Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (51 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Sometimes real estate agents in sundown towns have screened out the “wrong kind” of Gentile
whites.
An interesting incident in Martinsville, Indiana, in about 1995, shows an agent unhappy with her would-be clients. Jonathan Welch had a new job in Franklin; his wife, Amy, worked in Green-castle. Martinsville lies in between, so they shopped there for a home. In Amy Welch’s words:
We spent an evening driving around the village, which seemed very nice, and found a beautiful house that we decided to call on. I made arrangements with the real-estate lady to view the house; Jon unfortunately couldn’t come with. The house seemed nice, as was the agent. . . . When the tour was complete, she told me I was more than welcome to call her with any questions or concerns and gave me her business card. When I took out my wallet to put away her card, my picture fold fell out onto the bar and opened up to a portrait of some very good friends—good friends who happen to be engaged and Japanese and African American. She looked at the photo, put her finger on the very corner of the picture and turned it slowly toward her, like it could jump up and bite her if she made any sudden movements! Anyway, she said to me: “Oh, you associate with those kind of people?” . . . I turned her business card around to her in the same manner and said, “Yup.” And left.
 
Obviously, the realtor felt that for Martinsville to stay all-white required not only keeping out blacks, but also vigilance as to the type of whites one allows in.
87
Other Elements of the “System”
 
Realtors were only part of the system that kept African Americans out of sundown suburbs. Bankers played key roles. In the mid-1950s, the Detroit Urban League reported conversations with various bankers. One said he would loan to blacks regardless of where they bought, but another wouldn’t deal with African Americans, period. A third “would not make the first Negro loan in a white area.” Another banker tried “to substantiate this position by contending that it is not good common sense to make one friend and alienate eighteen friends, even though the one is a sound credit risk.” The FHA sided with the majority. In most cities, no banker like the first even existed.
FHA approval is often required for a bank loan, and Chapter 5 explained how racist were its national policies. In Detroit, according to Thomas Sugrue, author of
Origins of the Urban Crisis,
federal appraisors working for the Home Owners Loan Corporation, predecessor to the FHA, gave a D to “every Detroit neighborhood with even a tiny African American population” and colored it red on their maps. The FHA inherited these maps and the tradition of redlining, nationally as well as in Detroit. Should a potential buyer somehow surmount the credit hurdle, every subsequent step of the homebuy-ing process requires cooperation with someone—invariably someone white in a sundown suburb. The home has to be inspected or appraised, a title search must be completed and the title insured, and so forth. Each of these steps proved difficult or impossible for black would-be homebuyers.
88
The Grosse Pointe System
 
Realtors in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, also screened whites, but in a cruder manner. They developed a “point system” (no pun intended) for keeping out undesirables. When the system became public knowledge in 1960, a furor of publicity erupted, including stories in the
New York Times
and
Time
magazine. Don and Mary Hunt, author of several guides to Michigan, supply a useful summary:
For years into the 1950s, prospective Grosse Pointe home buyers were excluded by the Grosse Pointe Realtors’ infamous point system. Prospective buyers were assigned points to qualify for the privilege of living here. A maximum score was 100, with 50 points the minimum for ethnically inoffensive applicants [WASPs]. But Poles had to score 55 points, Greeks 65, Italians, 75, and Jews 85. The private detectives hired to fill out the reports didn’t even bother to rate African Americans or Asian Americans. The questions included:
1. Is their way of living typically American?
2. Appearances—swarthy, slightly swarthy, or not at all?
3. Accents—pronounced, medium, slight, not at all?
4. Dress—neat, sloppy, flashy, or conservative?
 
Realtors relied on private investigators who interviewed neighbors of would-be newcomers. Although Jews could allegedly gain entry, they had to be pretty special. Dr.J. B. Rosenbaum was “only half-Jewish” and his wife was a Gentile. Moreover, his mother was a direct descendant of Carter Braxton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Rosenbaum had invented an artificial heart and had received several academic awards in recognition of this achievement. Grosse Pointe rejected him.
89
The Grosse Pointe Brokers Association threatened to expel any member who didn’t use the point system. This was a meaningful threat, because without cooperation from other realtors, representing buyers and sellers, they could no longer do business in the community. And association members backed up the threat with action, expelling at least two members for selling to ineligible buyers under the point system before 1960. One had sold to Italian Americans, the other to a doctor who had remarried and whose new wife had not been screened. No member had dared sell to an African American.
90
The 1960 furor seemed to lead to action. In May 1960, Michigan’s attorney general and the state’s commissioner of corporation securities ordered Grosse Pointe to abandon the point system within 30 days. The minister of a Grosse Pointe church stated, “Jesus Christ could never qualify for residence in Grosse Pointe,” which was true, of course, he being Jewish and probably swarthy to boot. “It’s very unfortunate that the word ‘swarthy’ ever was used,” said the secretary of the Grosse Pointe Brokers Association, still defending the point system. “In our definition, the word ‘swarthy’ doesn’t always mean what it says. Applied to Jews, it would mean how much like a Jew does he look. This relates to his features, rather than just coloring.” After hearings on Grosse Pointe, the commissioner of corporation securities, Lawrence Gubow, issued an administrative regulation known as Rule 9, barring realtors from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or national origin.
Ultimately, however, the publicity resulted in no change. According to Norman C. Thomas, who wrote the standard work on the subject, “Reaction to Rule 9 was swift and vigorous.” Officials of the Grosse Pointe Property Owners Association “launched a movement to write into the Michigan constitution an unqualified right of a property owner to refuse to sell or rent ‘to any person whatsoever.’ ” The state legislature then passed a law specifically repealing Rule 9, but the Democratic governor vetoed it. Finally, in 1962 the Michigan Supreme Court unanimously killed Rule 9. It was too much policy making by administrative fiat, the court said, intruding into the powers of the legislature. Grosse Pointe realtors went back to business as usual with fair-skinned whites only.
91
As implied by the intervention of the Grosse Pointe Property Owners Association, realtors were not the only problem. In 1969, nine years after the scandal over the point system, some residents in Grosse Pointe Farms, one of the five related towns known collectively as Grosse Pointe, tried to get their community to agree with the principle of open housing, which had been endorsed by Congress and the Supreme Court just the year before. Calling themselves the Committee on Open Housing, they proposed an ordinance that levied civil penalties against discrimination in housing on the basis of race, sex, age, or national origin. “It was the showdown for Grosse Pointe on integration,” according to Kathy Cosseboom, author of a book on race relations in Grosse Pointe. The Real Estate Board and the Grosse Pointe Property Owners’ Association opposed it. The ordinance went down to defeat, 2,271 to 1,596, with half of all registered voters going to the polls, high for such a referendum.
92
Despite these attitudes, in July 1966, the first African American family moved into Grosse Pointe. They had not been able to buy directly through a realtor, and they met with some hostility as well as some welcome from residents. Two months after they moved in, whites placed gravestones on their front lawn. Nevertheless, another black family moved in. The next year, however, both families moved out of the region. In March 1968, shortly before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Grosse Pointe High School; he was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers. In 1990, Grosse Pointe had just twelve African American households, most of them live-in domestic couples, according to political scientist Andrew Hacker.
93
The publicity does allow us to see how exclusion worked in one elite suburb. Otherwise, Grosse Pointe was hardly exceptional. According to Cosseboom, similar crises over sundown policies took place in nearby Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills. Within 10 miles of Detroit lie perhaps 40 more sundown suburbs, including Grosse Ile and Wyandotte—some elite, some middle-class, some working-class, some multiclass.
94
Picking on Children
 
