Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (6 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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The Penultimate Denial of Human Rights
 
How could America do these things? How could white Americans drive Chinese Americans and African Americans and sometimes other groups from hundreds of towns? How could thousands of other towns and suburbs flatly prevent African Americans, Jewish Americans, or others from living in them? After all, after life itself, allowing someone to live in a place is perhaps the most basic human right of all. If people cannot live in a town, they cannot attend school in it, vote, or participate in any other form of civic life or human interaction.
In the 1857
Dred Scott
decision, that most racist of all Supreme Court decrees, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney held that African Americans “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Between 1890 and the 1930s—and continuing to the present in some places—many white Americans actually tried to put his words into practice, in the form of sundown towns and suburbs. “After all,” they reasoned, “if the founding fathers and their successors, including Taney, thought African Americans were ‘altogether unfit to associate with the white race,’ then let’s stop associating with them. And let’s do this, not by altering
our
behavior, but by limiting
their
choices—by excluding
them.”
Of course, other countries have flatly denied the rights of an entire race of people to live in a town or wider area. In Germany, beginning in 1934, according to historian James Pool, local Nazis began to put up signs “outside many German towns and villages: JEWS NOT WANTED HERE.” Pool goes on:
Before long the signs outside some towns were worded in more threatening terms: JEWS ENTER THIS TOWN AT YOUR OWN RISK. At this point the Nazi government in Berlin reluctantly intervened.... Although Berlin ordered all threatening signs removed, most of them stayed up.
 
Two years later, most German sundown signs actually came down at Berlin’s insistence as Germany prepared for the 1936 Olympic Games. During this period, hundreds and perhaps thousands of towns in America already displayed signs like the ones the Germans were putting up, directed against African Americans, but our government in Washington never ordered any of them removed, not even those on California highways as America prepared for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. To be sure, beginning in 1938, Germany’s “Final Solution” made communities free of Jews in a much more vicious way than anything the United States ever achieved. Still, it is sobering to realize that many jurisdictions in America had accomplished by 1934–36 what Nazis in those years could only envy.
40
Residential Segregation Lives On
 
Germany reversed course in 1945. The Allies forced it to. The sundown town movement in the United States did not begin to slow until 1968, however, even cresting in about 1970, and we cannot yet consign sundown towns to the past. More than half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in
Brown v. Board of Education
that whites cannot keep blacks out of white schools, and more than forty years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal to keep them out of a restaurant, hundreds of towns and suburbs still keep African Americans out of entire municipalities.
Several towns near Colp, Illinois, for example, are
not
done with being sundown towns. Consider the town with which we began this chapter, Anna, some 30 miles southwest. In September 2002, to the best knowledge of Anna’s reference librarian and newspaper editor, neither Anna nor its companion city of Jonesboro had a single African American household within their corporate limits. In 2004, a rural resident of the Anna-Jonesboro School District confirmed, “Oh no, there are no black people in Anna today.” Do these towns still actively keep out African Americans, or is their all-white nature merely the result of inertia and reputation? At the very least, Anna and Jonesboro—like most other sundown towns—have taken no public steps to announce any change in policy.
41
Anna is only an example, of course. Hundreds of other towns and suburbs across the United States have kept out African Americans even longer than Anna and are equally white today. Unfortunately for our country, America has not reached the point where all-white towns and suburbs are seen as anachronisms. Indeed, in a way, sundown towns are still being created. White families are still moving to overwhelmingly if not formally all-white exurbs distant from inner suburbs that have now gone interracial. And Americans of all races are moving to gated communities, segregated on income lines and sometimes informally segregated on racial grounds as well.
Not only our sundown past but also our sundown present affronts me. I believe that Americans who understand that all-white towns still exist—partly owing to past government actions and inactions—will share my anger and will support government and private actions in the opposite direction, to open them to everyone. I hope also that lifting the veil of secrecy that conceals the overt and often violent cleansings that produced sundown towns and suburbs will prompt Americans to see these “racially pure” communities as places to be avoided rather than desired.
Where we live does affect how we think, and eliminating all-white towns and neighborhoods will decrease racial prejudice and misunderstanding. Social psychologists have long found that a good way to reduce prejudice is for different people to live together and interact on an equal footing. We will see in “The Remedy” that racial integration usually does work. It helps to humanize most individuals who live in interracial communities, and the existence of such communities helps to humanize our culture as a whole. As sociologist Robert Park wrote decades ago, “Most if not all cultural changes in society will be correlated with changes in territorial organization, and every change in the territorial and occupational distribution of the population will effect changes in the existing culture.” So if we want American culture to be nonracist, Park would tell us, we have to eradicate our racially exclusive communities.
42
“The Remedy” will challenge you to do something about the history it presents. I am optimistic: at last, many people seem ready to talk about sundown towns, ready even to change them. Americans have come to decry overt racism, after all, and the task could hardly be more important. Indeed, integrating sundown towns and suburbs becomes, ultimately, a battle for our nation’s soul, and for its future.
To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United States between about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in their wake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, would openly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns and suburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.
At this point you may be shocked: how could it happen that in 1909 whites in Anna, Illinois, might run every African American resident out of their community, never to return? That many other towns across the United States could take similar actions as late as 1954? That Hawthorne, California, had a sign at its city limits in the 1930s that said, “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne”? Or that Minden and Gardnerville, Nevada, sounded a whistle at 6 PM to tell all American Indians to get out of town before sundown?
43
To understand how so many sundown towns formed in the United States, we must examine the era—1890 to 1940—that gave rise to them.
2
 
