Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (26 page)
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Authors: James W. Loewen
BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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If not for this intensification of white supremacy between 1890 and 1940, towns and suburbs across the North would never have been allowed to expel and exclude African Americans and others. The most obvious way that the Nadir of race relations gave birth to sundown towns was in the changed response of governments when whites drove out African Americans. Two incidents in Anna, in southern Illinois, one before the Nadir and one during it, highlight its impact. This book began with a mention of the 1909 lynching that led to the expulsion of African Americans from Anna; Chapter 7 tells that story in detail. But 1909 was not the first expulsion of African Americans from Anna-Jonesboro, which had long been anti-black. In 1862, citizens of Union County had supported a new state constitutional provision, “No Negro or Mulatto shall migrate or settle in this state,” by a vote of 1,583 to 98. Complaining because ex-slaves passed through the county going north on the Illinois Central Rail Road, the Anna newspaper editor wrote, “We have laws prohibiting their settlement here.” During the Civil War, Cairo was a place of refuge for African Americans from the Lower Mississippi Valley. United States Army officers struggled to cope with the flood of refugees. In 1863, residents in and around Cobden, six miles north of Anna, agreed to take some of these men and women as workers in their apple orchards. Benjamin Fenton brought in about 40 African American refugees to work on his farm. Whites from the Anna-Jonesboro area charged the orchard owners with “unlawfully and willfully bringing [slaves] into the State of Illinois . . . in order to free them,” a violation of the old statewide racial exclusion law passed before the Civil War. Then a mob of about 25 men led by an Anna doctor visited Fenton and forced him to return his workers to Cairo .
6
6
After the Anna mob drove the African American farmworkers from Union County in 1863, the army commander at Cairo who had let them go there in the first place was outraged. He wrote that he would have sent armed troops to protect them if the farmer who employed them had requested it. The military later arrested the mob leaders and imprisoned them for most of the rest of the war.
7
7
But when Anna whites again drove out their black population in 1909, no one was ever arrested. The federal government did nothing; neither did the state. Indeed, the times had shifted so much that there was no thought that either government
might
intervene. Nothing ever happened to the lynch mob in 1909 in Cairo, nor to the men who drove African Americans out of Anna.
might
intervene. Nothing ever happened to the lynch mob in 1909 in Cairo, nor to the men who drove African Americans out of Anna.
Although the increasing racism of the Nadir was a necessary characteristic underlying the outbreak of sundown towns, it cannot explain why one town went sundown while another did not. In Union County, for instance, the Nadir cannot explain why Anna drove out its African Americans in 1909 and has kept them out ever since, while Cobden, five miles north, has African American households to this day.
Tautological “Causes”Most residents of sundown towns and counties are of little help when asked why their town has been all-white for so long. They don’t know about the Nadir, and few ever think about the underlying causes of their town’s racial policy. Instead, local historians often offer tautological or nonsensical “explanations” for their town’s absence of African Americans. Typically these alleged factors have nothing to do with race. Before planting the seedlings of the real causes, I need to clear out the underbrush of erroneous reasons that many people give to explain all-white communities.
The spokesman for a historical society in a Pennsylvania county “explained” its all-white demography with this sentence: “Most or all of our towns were white because the area attracted few blacks.” The argument is airtight, of course, but circular. “There’s never been much need for them” is another favorite—but how an area’s “need” for new settlers comes with a racial label goes unexplained. “There wasn’t work for what skills they had,” said a local history expert from another Pennsylvania county whose white population between 1900 and 1940 was mostly farmers and miners. But mining and farming were precisely the occupations engaged in by most African American men.
