Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (68 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Reviewing
Urban Inequality,
a recent comparative urban research study, Anne Shlay summarized, “It is better to be black in Atlanta than in Detroit.” Atlanta does not have many of the sundown suburbs, like Grosse Pointe and Wyandotte, that have long cursed Detroit. This makes it easier for African Americans to amass cultural capital and make social connections in Atlanta. Atlanta attaches less stigma to blackness, and upward and geographic mobility is easier there.
38
William J. Wilson sees this exodus of jobs to the suburbs as the biggest single cause of inner-city hopelessness, which in turn leads to drugs, gangs, and the breakdown of the black family. It also removes from inner-city neighborhoods connections with people who have jobs. Remaining residents face yet another burden: unequal commuting. Most commutes are now suburb to suburb rather than suburb to inner city, and African Americans have the longest commutes to work of any racial/ethnic group.
39
Our society then stigmatizes the entire racial group identified with the resulting concentration of hopelessness, not only those members of it who live in the ghetto. Meanwhile, the racial group that forced the concentrating—whites—does not get stigmatized as a group. Instead, whiteness gets valorized owing to its identification with elegant elite sundown suburbs. This unequal burden of stigma versus honor is one more social cost blacks bear, derived from sundown towns.
We know how to end these social costs. The Gautreaux families, simply by dint of living in white suburbia, were able to make connections that led to educational and occupational opportunity. That they did so well, even though mostly headed by single mothers on welfare, shows the power of racial and economic integration. Conversely, the much worse educational and occupational outcomes of those
not
selected to participate shows the debilitating influence of segregation, hence ultimately of sundown suburbs, on African Americans in the inner city. The achievements of the Gautreaux families augur that the quick eradication of sundown towns would foster the development not only of whites who are less racist, but also of blacks who are more successful.
The next chapter shows that sundown towns also have bad effects on America as a whole and especially on our metropolitan areas. The more sundown suburbs a metropolitan area has, the lower the vitality of its inner city and perhaps of the entire area.
13
 
The Effect of Sundown Towns on the Social System
 
Our standard of decency in expenditure, as in other ends of emulation, is set by the usage of those next above us in reputability; until, in this way, especially in any community where class distinctions are somewhat vague, all canons of reputability and decency, and all standards of consumption, are traced back by insensible gradations to the usages and habits of thought of the highest social and pecuniary class—the wealthy leisure class.
—Thorstein Veblen,
The Theory of the Leisure Class,
1899
1
 
 
 
 
N
OT ONLY DO SUNDOWN TOWNS and suburbs hurt African Americans and warp white Americans, they also have negative consequences for the social system as a whole. Metropolitan areas in particular are social systems, complexly interlinked. Just as a power surge can cascade through an electrical grid, an overconcentration of whites in one neighborhood can cause difficulties elsewhere in the social system.
Sundown Suburbs Can Hurt Entire Metropolitan Areas
 
