Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (49 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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In about 1952, the high school band director at LaSalle-Peru was coordinating the visit of the university band of a Big Ten school, probably the University of Michigan. As Chapter 1 told, LaSalle and Peru are adjoining sundown towns on the Illinois River in northern Illinois. To save costs, he planned to have his band members house the visiting university students. Then he got advance publicity for their concert, including a photograph of the band, and realized several of its members were African American. What to do? According to my source, a student at the time, “he feared being in violation of the unwritten but well-acknowledged sundown rule.” His prudent solution: he went to a band member who lived outside LaSalle-Peru but in the school district, and asked him to host the African American band members. “This worked out all right, and I don’t recall any fracas or community uprising.”
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Perhaps the most remarkable example of the power of the city line—and yet it was subtle, even invisible until pointed out—was at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania in the late 1940s, probably continuing into the ’50s. According to a 1950 graduate of the college, to house returning servicemen after World War II, Elizabethtown College put up a barracks-like “dormitory.” One end of the long building extended across the city line, so to abide by Elizabethtown’s sundown rule, the college required its black students to live in that end of the barracks. The students then crossed over into Elizabethtown within their own dormitory and exited on campus to attend class. In 1948 or 1949, a black gospel quartet performed at the college and had to be put up for the night. As in LaSalle-Peru, a farmer outside the town provided the hospitality.
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In sundown counties, the county line plays the role of the city limits. Often, especially in the Cumberlands and Appalachia, it boasted the usual sundown signs. A 1906 report in the
Charlotte Observer
tells what happened when a telephone trunk line was put through Madison County, a sundown county
60
in western North Carolina:
Negroes were employed on the works and the company building the line was put in some inconvenience by the citizens of Madison refusing to allow the Negroes to stay in the county over night. The Negro laborers were forced to go beyond the Madison county line to spend their nights.
61
 
The power of the city limits can be seen still more graphically in suburbia. Often the jurisdictional line between city and suburb is not even visible on the landscape, yet these lines frequently result in an all-white suburb on one side, a majority-black neighborhood just across the street. (Portfolio 30 shows one such line in Maryland.) In 2002, reporter Dante Chinni pointed out that driving along Eight Mile Road—the boundary between overwhelming black Detroit and sundown suburb Warren—shows visually that social class is not responsible for suburban segregation, because the houses look the same on both sides.
In cities like Warren the racial contrast is remarkable. The small subdivisions just north of Eight Mile look almost like replicas of the neighborhoods on the south side in Detroit. The streets on both sides are lined with small, largely well-kept houses populated mostly by blue-collar workers. But the color line remains marked.
 
Something artificial and additional, obviously tied to the invisible line between city and suburb, has kept African Americans on one side in Detroit, whites on the other in Warren or Grosse Pointe. When boundaries also form racial divides, that shows the extent to which public policies have maintained all-white suburbs.
62
Zoning
 
Suburban incorporation gave suburbs power over zoning, which in turn conferred “unprecedented power to control development,” according to historian David Freund, which then played a key role in keeping suburbs white. Originally meant to keep out disamenities such as polluting industries, zoning became a tool to keep out the “wrong kind of people.” After such decisions as
Lee Sing
and
Buchanan v. Warley
(described in Chapter 4) made it more difficult to exclude blacks openly, suburban town governments soon saw that “regular” zoning might accomplish the same result, at least on a class basis. Beginning as early as 1900 and continuing “for many years,” sociologist Gary Orfield notes, “suburban governments used their zoning authority to exclude African Americans.” It was no accident that Edina became the first town in Minnesota to set in place a comprehensive zoning ordinance, Edina being the premier sundown suburb of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Cities like Edina banned mobile homes, public housing, subsidized housing, housing for the elderly, and apartments—and thus the kind of people who would live in such housing.
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In the New York metropolitan area in the mid-1970s, more than 99% of all undeveloped land zoned for residential use was restricted to single-family housing. The next step was to impose minimum acreage requirements for single-family homes. During the 1960s, more than 150 New Jersey suburbs increased their minimum lot sizes. In Connecticut, in 1978, more than 70% of all residentially zoned land carried a one-acre minimum lot size. Greenwich, an upper-class suburb of New York City, had a four-acre minimum. Much of St. Louis County surrounding St. Louis has a three-acre minimum. Given the cost of land in metropolitan areas, such large-lot zoning keeps out inexpensive homes and the people who might buy them. To make doubly sure, elite suburbs require new houses to be larger than a certain number of square feet or cost more than a certain amount. These economic measures could not keep out affluent African Americans, but the reputation they fostered for community elitism did.
64
Incorporation also let local officials decide if their communities would participate in subsidized or public housing. “Most suburbs never created local housing authorities,” according to Michael Danielson, so they never got public housing. Some highly populated suburban counties did create public housing authorities but neglected to build any, he further points out. “DuPage County Housing Authority [just west of Chicago] was established in 1942, but had yet to construct a single unit 30 years later.” St. Louis County, which surrounds St. Louis on three sides, had 50 units of public housing in 1970 for a population of 956,000, while St. Louis city had 10,000 units for a population of 622,000. Even suburbs that
do
accept public housing often limit it to the elderly or require prior residence in the suburb for at least a year.
65
Race, not the market, usually underlies suburban vetoes of public housing and subsidized housing. After a developer tried to build subsidized housing in Parma, a sundown suburb of Cleveland, voters in 1971 overwhelmingly endorsed a proposal requiring public approval for any subsidized housing project. Other Cleveland suburbs followed suit. “Racial fears were prominent in the controversy,” Danielson reports. In 1970, Parma had just 50 African Americans in a total population of 100,216, and “one official announced that he did ‘not want Negroes in the City of Parma.’ ” From coast to coast, sundown suburbs of all social classes have voted down public housing. And not just public housing—any housing that African Americans might likely inhabit. After Ford opened a huge assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, for example, the town refused to let the United Auto Workers build subsidized housing there, so thousands of workers, many of them African American, had to commute every day from Newark.
66
Farley and Frey explain how sundown suburbs have used their independent “zoning laws, school system, and police” to maintain racial purity:
Zoning ordinances were changed and variances granted or denied to prevent construction that might be open to blacks. Public schools hired white teachers, administrators, and coaches. As a result, in most Midwestern and Eastern metropolitan areas, white families who wished to leave a racially changing city could choose from a variety of suburbs knowing their neighbors would be white and that their children would attend segregated schools.
 
