration built the “Greens”—Green-belt, Greenhills, and Greendale—to create jobs and supply needed housing during the Great Depression; all three remained all-white for decades. So did Norris, built by the Tennessee Valley Authority to house workers on nearby Norris Dam, Richland, put up to house workers at the Hanford atomic plant, and Boulder City, Nevada, built for workers on Boulder Dam.
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Most “Unplanned” Suburbs Were Also Created All-White
 
When a suburb expanded without a plan or single developer, African Americans had more opportunity to move in. Still, the overwhelming majority of unplanned suburbs were created all-white from their inception. Most kept out African Americans (and often Jews) openly and “legally,” as Portfolio 28, an ad for a suburban development in Salt Lake City, exemplifies. Their most straightforward method was to pass a formal ordinance, like some of their country cousins, the independent sundown towns. Many suburbs never passed a formal ordinance but, like Batesville, Indiana, or Johnston City, Illinois, acted as if they had.

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