Racial exclusion can decrease opportunity for everyone in a metropolitan area if it makes that area less attractive to newcomers. Detroit was the nation’s most segregated metropolitan area in 2000.
2
Historically Detroit has been burdened with some of the nation’s most notorious sundown suburbs. Without a doubt, this hypersegregation has hurt the city of Detroit itself. Housing prices within the city reflect Detroit’s dismal economic position: its median home cost just $25,600 in 1990, dead last among America’s 77 cities with 200,000 or more people. In comparison, the median home in Boston cost $161,400, in Los Angeles $244,500. Detroit also ranked 73rd of 77 in median income.
3
Homes in Detroit are also worth much less than suburban homes: in 1999, the median Detroit home was valued at $63,400, less than half the median value elsewhere in the metropolitan area. Homes in Boston, in contrast, were worth only slightly less than homes outside Boston, while the median home in Los Angeles was worth more than homes outside Los Angeles. Since the 1950s, Detroit has lost half its population. George Lin, who styles himself an “urban explorer,” calls it “the most tragic case of urban abandonment in the United States.” Famous for abandoned homes, Detroit also boasts abandoned office buildings, factories, warehouses, and hotels, including several skyscrapers.
4
While there is no doubt that sundown suburbs have hurt the city of Detroit, they may not have hurt the outlying parts of its metropolitan area. Taken as a whole, the Detroit metropolitan area is among the nation’s most prosperous; in 1997, metropolitan Detroit families averaged $56,000 in income, well above New York City ($49,500) or Los Angeles ($47,600). Moreover, a metropolitan area’s growth or decline rests on many causes, from the rise and fall of specific industries and even companies to the historic location of hospitals or universities. Still, there is evidence that Detroit’s hypersegregation, with sundown suburbs clustered around a central city that in 2000 was 82% black, hurts its prospects as a metropolitan area. Certainly many people in Detroit think so. “Segregation Keeps Businesses, Professionals from Locating to Detroit Area,” headlined the
Detroit News
in 2002. The article cited “business officials” as saying, “For a firm evenly split between Detroit and another city as the possible home of its new headquarters, the distasteful aroma of segregation could be a deciding factor.” Metropolitan Detroit, not just the city, shrank in population between 1970 and 1998 by 3%, while the United States grew by 32%. Corporate leaders in St. Louis, Cleveland, and other hypersegregated metropolitan areas have voiced similar worries. The three cities that continued to lose the most population in the first three years of the new millennium were Detroit, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, all among our most segregated.
5
Many whites in hypersegregated cities like Detroit have thrown in the towel on their central city. As Leah Samuel put it, describing the debate in the Detroit Theater Organ Society (DTOS) over whether to move their huge Wurlitzer pipe organ from the Senate Theater in downtown Detroit, “relocating Detroit institutions to the suburbs is a well-established tradition.” Dick Leichtamer, president of the society, blames declining attendance on “the part of town that it’s in.” Former president George Orbits agreed: “The people just do not want to come to Detroit.” But Samuel points out, “Despite the fears of crime that they cite as a reason for the move, DTOS board members admit that they don’t recall any serious negative incidents involving concertgoers.” It isn’t specific fear of crime that drives the exodus so much as a sense that leaving is the right thing to do. But whether a metropolitan area can draw conventions and tourists with nothing to do in its core city remains to be seen.
6
Sundown Towns Stifle Creativity
 
In addition to discouraging new people, hypersegregation may also discourage new ideas. Urban theorist Jane Jacobs has long held that the mix of peoples and cultures found in successful cities prompts creativity. An interesting study by sociologist William Whyte shows that sundown suburbs may discourage out-of-the-box thinking. By the 1970s, some executives had grown weary of the long commutes with which they had saddled themselves so they could raise their families in elite sundown suburbs. Rather than move their families back to the city, they moved their corporate headquarters out to the suburbs. Whyte studied 38 companies that left New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, allegedly “to better [the] quality-of-life needs of their employees.” Actually, they moved close to the homes of their CEOs, cutting their average commute to eight miles; 31 moved to the Greenwich-Stamford, Connecticut, area. These are not sundown towns, but adjacent Darien was, and Greenwich and Stamford have extensive formerly sundown neighborhoods that are also highly segregated on the basis of social class. Whyte then compared those 38 companies to 36 randomly chosen comparable companies that stayed in New York City. Judged by stock price, the standard way to measure how well a company is doing, the suburbanized companies showed less than half the stock appreciation of the companies that chose to remain in the city.
7
Evidence from Tacoma, Washington, suggests that cities with a racial mix may be more hospitable to new ideas. Today Tacoma has an enormous inferiority complex compared to the metropolitan juggernaut to its north, Seattle. Some commentators, including journalist Charles Mudede, tie Tacoma’s relative lack of progress to its sundown policies vis-à-vis Chinese Americans in 1885:
Tacoma’s officials . . . helped force most of the city’s Chinese community onto a train headed for Portland. Tacoma faced national embarrassment because of the incident, and its backward way of settling racial disputes became known as “The Tacoma Method.” It has yet to recover from this humiliating recognition: recently, the
Tacoma News Tribune
published an article titled “Tacoma faces up to its darkest hour,” which posits that Tacoma might have turned out differently had it not booted out its Chinese population.
 
