Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (24 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Kenilworth residents subsequently closed ranks against other Jews, according to Ebner: “It is generally thought that one outcome [of the Spiegels] was to buttress the practice of enforcing restrictive covenants,” covenants that read “white Protestants only.” Labor historian Harry Rubenstein says Kenilworth and nearby Lake Forest started letting Italians in after World War II. Not Jews, though: in 1959, the Anti-Defamation League reported, “The North Shore suburbs of Kenilworth, Lake Forest, Barrington, and Palatine are almost completely closed to Jews. Kenilworth’s hostility is so well known that the community is bypassed by real estate agents when serving prospective Jewish purchasers.” Finally in the 1970s, according to Rubenstein, Kenilworth admitted Jews.
23
Kenilworth exemplified a national pattern. As the United States went more racist, it also went more anti-Semitic. After 1900, most elite suburbs quickly moved beyond barring blacks to bar Jews, and a few banned Catholics, especially if they were from southern or eastern Europe and looked “swarthy.” Here sundown suburbs parted company with independent sundown towns, few of which made a big deal out of religion.
24
Chapter 9 shows how Grosse Pointe, Michigan, also made it difficult or impossible for Jewish families to move in.
25
Some suburbs limited sales to “members of the Aryan branch of the Caucasian race,” thereby excluding “Mediterraneans” as well as Jews.
Imagining Jews as a problem pushes this line of thought to the breaking point, because Jews are
not
thought of as problems today, at least not as problems having to do with crime or poor school performance, but during the heyday of eugenics, Jews, like blacks, were thought to be stupid. On the standardized tests that came into vogue during and after World War I—the U.S. Army alpha test, the Stanford-Binet IQ test, and the SAT—Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe did perform poorly compared to WASPs.
26
Affluent WASP families increasingly viewed living near Jews as a threat to their own social status. Residents of several Boston suburbs reported that their communities formerly kept out Jews. Laura Hobson’s bestselling novel,
Gentleman’s Agreement,
made Darien, Connecticut, a sundown suburb of New York City, briefly notorious in 1947 when it publicized the town’s practice of not letting Jews spend the night. In 1959, the Anti-Defamation League commented on Bronxville, another suburb of New York City:
The Incorporated Village of Bronxville in Westchester County has earned a reputation for admitting to its precincts as home-owners or -renters only those who profess to be Christians. According to informed observers, this mile-square village, with a population of 6500, does not have any known Jewish families residing within its boundaries.... Even in the apartment buildings located in Bronxville there are no known Jewish tenants.
 
A report on the Midwest by British economist Graham Hutton tells of Jews’ precarious situation in that region just after World War II:
With exceptions in the Midwest today that could almost be named and counted on the fingers of two hands, the Jewish families—at least, those known to be Jews—settled in defined districts and were “restricted” from refined ones. They are still kept out of the select residential districts and clubs and have therefore established their own.
 
The same pattern held in suburb after suburb, as far west as La Jolla, California. Most upper- and upper-middle-class suburbs kept out Jews, often until well after World War II.
27
Until the 1980s, Jewish Americans were typically confined to just a handful of suburbs. A resident who favored barring Jews gave one reason: “Where [Jews] come in, the niggers follow and knock the property [values] down.”
28
Another reason was sheer status: a town or neighborhood was thought to be higher-class if it kept out Jews. This is still true in some parts of the upper class.
29
Sundown Suburbs Explode After World War II
 
By the end of World War II, the housing pressure in African American neighborhoods in inner cities was enormous, greater even than the pent-up postwar demand among white families. A 1943 memo of the Illinois Interracial Commission pointed out that 80% of the black population of Chicago was packed into less than 5 square miles, making dwelling units “unbelievably crowded.” Paradoxically, while World War II had a salutary effect on race relations in the United States, it also contributed to an explosion in the development of sundown suburbs. Between 1947 and 1967, more towns were established on a whites-only basis than ever before. Almost every suburb that sprang up or expanded after World War II was whites-only. Among the largest were the three Levittowns, in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, begun in the 1950s. In fact, Levitt & Sons was by far the largest home builder in America after World War II. By one estimate, the firm built 8% of all postwar suburban housing—all of it sundown. As Kenneth Jackson notes, “The Levitt organization . . . publicly and officially refused to sell to blacks for two decades after the war. Nor did resellers deal with minorities.” The result—“not surprisingly,” in Jackson’s words—was that “in 1960 not a single one of the Long Island Levittown’s 82,000 residents was black.” William Levitt claimed, “Our housing policy has been to abide by local law or custom” when he built his sundown suburbs, but this was not true. The African American family that finally desegregated Levittown, Pennsylvania, moved in from an integrated town only a mile away. Even more disgraceful was his performance in Manhasset, on Long Island: according to journalist Geoffrey Mohan, Levitt used “restrictive covenants to ban Jews from his early Manhasset developments. It was strictly business.” Levitt himself not only was Jewish but lived in Manhasset!
30
Even some suburbs now famous for their racial tolerance were all-white by policy at first. Oak Park, which abuts the western edge of Chicago, is now nationally renowned as an integrated community, but it was a sundown suburb in 1950, when the Percy Julian family tried to move in. The Julians could hardly have been more deserving candidates: Dr. Julian earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Vienna and synthesized cortisone in 1949; his wife was the first African American woman ever to earn a doctorate in sociology. Recognized for his scientific eminence, Percy Julian had been named Chicagoan of the Year in 1949. None of that helped when the Julians tried to become the first African American family to move into Oak Park. James Hecht, who worked for open housing in Buffalo and Richmond, tells what happened:
When Dr. Percy L. Julian bought an expensive fifteen-room house in Oak Park in 1950, the color of his skin was more important to many people . . . than the fact that he was one of the nation’s leading chemists. The water commissioner refused to turn on the water until the Julians threatened to go to court. There were threats by anonymous telephone callers, and an attempt was made to burn the house down. But Dr. Julian—then the chief of soybean research for the Glid-den Company . . . a man known throughout the scientific world for his synthesis of hormones and development of processes for their manufacture—hired private guards and moved into the house.
 
