Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (27 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Sundown suburbs with an industrial base—such as Dearborn, Warren, and Livonia, around Detroit—have long employed African Americans, at least as janitors, but they could not spend the night. Some of these suburbs—like Livonia and Warren—are working-class. Other sundown suburbs, like independent sundown towns, are multiclass: houses in Dearborn, in 1997, ranged from starter homes around $45,000 to executive homes for $800,000 and up. Social class simply cannot explain the absence of African Americans from multiclass or working-class communities. Nor can it explain the absence of Jews from such elite suburbs as Kenilworth and Flossmoor, Illinois, and Darien, Connecticut.
17
Sociologist Reynolds Farley and his associates used our old friend D, the Index of Dissimilarity, to compare the power of race to that of class. Specifically regarding Detroit, they observed, “If household income alone determined where people lived, the Index of Dissimilarity would be 15 [almost completely integrated] instead of 88 [almost completely segregated].” Instead,
Economic criteria account for little of the observed concentration of blacks in central cities and their relative absence from the suburbs. The current level of residential segregation must be attributed largely to action and attitudes, past and present, which have restricted the entry of blacks into predominately white neighborhoods.
18
 
Indeed, blaming the whiteness of elite sundown suburbs on their wealth actually reverses the causality of caste and class. It is mostly the other way around: racial and religious exclusion came first, not class. Suburbs that kept out blacks and Jews became more prestigious, so they attracted the very rich. The absence of African Americans itself became a selling point, which in turn helped these suburbs become so affluent because houses there commanded higher prices. To this day, all-white suburbs attract the very rich. Twelve of the communities on
Worth
magazine’s list of 50 richest towns were all-white in 2000 or had just one or two African American families. Typically they were all-white first and became rich only when affluent families moved in. After 1959, for example, when Jews were let into La Jolla, California, a number of WASP families fled from La Jolla to Rancho Santa Fe, fifteen miles north and inland from the beach. Now Rancho Santa Fe is #16 on
Worth
’s list, well above La Jolla at #85,
19
based on median home price.
20
In yet another way, blaming blacks for being poor, as a cause of segregation, reverses cause and effect. As Chapter 12 shows, residential segregation itself constrains and diminishes the cultural capital and social connections of African Americans, thus artificially decreasing their income and wealth. It won’t do to then use blacks’ lower income and wealth to explain residential segregation.
Other Nonsensical “Causes”
 
Related to the isolation hypothesis is climate. A historical society leader in western Maryland explained why Garrett County had only a handful of African Americans when all other Maryland counties had at least a thousand: “It’s too cold here.” Whites “know” that African Americans don’t like cold weather, which “explains” why they didn’t move to a given northern town or county. Persons making this claim have obviously never been to Detroit, where African Americans outnumber European Americans three to one, yet winter punishes anyone not prepared for its rigors. Garrett County is hardly colder than Detroit—hardly colder in 2002, for that matter, when I had the conversation, than it had been in 1890, when it had 185 African Americans. The fact that the very next county to the east had more than 1,000 African Americans, while Garrett County had at most one black household, is a dead giveaway. Such abrupt disparities can only result from different racial policies, not from factors such as climate.
21
Counties in Maine or Wisconsin were also no warmer in 1865–90, when African Americans were moving into them, than in 1890–1940, when they were moving out. Moreover, African Americans returned to most Wisconsin all-white towns between 1970 and 1990. Manitowoc, a sundown town that had just 2 African Americans in 1970, had 71 by 1990, and Oshkosh had a whopping 435 (approaching 1% of its total population). The migration of African Americans to towns throughout Wisconsin after 1970, like their earlier arrival before 1890, underscores that something other than isolation or climate was required to force their departure between 1890 and 1940. Global warming to the contrary, Wisconsin winters did not turn noticeably warmer after 1970, when blacks were again moving into formerly all-white counties and towns across the state.
