Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (5 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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First—and most basically—it happened. Our country
did
do that. Surely the fact that since about 1890, thousands of towns across the United States kept out African Americans, while others excluded Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Native, or Mexican Americans, is worth knowing. So is the panoply of methods whites employed to accomplish this end. I hope this book prompts readers to question all-white communities everywhere, rather than take them for granted. Whenever the census shows that a town or county has been all-white or overwhelmingly white for decades, we do well to investigate further, since across the nation, most all-white towns were that way intentionally. Telling the truth about them is the right thing to do.
It is also true that the powers that be don’t want us to learn about their policy of exclusion and have sometimes tried to suppress the knowledge. The truth about sundown towns implicates the powers that be. The role played by governments regarding race relations can hardly be characterized as benign or even race-neutral. From the towns that passed sundown ordinances, to the county sheriffs who escorted black would-be residents back across the county line, to the states that passed laws enabling municipalities to zone out “undesirables,” to the federal government—whose lending and insuring policies from the 1930s to the 1960s
required
sundown neighborhoods and suburbs—our governments openly favored white supremacy and helped to create and maintain all-white communities. So did most of our banks, realtors, and police chiefs. If public relations offices, Chambers of Commerce, and local historical societies don’t want us to know something, perhaps that something is worth learning. After all, how can we deal with something if we cannot even face it?
There are other reasons to incorporate sundown towns into our accounts of our nation’s past. “I am anxious for this book,” a high school history teacher in Pennsylvania wrote.
I tend to collect evidence for my students that racism and discrimination still exist. Many like to pass it off as a part of the distant (before they were born) past, thus no further energy or thought need be expended on the issue!
 
Chronicling the sundown town movement teaches us that something significant has been left out of the broad history of race in America as it is usually taught. It opens a door into an entire era that America has kept locked away in a closet. I hope that
Sundown Towns
will transform Americans’ understanding of race relations in the North during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Realizing that blatant racial exclusion increased during the first half of the twentieth century and in many places continues into the twenty-first can help mobilize Americans today to expend energy to end these practices.
36
Many people wonder why African Americans have made so little progress, given that 140 years have passed since slavery ended. They do not understand that in some ways, African Americans lived in better and more integrated conditions in the 1870s and 1880s, that residential segregation then grew worse until about 1968, and that it did not start to decrease again until the 1970s and 1980s, well after the Civil Rights Movement ended. Recovering the memory of the
increasing
oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.
Sundown Towns Persist
 
In other spheres of race relations, America has made great strides. The attention given to southern segregation—not just by historians but, more importantly, by the Civil Rights Movement and the courts, beginning in 1954—ended its more appalling practices. Whites, blacks, and other races ride the same subways, buses, trains, and planes. Americans of all backgrounds work together in offices, restaurants, factories, and the military. Universities, north and south, now enroll African American undergraduates; some even compete for them. Republican as well as Democratic administrations include African Americans in important positions as a matter of course. We have made far less progress, however, regarding where we live. Aided by neglect, the number of sundown towns and suburbs continued to grow after 1954, peaking around 1968. Many sundown towns had not a single black household as late as the 2000 census, and some still openly exclude to this day.
Many whites still feel threatened at the prospect of African American neighbors—maybe not just one, but of any appreciable number. Residential segregation persists at high levels. “What is more,” wrote Stephen Meyer in his 2000 book,
As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door,
“many Americans of both races have come to accept racial separation as appropriate.” Indeed, many whites see residential segregation as
desirable.
Across America, such elite sundown suburbs
37
as Darien, Connecticut; Naperville, Illinois; and Edina, Minnesota, are sought-after addresses, partly owing to, rather than despite, their racial makeup.
38
Therefore this book has important implications for current racial policies. Most attempts to understand or ameliorate America’s astounding residential concentrations of African Americans and Latinos have focused on the ghetto, barrio, or “changing neighborhood.” We shall see, however, that these problem areas result primarily from exclusion elsewhere in the social system—from sundown towns and suburbs. But despite their causal importance, these white “ghettoes” have been dramatically underresearched. As a result, few Americans realize that metropolitan areas are not “naturally” segregated and that suburban whiteness has been produced by unsavory policies that continue in part to this day. If Americans understood the origins of overwhelmingly white communities, they might see that such neighborhoods are nothing to be proud of.
On the contrary, all this residential exclusion is bad for our nation. In fact, residential segregation is one reason race continues to be such a problem in America. But race really isn’t the problem. Exclusion is the problem. The ghetto—with all its pathologies—isn’t the problem; the elite sundown suburb—seemingly devoid of social difficulties—is the problem. As soon as we realize that the problem in America is white supremacy, rather than black existence or black inferiority, then it becomes clear that sundown towns and suburbs are an intensification of the problem, not a solution to it. So long as racial inequality is encoded in the most basic single fact in our society—where one can live—the United States will face continuing racial tension, if not overt conflict.
Thus the continued existence of overwhelmingly white communities is terribly important. Moreover, residential segregation exacerbates all other forms of racial discrimination. Segregated neighborhoods make it easier to discriminate against African Americans in schooling, housing, and city services, for instance. We shall see that residential segregation also causes employment inequalities by isolating African Americans from the social networks where job openings are discussed. Thus some of the inadequacies for which white Americans blame black Americans are products of, rather than excuses for, residential segregation.
All-white communities also make it easier for their residents to think badly of nonwhites. Because so many whites live in sundown neighborhoods, their stereotypes about how African Americans live remain intact, unchallenged by contact with actual black families living day-to-day lives. In fact, these stereotypes get intensified because they help rationalize living in sundown neighborhoods in the first place. Black stereotypes about whites also go unchallenged by experience. Trying to teach second-graders not to be prejudiced is an uphill battle in an all-white primary school in a culture that values all-white communities. Among adults, living in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods and suburbs ties in with opposing policies that might decrease the sharp differences between the life chances of blacks and whites in our society.
The Plan of the Book
 