Thus Oak Park, like Tuxedo Park, not only did not try to enforce fair housing but tried to use its control over access to water to stay all-white.
31
The degree to which African Americans were simply shut out of the suburban explosion is astonishing. Historian Thomas Sugrue tells that in Detroit, “a mere 1,500 of the 186,000 single-family houses constructed in the metropolitan Detroit area in the 1940s were open to blacks. As late as 1951, only 1.15% of the new homes constructed in the metropolitan Detroit area were available to blacks.” Just four African American families entered any of the white suburbs of Chicago in 1961–62 combined. By 1970, exclusion was so complete that fewer than 500 black families lived in white suburban neighborhoods in the entire Chicago metropolitan area, and most of those were in just five or six suburbs. Sociologist Troy Duster cites an even more amazing yet representative statistic: “Of 350,000 new homes built in northern California between 1946 and 1960 with FHA [Federal Housing Administration] support,
fewer than 100 went to blacks.
That same pattern holds for the whole state, and for the nation as well.” Just as Palos Verdes Estates had been more segregated than the suburbs closer to Los Angeles, in the late 1950s and early 1960s the suburbs beyond Palos Verdes Estates took the phenomenon one step further, turning the entire Palos Verdes peninsula “into a congerie of walled, privatized residential ‘cities,’ ” in the words of Mike Davis. “Rolling Hills did it, and Rancho Palos Verdes, and then Rolling Hills Estate.” Orange County, the next county out, was worse yet. Statewide, after the legislature passed a fair housing law in 1963, Californians repealed it by voting overwhelmingly for Proposition 14, but the California Supreme Court found this unconstitutional in 1966.
32
The FHA Helped Create Our Sundown Suburbs
 
The Federal Housing Administration, set up during the Depression to make it easier for Americans to buy homes, was a large part of the problem. In fact, Charles Abrams, an early proponent of integrated housing, saw the FHA as the most important single cause of residential segregation. He wrote in 1955:
From its inception the FHA set itself up as the protector of the all white neighborhood. It sent its agents into the field to keep Negroes and other minorities from buying houses in white neighborhoods. It exerted pressure against builders who dared to build for minorities, and against lenders willing to lend on mortgages.
 
In 1938, the FHA held, “If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that its properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” The FHA advocated restrictive covenants, “since these provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment,” and its
Manual
contained a model restrictive covenant until 1948. In that year, assistant FHA commissioner W.J. Lockwood boasted, “The FHA has never insured a housing project of mixed occupancy.”
33
The FHA even engaged in such absurdities as requiring the developer of Mayfair Park, a postwar residential subdivision in South Burlington, Vermont, to include its model racially restrictive covenant in each deed before it would guarantee loans in the development. Scarcely a hundred black families lived in the entire state, so the covenants did not stop any mass influx of African Americans into the suburb. They did, however, make salient to white purchasers that their government believed black families were a danger from which whites required protection, even that far north. Portfolio 29 shows a physical legacy of the FHA’s policy, still on the ground in Detroit.
34
FHA publications repeatedly listed “inharmonious racial or nationality groups” alongside such noxious disamenities as “smoke, odors, and fog.” Again, this was the familiar “blacks as the problem” ideology, and the FHA’s solution was identical to that employed by independent sundown towns: keep “the problem” out. Palen states that loan guarantees by the FHA and Veterans Administration (VA) were the most important single cause of postwar suburbanization, and more than 98% of the millions of home loans guaranteed by the FHA and VA after World War II were available only to whites. This was the money that funded the Levittowns and most other postwar sundown suburbs. America became a nation of homeowners largely
after
World War II, in the suburbs. Indeed, more Americans bought single-family homes in the decade after the war than in the previous 150 years, according to historian Lizabeth Cohen. African Americans were thus not only shut out of the suburbs but also kept from participating in Americans’ surest route to wealth accumulation, federally subsidized home ownership. Federal support for home ownership not only included the FHA and VA programs but also the mortgage interest tax deduction, which made home ownership in the suburbs cheaper than apartment rental in the cities—for whites. Housing prices then skyrocketed, tripling in the 1970s alone; this appreciation laid the groundwork for the astonishing 1-to-11 black-to-white wealth ratio that now afflicts African American families.
35
When the federal government did spend money on black housing, it funded the opposite of suburbia: huge federally assisted high-rise “projects” concentrated in the inner city. We are familiar with the result, which now seems natural to us, market-driven: African Americans living near the central business district and whites living out in the suburbs. Actually, locating low-income housing on cheaper, already vacant land in the suburbs would have been more natural, more market-driven. One of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects, Cabrini Green, lies just a stone’s throw west of an expensive and desirable lakefront neighborhood north of the Loop, separated by the elevated railroad tracks. This is costly land. To justify its price, the Chicago Housing Authority had to pile hundreds of units onto the tract, building poorly devised physical structures that bred a festering, unsafe social structure. The steps taken by suburban developers and governments to be all-white were interferences in the housing market that kept African Americans from buying homes and locked them in overwhelmingly black tracts inside the city.

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