The
News Tribune
laments the missing Chinese Americans and their ideas, pointing out that to this day Tacoma remains the only city on the West Coast with no large Chinese American population. In addition, the restrictive mind-set established when Tacoma’s expulsion of Chinese immigrants was allowed to stand was not conducive to new ideas and new peoples.
8
Independent sundown towns also hurt their own futures by being closed to new ideas. Nick Khan of Paragould, Arkansas, said nearby interracial Jonesboro is growing much more than Paragould. “If this thing [racism] goes out of here, Paragould will grow rapidly.” “To this day, it’s a very stuck-in-the-past town,” said a 1983 high school graduate of Red Bud, Illinois, a sundown town near St. Louis. “Any time the community is presented with opportunities to provide tax incentives or otherwise bring something new in, the council votes it down.” There are exceptions. Some sundown towns do better than others. Murray Bishoff, who lives in Pierce City, Missouri, and works in nearby Monett, thinks Pierce City, which drove out its African Americans in 1901 and has been sundown ever since, has been hurt by its sundown policy. Meanwhile, Monett, which drove out its blacks in 1894 and has been equally white since, is doing better. In 1999, Monett’s per capita income was nearly 40% higher than Pierce City’s, although still below average for the state. Effingham, an important rail and interstate highway junction in central Illinois, is a printing center and boasts a big new Krispy Kreme doughnut factory, although its per capita income remains below average for Illinois. Effingham and Monett may be exceptions, but on the whole, I think Khan is right. Some industries are reluctant to move to all-white communities because their nonwhite managers cannot easily find places to live. Even the white managers of these firms increasingly consider such towns backward and unappealing.
9
Some residents feel that a limited future is not too high a price to pay for the joys of living in an all-white town. While doing a community study of a southern Illinois sundown town in 1958, Herman Lantz and J. S. McCrary elicited this comment from a white barber:
I don’t think that they would let any Negroes live here today, even if a new industry came in and said they would settle here if they could hire Negroes. I don’t think that we would let them. That is, as bad as we need industry, if it meant bringing in Negroes, we would not want it. We don’t allow any Negroes here now.
 
In 2002, a genealogist reported the same sentiment from a neighbor in nearby West Frankfort: “Some folks say we’ve got to let the blacks in, if we want to have progress. Well, we’re
not
going to do it!” Such insular people are unlikely to seek new ideas or recruit new companies. They understand that racism interferes with their ability to enjoy the outside world, but given their fears about that world and especially about its African Americans, they do not want to invite that world into their sundown sanctuary.
10
Research suggests that gay men are also important members of what Richard Florida calls “the creative class”—those who come up with or welcome new ideas and help drive an area economically.
11
Metropolitan areas with the most sundown suburbs also show the lowest tolerance for homosexuality and have the lowest concentrations of “out” gays and lesbians, according to Gary Gates of the Urban Institute. He lists Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh as examples. Recently, some cities—including Detroit—have recognized the important role that gay residents can play in helping to revive problematic inner-city neighborhoods, and now welcome them.
12
The distancing from African Americans embodied by all-white suburbs intensifies another urban problem: sprawl, the tendency for cities to become more spread out and less dense. Sprawl can decrease creativity and quality of life throughout the metropolitan area by making it harder for people to get together for all the human activities—from think tanks to complex commercial transactions to opera—that cities make possible in the first place. Asked in 2000, “What is the most important problem facing the community where you live?” 18% of Americans replied sprawl and traffic, tied for first with crime and violence. Moreover, unlike crime, sprawl is increasing. Some hypersegregated metropolitan areas like Detroit and Cleveland are growing larger geographically while actually losing population.
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