This book is divided into six parts. Part I, “Introduction,” consists of this chapter, “The Importance of Sundown Towns,” and Chapter 2, “The Nadir: Incubator of Sundown Towns.” Chapter 2 begins with the “springtime of race relations” following the Civil War, when blacks moved everywhere in America. Then it tells of the time when race relations actually moved backward—the era that not only gave rise to sundown towns, but made them seem necessary, at least to some white Americans. Today’s overwhelmingly white towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods linger as living legacies from that tragic period when race relations grew harsher.
Part II, “The History of Sundown Towns,” includes three chapters. Chapter 3, “The Great Retreat,” suggests a term for the massive strategic withdrawal that African Americans—and Chinese Americans before them—were forced to make from northern and western towns and rural areas to our large cities. Until now, historians have largely overlooked the forced departure of minorities, the Nadir period in the North that gave rise to the Great Retreat, and the “springtime of race relations” in the North that preceded the Nadir. “The Great Retreat” also shows statistically how widespread the sundown town movement was. Chapter 4, “How Sundown Towns Were Created,” explains the mechanisms underlying these statistics. It supplies examples of the use of violence, threats, law, and official policy; informal means such as freeze-outs and buyouts; and suburban methods including zoning and public planning, all in the service of creating all-white communities. Chapter 5, “Sundown Suburbs,” notes that the rush to the suburbs wasn’t originally racial but became racially tagged after about 1900. Sundown suburbs then grew even more widespread than independent sundown towns and persisted in forming into the late 1960s. By the time the federal government finally switched sides and tried to undo the resulting segregation, great damage had been done to our metropolitan areas.
Part III, “The Sociology of Sundown Towns,” also contains three chapters. Often a sundown town is located near an interracial town. What explains why the first went sundown while the second did not? What explains Anna-Jonesboro, for example, when five miles north, Cobden, Illinois, always allowed African Americans to live in it? Chapter 6, “Underlying Causes,” suggests several basic conditions that underlie and predict sundown towns; unaware of these factors, many residents believe nonsensical or tautological “reasons.” Chapter 7, “Catalysts and Origin Myths,” deconstructs the triggering incidents that residents often invoke to justify their town’s policy and shows how these stories function as origin myths. Chapter 8, “Hidden in Plain View: Knowing and Not Knowing About Sundown Towns,” tells why most Americans have no idea that sundown towns exist. This chapter also sets forth the methods and evidence underlying the claims made throughout the book. Some readers suggested relegating this material to an appendix, but I need you to read the book actively, assessing my claims as you go along. I invite skeptics (which I hope includes all readers) to turn to this chapter at any point, and also to the “Portfolio” in the center of the book—photographs and newspaper headlines that introduce visually some of the evidence for these claims.
The two chapters of Part IV, “Sundown Towns in Operation,” explain how, once they made their decision to go all-white, sundown communities managed to stay so white for so long. Chapter 9, “Enforcement,” tells the sometimes heartbreaking consequences inflicted upon casual and even inadvertent visitors caught after dark in sundown towns, and the still worse repercussions that awaited persons of color who tried to move in permanently. Chapter 10, “Exceptions to the Sundown Rule,” explains that many all-white towns allowed an exceptional African American or Chinese American or two to stay, even as they defined their communities as sundown towns. Usually these exceptions reinforced the sundown rule by making it all the more obvious.
Part V, “Effects of Sundown Towns” answers the question, what difference do these towns make? Its three chapters show that they have bad effects “On Whites” (Chapter 11), “On Blacks” (Chapter 12), and “On the Social System” (Chapter 13). The resulting pattern of “chocolate cites and vanilla suburbs” has damaged everything from Republican Party platforms to black employability and morale.
Part VI, “The Present and Future of Sundown Towns,” contains two chapters. Chapter 14, “Sundown Towns Today,” tells that many communities relaxed their prohibitions since about 1980, while others did not. This recent improvement has made choosing the appropriate verb tense difficult. Putting a practice in the past—“Fans in many sundown towns seemed affronted that African Americans dared to play in their town”—would mislead, because fans in many sundown towns continue to taunt visiting interracial athletic teams. At the same time, writing “such elite sundown suburbs as Darien, Connecticut” might imply that Darien still keeps blacks out today—which I don’t know and even doubt. I resolved my verb tense dilemma as best I could, usually using the continuing past (“has excluded”) or the present tense (“keeps out”) if a town kept out African Americans (or other groups) for decades, regardless of whether it does so now.
39
Such statements do not necessarily mean that the town is sundown to this day.
Please do not assume that a town still keeps out African Americans without checking it out yourself. Meanwhile, concurrent with this improvement, Americans have also been developing new forms of exclusion, based no longer on race—at least not explicitly—but on differences in social class that then get reified on the landscape in the form of gated communities.
The final chapter is titled “The Remedy: Integrated Neighborhoods and Towns.” It suggests tactics for everyone from members of Congress to individual homeowners who want to end sundown towns—surely a national disgrace.

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