The flip side of the “lack of jobs” theory is the notion that African Americans went to big cities because that’s where the jobs were. “There were more jobs in Milwaukee,” said several Wisconsin residents, trying to explain the increasing whiteness of midsized Wisconsin towns during the first half of the twentieth century. But “jobs in the cities” likewise fails as a cause of sundown towns. Of course, Milwaukee
does
have more jobs than any other Wisconsin city, but there were jobs aplenty in smaller Wisconsin cities such as Appleton, Fond du Lac, and Oshkosh, in the four counties surrounding Lake Winnebago. Indeed, those counties were urbanizing between 1890 and 1930. Precisely as their black population declined by 78%, their white population increased by 45%, from 149,514 to 216,143. Similarly, from 1900 to 1970, Granite City, Illinois, zoomed in population from 3,122 to 40,440, owing to skyrocketing employment, while its black population fell from 154 to 6. Obviously these growing cities had an abundance of new jobs—for whites.
does
have more jobs than any other Wisconsin city, but there were jobs aplenty in smaller Wisconsin cities such as Appleton, Fond du Lac, and Oshkosh, in the four counties surrounding Lake Winnebago. Indeed, those counties were urbanizing between 1890 and 1930. Precisely as their black population declined by 78%, their white population increased by 45%, from 149,514 to 216,143. Similarly, from 1900 to 1970, Granite City, Illinois, zoomed in population from 3,122 to 40,440, owing to skyrocketing employment, while its black population fell from 154 to 6. Obviously these growing cities had an abundance of new jobs—for whites.
As well, it is important to understand that most jobs in big cities were flatly closed to African Americans throughout the Nadir. Breweries in Milwaukee started to hire African Americans only in 1950, the city did not employ a single black teacher until 1951, and its first major department store to hire an African American as a full-time sales clerk did not do so until 1952. In northern cities, most jobs in construction were reserved for whites until the 1970s. So big-city jobs weren’t much of a draw, except in a few cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh, where a sizable fraction of industrial jobs were open to African Americans.
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The claim that lack of jobs caused towns to go all-white is rendered preposterous by those sundown towns where African Americans have been allowed to work but not to live. African Americans helped build Hoover Dam but had to commute from Las Vegas to do it, while white workers and their families lived in Boulder City, a sundown town built just for them. African Americans helped build Kentucky Dam, but after they finished, their housing—“Negro Village”—was razed, they were booted out, and Marshall County, Kentucky, resumed being a sundown county. Today African Americans commute from Hayti Heights, Missouri, to work in Paragould, Arkansas; from Peoria, Illinois, to Pekin; and from Mattoon, Illinois, to Effingham. African Americans care for patients at the Illinois State [Mental] Hospital in Anna but live in Cairo and Cobden. Sundown towns such as Cullman, Alabama, and Herrin, Illinois, have long been serviced during the day by domestics from nearby African American “townships.” Ford Motor Company located its largest single plant in Dearborn, Michigan, a sundown suburb; thousands of African American car builders commuted to it every day from Detroit. In 1956,
U.S. News and World Report
estimated that “at least 15,000 Negroes” worked in Dearborn but were “barred, completely and semioffi-cially,” from living there. More thousands commuted to a huge General Motors plant in neighboring Warren but had to return home to Detroit when night fell. In 1972, 4,353 African Americans worked in Livonia, another sundown suburb of Detroit, but could not live there. “Lack of jobs” can hardly explain the absence of African Americans from any independent town such as Paragould or multiclass suburb such as Dearborn in which they work but do not live, because these towns house
white
workers who do the same jobs.
9
U.S. News and World Report
estimated that “at least 15,000 Negroes” worked in Dearborn but were “barred, completely and semioffi-cially,” from living there. More thousands commuted to a huge General Motors plant in neighboring Warren but had to return home to Detroit when night fell. In 1972, 4,353 African Americans worked in Livonia, another sundown suburb of Detroit, but could not live there. “Lack of jobs” can hardly explain the absence of African Americans from any independent town such as Paragould or multiclass suburb such as Dearborn in which they work but do not live, because these towns house
white
workers who do the same jobs.
