Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (23 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Suburbs also offer other very real amenities. People move to them to get good schools, nice parks, good city services, and safety, as well as status and aesthetics. Children in elite suburbs have a leg up, because these communities concentrate opportunity. An elite suburban child is far more likely to know what the world has to offer and how to take advantage of it—from computers to summer jobs to coaching classes for the SAT. As a former school administrator in Stamford, Connecticut, said, “the keys to the kingdom” lie in these suburbs. And those keys are in addition to suburban tax base advantages that make possible much better public schools.
Avoiding the Problems of the City
 
“The city is doomed,” announced Henry Ford. “We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city.” And he moved Ford’s headquarters and largest manufacturing unit to the sundown suburb of Dearborn. Suburbs took steps to define themselves as different from cities. The promoters of Highland Park, Texas, used the slogan “Beyond the City’s Dust and Smoke” to distance their suburb from Dallas, even though Dallas eventually encompassed Highland Park. Upper-middle-class Americans were revolted by the dirt of the cities, not only from their factories and railroads, but also from their politics. If their political machines could not be reformed, then the “progressive” thing to do would be to form one’s own government in the suburbs under the control of the “better element.” In 1874, Brookline, Massachusetts, voted to reject union with Boston. By 1920, suburbs had rejected mergers with central cities across the United States, from Rochester to Pittsburgh to Chicago to Oakland.
8
This withdrawal from the city is evident in suburban names. Earlier suburbs of Chicago were named, inter alia, North Chicago, East Chicago, South Chicago, and, yes, West Chicago. Later suburbs used
park
and
forest
to death. Chicago alone is surrounded by Bedford Park, Calumet Park, Deer Park, Edison Park, Elmwood Park, Evergreen Park, Forest Lake, Forest View, Franklin Park, Hanover Park, Highland Park, Ingalls Park, Jefferson Park, LaGrange Park, Lake Forest, Liberty Park, Melrose Park, Merrionette Park, Norwood Park, Oak Forest, Oak Park, Orland Park, Palos Park, Park City, Park Ridge, Richton Park, River Forest, Round Lake Park, Schiller Park, Stone Park, University Park, and Villa Park, not to mention Forest Park and Park Forest. The process continues: in 1973, East Paterson, New Jersey, changed its name to Elmwood Park. East Detroit became Erin Heights in 1984; eight years later, it changed to Eastpointe, trying desperately to grasp some of the prestige of Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Woods, Grosse Pointe Farms, and Grosse Pointe Park, sundown suburbs to its south.
9
Moving to the suburbs to escape the disamenities of the city—everything from industrial sectors and delivery trucks to crime and prostitution—not only makes aesthetic sense and provides a more pleasant lifestyle; it also makes for a better investment. A real estate agent put it this way, advising potential home buyers in 2001 in the
Chicago Tribune
:
You should nearly always avoid buying in a “marginal neighborhood,” such as one that is seriously flawed by commercial blight, heavy traffic congestion, loud environmental noise, pollution, or foul smells.
“I would only do it if I’d been renting for years and years and absolutely could not afford to buy anywhere else,” he says.
 
His advice makes sense and does not mention race, but like everything said about suburbs thus far, it has racial implications. Marginal people make for a marginal neighborhood, and no people have been more marginalized than African Americans.
10
Blacks as a Key Problem to Be Avoided
 
African Americans’ low prestige has long posed a danger to white status. Andrew Hacker, author of
Two Nations,
identified the status threat in 1961:
If there is one sword which hangs over the heads of untold millions of white—and Northern—Americans it is that they cannot afford to live in close proximity to Negroes. The single social fact which can destroy the whole image of middle class respectability is to be known to reside in a neighborhood which has Negroes nearby.
 