Circularities get built in. Some working-class or multiclass sundown suburbs have passed ordinances requiring teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other city workers to live within their corporate limits. Thus they can be assured that all their employees will be white. Their schools, police departments, and other offices then present all-white facades to any black would-be newcomers. In turn, African Americans are ineligible to be hired for future openings, since they would first have to move in to be considered. This is subtler than an open prohibition: race does not get used as a criterion for hiring or for residence, yet the suburb stays white.
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When all else fails and a black family actually manages to acquire a house in a sundown community, incorporation confers the right to take it for the “public good.” No matter if the black family doesn’t want to sell, even for an above-market price. For many decades, independent towns and sundown suburbs alike have used this power of eminent domain to force the sale, condemning the land for a public purpose such as a park or school playground. For instance, in Deerfield, a sundown suburb fifteen miles northwest of Chicago, the Progress Development Corporation bought two tracts of land in 1959 and planned to build integrated housing. An Episcopal minister told his congregation about it, which, according to Ian McMahan, “was as if a bomb had exploded in the quiet town of Deerfield.” First the city invented trivial building violations to stop the work. Then an organization called the North Shore Residents’ Association polled Deerfield residents and found they were eight to one against letting blacks in. Finally, Deerfield decided to keep out the development by designating the tracts as parks; that proposal passed in a referendum in late 1959 but “only” by a two-to-one margin, with an astonishing 95% of all eligible voters casting ballots. Progress Development took Deerfield to court, accusing the city of coming up with the parks as subterfuges to stay all-white, but McMahan says Deerfield prevailed, at least as of 1962, and he must be right, because 40 years later, of 18,420 residents, only 61 were African American.
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Defended Neighborhoods
 
Officials of sundown suburbs also have subtler weapons at their disposal in their fight to keep their communities white. Their jobs have two main components—providing public services and keeping out undesirables—according to research in the 1960s summarized by Danielson. Sometimes the two conflict, and when they do, “residents of upper- and middle-class suburbs in the Philadelphia area ranked maintenance of their community’s social characteristics—defined in terms of keeping out ‘undesirables’ and maintaining the ‘quality’ of residents—as a more important objective for local government than . . . the provision of public services.” At the “behest” of the wealthy, as Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen put it in their study of suburban Long Island, “officials in Nassau County allowed all public roads to fall into disrepair. Moreover, private estate roads were built like mazes—winding and deliberately confusing. Most of the North and South Shore beaches were marked CLOSED with large private property signs, and were guarded as well.” Baumgartner found that residents of “Hampton,” her pseudonym for a New York City suburb, “would rather bear the inconvenience of narrow and congested streets on a day-by-day basis than make it easier for the inhabitants of New York City to reach the town.” Even street signs are in short supply in Darien, Connecticut, making it hard to find one’s way around that elite sundown suburb. Darien doesn’t really
want
a lot of visitors, a resident pointed out, and keeping Darien confusing for strangers might deter criminals—perhaps a veiled reference to African Americans. Some Darien residential streets are even posted “Private.”
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Many sundown suburbs thus exemplify what urban sociologists call “defended neighborhoods.” Sidewalks and bike paths are rare and do not connect to those in other communities inhabited by residents of lower social and racial status. Some white suburbs of San Francisco opted out of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, fearing it might encourage African Americans to move in. Some white suburbs and neighborhoods in and around Washington, D.C., similarly showed no interest in that area’s Metro rapid transit. Many sundown suburbs choose not to provide other public amenities that might draw outsiders. If by accident of geography or history they already have such facilities, they usually make access difficult for outsiders. Thus suburbs may admit only residents to beaches. Parks, tennis courts, and playgrounds may be few or located on minor roads where visitors will be unlikely to find them. Rather than set aside large areas for parks, private lawns take on a park-like appearance. Some of these towns come to exemplify what economist John Kenneth Galbraith famously called “public squalor and private affluence.” According to Frederique Krupa, writing in 1993, San Marino, an elite suburb of Los Angeles, “closes its parks on weekends to make sure the neighboring Asian and Latin communities are excluded,” thus keeping out everyone, even its own residents.
70
Policies and Ordinances
 
For years, the public policies and restrictions of suburbs have carried a purposeful racial tinge and have been selectively enforced. Their racial aspect was evident to Bob Johnson and his family in southern California in 1960:
We lived in Sunland near Glendale. We took the kids to the Verdugo Plunge [swimming pool] in Glendale. There was a sign that said only for residents of Glendale. We are white and did not want to go back home, so we paid our money and they did not ask for our drivers license or identification. I was puzzled how they monitored whether or not I was from Glendale. Then I realized that was a way to keep blacks out since no blacks lived in Glendale.
 

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