The Nadir: Incubator of Sundown Towns
 
The elevation of the Negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people.... The influence of this force will grow greater and bear richer fruit with the coming years....
The emancipated race has already made remarkable progress.... So far as my authority can lawfully extend they shall enjoy the full and equal protection of the Constitution and the laws.
—President James A. Garfield, Inaugural Address, 1881
 
 
 
In the half decade of the 1860s following the Civil War and during the 1870s, the organized activities and individual happenings within the Negro group still found a place in the newspapers, but as the emotions of the Civil War era cooled and Negroes gradually took their place in the everyday life of Northern communities, the special interest and the ready sympathy of earlier days waned.
—Leola Bergmann, after analyzing Iowa newspapers
1
 
 
 
T
HE FACTS ABOUT SUNDOWN TOWNS prove hard for many people to believe, partly because high school textbooks in American history present a nation that has always been getting better, in everything from methods of transportation to race relations. We used to have slavery; now we don’t. We used to have lynchings; now we don’t. Baseball used to be all-white; now it isn’t. Step by step, race relations have somehow improved on their own, according to the textbooks’ archetypal story line of constant progress, and the whole problem has now been fixed or is on the way to being fixed. “The U.S. has done more than any other nation in history to provide equal rights for all,”
The American Tradition,
a representative textbook, blandly assures us, as if its authors have examined race relations in Andorra, Botswana, Canada, or any other country.
2
The assumption of progress has blinded us to the possibility that sometimes things grew worse. As a result, most Americans have no idea that race relations
deteriorated
in the 1890s and in the first third of the twentieth century. Sundown towns cannot be understood outside of the historical period that spawned them. This era, from 1890 to the 1930s, when African Americans were forced back into noncitizenship, is called the Nadir of race relations in the United States.
Unfortunately, most Americans do not even know the term. Instead, the period has been broken up into several eras, most of them inaccurate as well as inconsequential, such as “Gay Nineties” or “Roaring Twenties.” During the Gay Nineties, for example, the United States suffered its second-worst depression ever, as well as the Pullman and Homestead strikes and other major labor disputes. Thus “Gay Nineties” hardly signifies more than the decade itself and leads logically to the query, “Gay for whom?”
Historian Rayford Logan began to establish “Nadir of race relations” as a term in his 1954 book,
The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir.
Since then, the idea that race relations actually grew worse has become well accepted in American history, but the deterioration has hitherto mainly been identified only in the South.
3
Impact of the Civil War
 
To be sure, the idea of keeping out African Americans was not born in this period. It first occurred to northern whites during the slavery period. Before the Civil War, several entire states passed laws to accomplish this end. The 1848 Illinois state constitution provided:
The General Assembly shall at its first session under the amended constitution pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state, for the purpose of setting them free.
 
Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, California, and Oregon passed similar laws, thus becoming “sundown states” so far as any new African Americans were concerned, although only Oregon’s law saw much enforcement. No state made a serious effort to expel African Americans
4
already residing within its borders.
Until at least 1861, North and South, most white Americans defined “black inferiority” as the problem, to which slavery was the solution. The Civil War changed all that, at least for a time. As the war continued, on the United States side it became not just a struggle to maintain national unity, but also a war to end slavery. As early as 1862, U.S. soldiers were marching to songs such as George Root’s “Battle Cry of Freedom”:
We will welcome to our numbers the loyal true and brave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
And although he may be poor, not a man shall be a slave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
5
 
During the war, many white U.S. soldiers met and came to know African Americans for the first time. The actions of these African Americans played a big role in challenging white racism. Slaves fled to Union lines to be free, to get married and launch normal family lives, to make a living, and to help the United States win the war. The contributions of black soldiers and sailors to the war effort made it harder for whites to deny that African Americans were fully human, since they were acting it. Real friendships formed—between white officers of United States Colored Troops and their men, between white officers in white units and their black orderlies, and between escaped Union POWs and the African Americans who sheltered them behind enemy lines. Ordinary enlisted men, white and black, came increasingly to rely on each other, albeit in separate units, for the mutual support necessary for survival on the battlefield.

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