9
Even more blatant have been those sundown towns that allowed African American laborers to sojourn in temporary housing on construction sites for the summer construction season but would not let them stay once the season was over. In fact, using lack of jobs to explain black absence often gets the causation directly backward. In 1943, the chairman of Illinois’s Inter-Racial Commission noted, “Many plants in towns where Negroes are not permitted to reside, give that as an excuse for not hiring Negroes.”
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Some theories emphasize social isolation: why
should
African Americans move into out-of-the-way hamlets distant from centers of African American population? In short, the lack of blacks was just “natural,” or resulted from historical coincidence. I began my research with this hypothesis—that most all-white towns never
happened
to draw any black residents—but it didn’t hold up. Another near-tautology lurks: African Americans didn’t move in because few African Americans lived there to attract them. Before 1890, however, African Americans moved to counties and towns throughout America, as
Table 1
showed (page 56)—even to isolated places such as northern Maine, northern Wisconsin, and Idaho north of the Snake River Valley. Then during the Great Retreat, they withdrew to the larger cities and a mere handful of small towns. Distance from the South, from African American population centers, or from major trade routes cannot explain this pattern, because towns in Maine, Wisconsin, Idaho, and elsewhere were at least as isolated socially between 1865 and 1890, when African Americans were moving into them, as they were between 1890 and 1930, when African Americans were fleeing them.
11
In other words, because social isolation cannot explain the
increases
in black population in northern counties before 1890, it cannot explain why those increases reversed after that date. Something different went on after 1890.
Sundown Suburbs Are Not “Natural” and Not Due to Classshould
African Americans move into out-of-the-way hamlets distant from centers of African American population? In short, the lack of blacks was just “natural,” or resulted from historical coincidence. I began my research with this hypothesis—that most all-white towns never
happened
to draw any black residents—but it didn’t hold up. Another near-tautology lurks: African Americans didn’t move in because few African Americans lived there to attract them. Before 1890, however, African Americans moved to counties and towns throughout America, as
Table 1
showed (page 56)—even to isolated places such as northern Maine, northern Wisconsin, and Idaho north of the Snake River Valley. Then during the Great Retreat, they withdrew to the larger cities and a mere handful of small towns. Distance from the South, from African American population centers, or from major trade routes cannot explain this pattern, because towns in Maine, Wisconsin, Idaho, and elsewhere were at least as isolated socially between 1865 and 1890, when African Americans were moving into them, as they were between 1890 and 1930, when African Americans were fleeing them.
11
In other words, because social isolation cannot explain the
increases
in black population in northern counties before 1890, it cannot explain why those increases reversed after that date. Something different went on after 1890.
Social isolation has even been used to explain overwhelmingly white suburbs: whites have imagined that African Americans prefer the excitement of the big city to such suburban values as home ownership, peace and quiet, tree-lined streets, and good school systems. This notion is absurd, as historian Andrew Wiese showed in 2004. Wiese summarized survey research as far back as the 1940s, finding no support for this stereotype. Among a sample of six hundred middle-income black families in New York City in 1948, for example, nine out of ten wanted to buy their own homes, and three in four wanted to move to suburbia. Many African American families have the same fervent desire for a patch of ground that white suburbanites manifest.
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Other whites seem to think it’s somehow “natural” for blacks to live in the inner city, whites in the outer suburbs. This idea is a component of what law professor John Boger calls “the national sense that [residential segregation] is inescapable.” Most African Americans arrived by train, goes this line of thought, and they’re just taking a long time to move out from the vicinity of the train station; as soon as they make enough money, they too will move to the suburbs. But the whiteness of our suburbs is not “natural.”
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Over and over, white academics as well as residents of sundown suburbs suggest that social class explained sundown suburbs, if not independent sundown towns.