Also related to isolation is the claim that independent sundown towns are miserable backwaters. “Who would
want
to live there?” a white professor at Texas A & M University in Commerce suggested in 1999, referring to Cumby, a small nearby sundown town. “What a dump!” A white woman from Buffalo said, “There’s nothing there!” referring to nearby Tonawanda and North Tonawanda. To be sure, some sundown towns
are
small, isolated, and backward—hardly the stars to which rational Americans of any race would hitch their wagons. Cumby, for example,
is
a dump. Moreover, during the twentieth century Americans of all races did migrate to cities, which they believed offered cultural as well as educational and economic opportunities lacking in small towns. Nevertheless, even to explain why towns as small, isolated, and backward as Cumby have
no
African Americans, “small, isolated, and backward” won’t do, because humans are unpredictable. People are always moving into and out of small towns in America, even into dying towns, for all kinds of reasons. So would African Americans if given a chance. Indeed, so
did
African Americans between 1865 and 1890 and, in those places whose exclusionary policies have cracked, between 1980 or 1990 and 2005. The “backwater” explanation is rarely offered by residents of a town itself, because it puts down their town and because they know that it isn’t so bad that a family has to be irrational to move into it.
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Amazingly, I have heard this explanation given for whole regions—the Ozarks, straddling the Missouri-Arkansas line for nearly 300 miles; the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky; the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles; large swaths of southern Illinois and southern Indiana; the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; and parts of Appalachia. “Who would want to live there, anyway?” But implying that African Americans have been making rational unconstrained choices to avoid such towns won’t do, because they haven’t been.
23
Their choices have been constrained. Indeed, many of the people who supply these explanations do know that the place under discussion has kept out African Americans by policy. They put down the town or even the region not really to explain its whiteness but merely to make it seem a problem not worth fixing.
Moreover, backwater isolation certainly wasn’t judged adequate by whites who lived in such isolated little towns as Cumby, or De Land or Villa Grove, Illinois. They never relied on their towns’ smallness, backwardness, or remoteness from black population centers to “protect” themselves from African Americans, instead taking care to pass ordinances, blow whistles, or engage in other acts, formal or informal, to keep them out. Furthermore, many all-white towns are not isolated. Some are on important transportation routes, including Effingham, Illinois, or Tonawanda, New York. Some are themselves important manufacturing or educational centers, such as Appleton, Wisconsin; Niles, Ohio; or Norman, Oklahoma. Isolation and happenstance make even less sense as explanations for sundown suburbs, because some of America’s whitest suburbs grew up right next to some of our blackest cities.
All of these tautological and nonsensical “causes”—lack of skills, lack of jobs, social isolation, “natural,” social class, climate, avoidance of backwaters—share two characteristics. First, they minimize the problem. Second, they let white society off the hook for it, relying instead on individual choices by African Americans. In recent years, some social scientists, such as Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom, have increasingly relied upon individual decisions by African American families to explain America’s intractable residential segregation. Blacks don’t want to live in an ocean of white faces, goes the reasoning. If we stop to think, however, sundown towns and suburbs cannot possibly result from decisions by people of color who happily choose to live in black neighborhoods. For there would always be at least
a few
African Americans who would choose to live in majority-white neighborhoods, for some of the same reasons whites do: better schooling, nicer parks, investment value, and social status, in the case of elite suburbs. Others would move for convenience—some African Americans who care for patients in the mental hospital in Anna, Illinois, for example, might choose to live there. Still others would wind up in formerly white towns owing simply to the vagaries of fortune. Voluntary choice simply
cannot
explain what kept sundown towns and suburbs
so
white for so many decades. Some underlying historical and sociological causes do. We will explore three: political ideology, white ethnic solidarity, and labor strife.