In the early 1970s, among many items inquiring about relationships with African Americans, “‘Having a Negro family as next door neighbors’ was one of the most objected to,” reported social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew. Writing in 2000, historian Stephen Meyer pointed out that race still plays the key role: “Many whites remain reluctant to accept African Americans as social equals. They refuse to accept African Americans as neighbors.”
11
In addition to their status concerns, white suburbanites also worry that African Americans are less intelligent, more prone to crime, and a threat to property values. That last concern—property values—rephrases the status issue as a very real pocketbook problem: whites feel an African American next door may make their own home less desirable when they go to sell it. The solution to this familiar blacks-as-problem thinking proves the same in the suburbs as in independent towns: keep them out.
Suburbs Start to Go Sundown
 
Most of America’s first suburbs, built along railroad and streetcar lines, were not all white. Even elegant suburbs—“places like Greenwich, Connecticut; Englewood, New Jersey; Evanston, Illinois; and Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts,” in urban historian Kenneth Jackson’s words—made room for servants and workers, including independent African American households (in addition to those who lived in).
12
“The barons of Chestnut Hill regarded the close proximity of a poor servant class as an advantage.” To commute all the way from the inner city was too expensive, and it was too hard to arrive in time to warm the house and fix breakfast. Some of these early suburbs grew up around stops on the new suburban rail lines. They replicated “the class-related spatial patterns of the core cities,” writes Jackson, “with the poorest inhabitants living closest to the tiny business districts and the more affluent residents living in commodious homes on landscaped grounds.” Thus Stamford, Connecticut, outside New York City, has its poorer section near what is now the Amtrak station, and Lower Merion, outside Philadelphia, includes Ardmore, near the SEPTA station, where its maids, chauffeurs, and gardeners lived.
13
Gradually, such a hierarchy no longer seemed good enough. A black family living in Stamford or Evanston might become wealthy, after all, and might want to move into a more elite neighborhood. Already their children were in the public schools with the children of the elite, at least by high school. Affluent whites now declared their upward mobility by moving outward geographically, to all-white suburbs. They expressed their social distance from nonwhites and working-class whites by increasing the physical distance between them. Geographically and chronologically, Kenilworth was the next suburb north of Evanston. Chapter 8 notes that Joseph Sears, developer of Kenilworth, incorporated the restriction “Sales to
Caucasians only”
into his village’s founding documents, according to Kenilworth’s official historian. We have seen that independent sundown towns often allowed African Americans as live-in servants. Sears had forgotten to make this concession. Therefore, according to his daughter Dorothy: “When in 1903 he would have our colored coachman and his family move into the remodeled farmhouse, he sent a note to each resident, and none objected.” Of course they didn’t, for the coachman’s family was hardly an independent household; moreover, Sears still controlled Kenilworth. Soon Kenilworth became the most elite suburb of Chicago.
14
This was a national pattern. Like Kenilworth, Darien, the next suburb beyond Stamford, Connecticut, kept out African Americans. So did Palos Verdes Estates, outside of Los Angeles. Increasingly as the twentieth century wore on, white breadwinners chose to make burdensome commutes from ever more distant sundown suburbs. Elite sundown suburbs such as Kenilworth, Darien, and Palos Verdes Estates also differed from older suburbs in being exclusive by social class. The suburbanization of America and the segregation of our metropolitan areas went hand in hand, and the automobile—the same technological innovation that made mass suburbanization possible—facilitated this new separation by race and class. Today elite suburbs no longer need to include working-class homes. Even their teachers and police officers commute from housing they can afford, often two suburbs away. We have seen that some independent sundown towns had black communities nearby to supply workers, like the townships outside Johannesburg, South Africa. So do some sundown suburbs, in a way: “maid buses,” sometimes subsidized by residents of the town, bring domestic workers from the nearest inner city every morning and return them home before sundown.
On the ground in Chevy Chase, Maryland, stands a tangible symbol of this difference between old and newer suburbs: the Saks Fifth Avenue store, looking like a bank surrounded by the green lawns of well-kept suburbia. In 1903, Francis Newlands, who set up the Chevy Chase Land Company to build an elite suburb just northwest of Washington, D.C., sold some land to developers to build a subdivision called Belmont to provide affordable housing for domestics and other workers. Shortly thereafter, according to
Washington Post
reporter Marc Fisher, “rumors swept the area that Belmont was to be a community for the suburb’s black servants.” Newlands claimed he had no such intent, and in 1909 his company filed suit, claiming that the developer was committing fraud “by offering to sell lots . . . to Negroes.”
15
In the end, the Chevy Chase Company reacquired the land, and Chevy Chase became one of our first sundown suburbs. The Belmont property then lay vacant for decades, perhaps tainted by its past. That’s why it was available for the Saks Fifth Avenue store and parking lot. Today Chevy Chase remains an enclave for rich whites. In 2000, its 6,183 residents included just 18 people
16
living in families with at least one African American householder.
17
Nearby on the landscape is a reminder that throughout the decades when suburban America was being constructed—and constructed
white
—the federal government abetted the process. Newlands got the United States to create Rock Creek Park as our third national park and the largest urban park in the National Park System. At once the park increased the value of the land Newlands and his associates had bought by removing 2,000 acres from the market, created a beautiful amenity adjoining Chevy Chase, and interposed a green swath of forest to define the new suburb as “rural.” Most important, Rock Creek Park buffered Chevy Chase from the increasingly black neighborhoods on what Chevy Chase residents came to call “the wrong side of the park.” It still plays this role today.
18
Sundown Cemeteries
 