“I
couldn’t live in Grosse Pointe either,” one professor put it in 2002, referring to one of Detroit’s richest suburbs, also one of its whitest. For all-white suburbs to result from classism is seen as defensible, because classism is OK, since we all presumably have a reasonable if not equal chance to get into the upper class. This ideology is a form of Social Darwinism: the best people wind up on top, and whites are smarter, better students, work harder at their jobs, etc. People who think like this don’t see Grosse Pointe’s whiteness as a white problem but as a black problem. “They” haven’t worked hard enough, etc., so they haven’t accumulated enough wealth—and perhaps enough social connections and knowledge—to crack these suburbs.
“I
couldn’t live in Grosse Pointe either,” one professor put it in 2002, referring to one of Detroit’s richest suburbs, also one of its whitest. For all-white suburbs to result from classism is seen as defensible, because classism is OK, since we all presumably have a reasonable if not equal chance to get into the upper class. This ideology is a form of Social Darwinism: the best people wind up on top, and whites are smarter, better students, work harder at their jobs, etc. People who think like this don’t see Grosse Pointe’s whiteness as a white problem but as a black problem. “They” haven’t worked hard enough, etc., so they haven’t accumulated enough wealth—and perhaps enough social connections and knowledge—to crack these suburbs.
This line of thought seems plausible. Segregation by class
is
an important component of suburbanization, and increasingly so. Residents of elite suburbs such as Grosse Pointe segregate on the basis of both race and class, and for the same reason: being distant from African Americans and from lower-class people conveys status.
14
Nevertheless, the reasoning does not hold up, for two reasons. First, it ignores history. People who think like this have no idea that as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, when today’s mature adults were starting their careers, whites in much of the country flatly banned African Americans as a group from many occupations—not just professions but also jobs like construction work, department store clerk, flight attendant, and railroad engineer.
is
an important component of suburbanization, and increasingly so. Residents of elite suburbs such as Grosse Pointe segregate on the basis of both race and class, and for the same reason: being distant from African Americans and from lower-class people conveys status.
14
Nevertheless, the reasoning does not hold up, for two reasons. First, it ignores history. People who think like this have no idea that as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, when today’s mature adults were starting their careers, whites in much of the country flatly banned African Americans as a group from many occupations—not just professions but also jobs like construction work, department store clerk, flight attendant, and railroad engineer.
Second, sundown suburbs simply do not result from class. Research by Michael Danielson points to a key flaw in the argument: the proportion of a metropolitan area’s blacks in a suburb,
controlling for income,
is less than half the proportion of whites in that suburb, except for the handful of interracial suburbs. That is, if we tried to guess the number of African Americans in a suburb just using income, we would always predict more than twice as many black people as actually lived there. Something has been keeping them out in addition to their class status. Conversely, a much higher proportion of poor white families live in suburbs, compared to poor black families. If income were the crucial factor, then there would be little difference by race in the distribution of the poor.
15
controlling for income,
is less than half the proportion of whites in that suburb, except for the handful of interracial suburbs. That is, if we tried to guess the number of African Americans in a suburb just using income, we would always predict more than twice as many black people as actually lived there. Something has been keeping them out in addition to their class status. Conversely, a much higher proportion of poor white families live in suburbs, compared to poor black families. If income were the crucial factor, then there would be little difference by race in the distribution of the poor.
15
Continuing with our Grosse Pointe example, in the Detroit metropolitan area, class has mattered even less, race even more, than elsewhere in the nation, according to research by Karl Taeuber. “More than half of the white families in each income level, from very poor to very rich, lived in the suburbs,” he found. “Among blacks, only one-tenth of the families at each income level (including very rich) lived in the suburbs.” In short,
social class, at least as measured by income, made little difference in the level of suburbanization.
Rich whites have been much more suburban than rich blacks; poor whites have been much more suburban than poor blacks.
16
social class, at least as measured by income, made little difference in the level of suburbanization.
Rich whites have been much more suburban than rich blacks; poor whites have been much more suburban than poor blacks.
16
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