24
Political Ideology as a Cause of Sundown Towns
 
From its inception, the Democratic Party was “the White Man’s Party.” Today it is hard for Americans to understand how racist the Democrats became during the Nadir, especially since the two parties flipflopped on this issue beginning in 1964. Historian Nicole Etcheson writes that midwestern Democrats supported what Chief Justice Taney said about black rights in
Dred Scott
: “that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Some Republicans believed African Americans should have all the rights of citizenship, while others, including Abraham Lincoln, were “not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes,” as Lincoln put it in Charleston, Illinois, in 1858. As the Civil War progressed, Republican thinking about African Americans moved toward full equality. Democrats underwent no such ideological advance.
25
In the Midwest I found a striking correlation between counties or towns voting Democratic in the 1850s and driving out their African Americans half a century later. Almost every town on the Illinois River, for example, which stretches diagonally across Illinois from the Mississippi near St. Louis northeast toward Chicago, voted for the Democratic candidate for president in 1868, except for Peoria. The same voting pattern held from at least 1856 to 1892. Between 1890 and 1930, almost every town along the river went sundown, except for Peoria. Why? The Illinois River valley was settled mostly by Democrats from Kentucky and Tennessee. Many of them were exceptionally racist to begin with, having left Kentucky and Tennessee to avoid both slavery and black people. Being a Democrat played a still greater role, owing to the continuing racism expressed by candidates of the Democratic Party.
We can see this same pattern of white supremacy in county histories. In every county along the Illinois River from the Mississippi River to LaSalle-Peru except one, local histories tell of substantial pro-Confederate sentiment during the Civil War. Moreover, treatments of the Civil War in these county histories, whether written in the late nineteenth century or as late as the 1980s, display a white perspective: they rarely mention slavery and say nothing about African Americans. Peoria, the largest city on the Illinois River, is the exception. The rhetoric in its late-nineteenth-century histories is profoundly different, even abolitionist. An 1880 Peoria history tells how midwestern farmers ignored slavery in the 1850s: “Immediately surrounded with peace and tranquility, they paid but little attention to the rumored plots and plans of those who lived and grew rich from the sweat and toil, and blood and flesh of others—aye, even trafficked in the offspring of their own loins.” Histories in Democratic counties would never use such language.
26
Public history as displayed on the landscape shows the same pattern. Peoria dedicated a large Civil War monument shortly after the war ended. Thirty thousand people attended, and the 1880 account of the monument tells how it “would commemorate for all time the names of . . . the men who gave their lives in defense of the Union and of human rights.” In Democratic counties, “defense of the Union” would rarely be conjoined with “human rights.” Peorians put up another Civil War monument a few years later in Springdale Cemetery, proclaiming “Liberty / Justice / Equality / Pro Patria.” Equality would never secure a place on the landscape in a Democratic county.
So it should come as no surprise that during the Nadir, every town on the river
except Peoria,
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from the hamlets of Calhoun County all the way up to LaSalle-Peru, drove out or kept out African Americans.
Towns in other parts of Illinois show the same relationship. When Anna-Jonesboro expelled its black population in 1909, political background played a key role. Anna and Jonesboro were overwhelmingly Democratic, while Cobden was partly Republican. During the Civil War, Union County Democrats meeting in Jonesboro adopted a resolution protesting “the introduction of the Negro into our midst” and citing “with apprehension the dangers of robber and violence” to be expected from such an addition to the community. So the 1909 expulsion of African Americans from Anna-Jonesboro was neither novel nor surprising. Nor was Cobden’s relative tolerance.
In central Illinois, Mattoon was Republican, in contrast to the next town to the northwest, Sullivan, seat of Moultrie County, highly Democratic. That political difference in 1860 translated to a high level of anti-black sentiment many decades later. Moultrie County had “a few families of the colored race” in 1880, according to an 1881 history, but only one African American was left by 1920. In the 1920s, the KKK burned crosses in Sullivan. Later, according to one oral history report, Sullivan wound up with a sign that read “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On Your Ass.” Mattoon, while no race relations haven, has had a stable African American community for many decades.
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