An additional factor keeping African American families out of all-white counties and towns was the matter of schooling for their children. Just raising the question would be likely to provoke a hostile response from whites in a sundown jurisdiction. In states that practiced de jure segregation—Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, and parts of Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma, as well as the traditional South—white officials in sundown towns sometimes encouraged threats or violence against a black family to avoid the expense of setting up a new black school for them. In Duncan, Arizona, for example, the signs at the edge of town after World War II “included the usual ‘Welcome’ and ‘Goodbye,’ but also, ‘Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You Here,’ ” according to Betty Toomes, who lived in Duncan at the time. In 1949, “a Mormon farmer who needed a large number of hands on his 100-acre cotton field” hired the Earl and Corinne Randolph family and provided them with a house. They became “the first colored family ever to live there.” Toomes accompanied Corinne Randolph to see the principal of the Consolidated Duncan Schools to get their children enrolled. He promised her an answer the next day. The answer came that very night: after midnight the Randolphs were “awakened by shots and the sounds of horses’ hoofs very close to their house which was very isolated; it was probably a half mile from the highway and there were no other houses around it.” Frightened, the family huddled “until the shooting and the shouting and the galloping stopped. Then they looked out of the window and they saw three crosses burning.” They refused to give in, however, and eventually the Greenlea County Public Schools set up a “colored school” just for the Randolph children.
95
Obviously children are a weak spot; parents cannot be with them at all times to protect them from harm. In northern states where children were not legally segregated by race, white parents and teachers often looked even less kindly on black faces in their previously all-white classrooms. In the early 1960s, Floyd Patterson, heavyweight champion of the world, tried to move into Scarsdale, a suburb of New York City. According to historian James Grossman, his son was beaten up and the family was hounded out of town. A black girl in high school in Oak Lawn, outside Chicago, “got spit upon and lasted just two weeks” in the fall of 1974, according to a woman who lived in Oak Lawn at the time. In about 1975, Dale Leftridge was transferred to Fremont, Nebraska, a sundown town near Omaha, as a manager on the Chicago and North Western Railroad. Within weeks he requested a transfer to Minneapolis, according to historian Eric Arnesen: “What put a ‘dagger’ in his heart was the cold treatment his young daughter received from other children.” In 1982, into Corbin, Kentucky, moved an African American family whose son signed up to play football, according to Robby Heason’s documentary
Trouble Behind.
He practiced with the football team, and “most of the kids were pulling for it,” but his mother received death threats for her son if he were ever to play in a varsity game, so they left. In Perryville, Arkansas, in about 1987, “in first grade, our teacher told us not to play with the one black child on the playground,” according to a woman who grew up in that sundown town near Little Rock. “We didn’t. She left.”
96
Nothing physical happened to the only African American student in West Lawn in southwest Chicago. Although legally part of Chicago, West Lawn is almost a sizable suburb unto itself, including Midway Airport and the largest indoor mall in Chicago. In 1986, Steve Bogira wrote an extensive story on West Lawn and environs. Several residents told him that West Lawn wasn’t really a sundown part of Chicago. “They referred to ‘that colored mailman and his wife’—a reclusive black couple who, they said, had been living there for years.... No one knew how they got there or anything else about them.” Bogira met with the couple, Fred and Mary Clark, and learned that they had raised their daughter there. She was the only African American student in her elementary school. Bogira then interviewed West Lawn resident Alexis Leslie, who went to school with the Clarks’ daughter.
“I felt bad for her—she seemed so lonely,” Leslie says. “And I imagine a lot of other kids felt bad for her too. But it never occurred for us to actually be friends with her or even to talk to her—because to do so would put us in the same position she was in. There was also some apprehension, with the belief system we had, about the kind of person she was—was she someone you actually
wanted
to be friends with? Because she was black. I often felt bad later, because I didn’t have the moral stamina to actually talk to her.”

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