Cemeteries had gone suburban even before the Nadir. According to the cemetery’s web site, the founders of Mount Auburn Cemetery outside Boston, established in 1831, “believed that burying and commemorating the dead was best done in a tranquil and beautiful natural setting set apart from urban life.” Mount Auburn’s park-like imitators around the country actually helped inspire the suburban movement. If the suburbs embodied the good life, avoiding “the problems of the city,” then the new cemeteries, complete with lakes, hills, and trees, represented the good death. Quiet and exclusive, they were very different from the burying grounds adjoining urban churches, where one might rub elbows in death with persons very different in race and social class. And during the Nadir, like their suburban environs, the new cemeteries too went sundown, leaving a vivid record of the process on the landscape in granite.
19
In New Jersey in 1884, a cemetery refused burial to an African American sexton, which led to indignant criticism from the governor as well as the
New York Times.
The Nadir had not yet set in. By World War I, segregation was common practice in cemeteries and no longer aroused any protest, save from African Americans. In 1907, for example, the Forest Home Cemetery near Chicago adopted a resolution that only the remains of white persons would be buried in that cemetery from then on, “except that in cases where colored persons already owned lots in the cemetery, the remains of such colored persons and their direct heirs could be interred there.”
20
Before this change, John Gaskill, African American, had buried four of his children in his lot in that cemetery. When his wife died, in 1912, he tried to bury her near them but was refused, because she was not his heir. He filed suit and took his case to the Illinois Supreme Court, which found against him, so his wife could not be buried near her children, or, if he followed through with his plans, near her husband. By 1930, most cemeteries had exclusionary clauses.
21
Cemetery exclusion was not challenged in the courts until well after World War II. White Chapel Memory Gardens, a sundown cemetery in Syracuse, New York, did not allow a black body within its gates until 1981. Some cemeteries still maintain sundown policies.
22
Keeping Out Jews
 
When Joseph Sears proclaimed Kenilworth open to
“Caucasians only,”
the phrase also meant no Jews. Lena and Modie Spiegel, of Spiegel Catalog fame, soon broke this barrier when they “rented Lawyer Merritt Star’s large house at 40 Melrose for eight years,” according to Colleen Kilner, Kenilworth historian. “How could there be objection when they purchased,” she added, “especially after having proved themselves?” Kilner went on to note that their son was president of his eighth-grade class in 1925, but historian Michael Ebner says she painted far too rosy a portrait:
In the years before World War I, Lena and Modie remained outsiders. Nor did their circumstances improve as perhaps they hoped they would, when the Spiegels became ardent practitioners of Christian Science in an effort to diminish their Jewish identity.
 

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