Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (71 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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Republicans do especially well in sundown suburbs owing not only to their racial ideology, but also to their NIMBY principles and small-government philosophy.
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But these principles too have a racial tinge and tie in with the soclexia that results from living in sundown towns and suburbs. In
Chain Reaction,
their analysis of the GOP’s appeal to racism from 1964 to 1990, Thomas and Mary Edsall pointed to Republicans’ use of the stereotype that whites work and succeed, while blacks don’t work, hence don’t succeed. As former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman put it, Republicans win in the suburbs partly because they present positions on crime, education, and housing in such a way that a voter could “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.”
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Sundown suburbs are politically independent and usually quash efforts at metropolitan government. Their school systems are separate and usually oppose metro-wide desegregation. They resist mightily what they view as intrusions by people or governments from the larger metropolitan area or the state. In New Jersey, trying to comply with a New Jersey supreme court decision mandating equal educational opportunity, the legislature passed the Quality Education Act, and Governor Jim Florio proposed higher taxes on families earning more than $100,000 to pay for it. Suburbanites responded by voting out of office many of the politicians who supported the equalization bill, including Florio, whom they replaced with Republican Christine Todd Whitman.
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The Edsalls point out that the principle of self-interest explains what otherwise might seem to be an ideological contradiction: sundown suburbanites usually try to minimize expenditures by the state and federal governments, but locally they favor “increased suburban and county expenditures, guaranteeing the highest possible return to themselves on their tax dollars.” The Edsalls cite Gwinnett County, Georgia, as an example. Gwinnett, east of Atlanta, is “one of the fastest growing suburban jurisdictions in the nation, heavily Republican (75.5% for Bush [senior]), affluent, and white (96.6%).” Its residents “have been willing to tax and spend on their own behalf as liberally as any Democrats.” Such within-county expenditures increase the inequality between white suburbs and interracial cities. They also do nothing to redress or pay for the ways that Gwinnett residents use and rely upon Atlanta and its public services.
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Meanwhile, white suburbs favor “policies of fiscal conservatism at the federal level.” Interestingly, despite enjoying more than half a century of federal intervention on behalf of whites in suburbia—FHA and Veterans Administration (VA) loan guarantees, FHA and VA policies that shut out blacks, highway subsidies, and all the rest—residents feel they achieved home ownership in their all-white suburb entirely on their own. Since 1968, whenever African Americans have mobilized to try to get the federal government to act on
their
behalf, suburban Republicans have rejected the idea: “We’ve done so much for them already.” Many white suburbanites identified attempts of the federal government to be fair about housing, such as the 1968 housing act, with the Democratic Party, and considered them outrageous examples of “special interests” and “federal intervention in local affairs.”
Today the most important national impact of sundown towns and suburbs is through their influence on the Republican Party. The Edsalls conclude, “The suburban vote is becoming the core of the Republican base.” Since elected officials from safe districts develop seniority, suburban Republicans dominate committees in the House of Representatives and in state legislatures when Republicans control those bodies. They also wield much power over their party in most states.
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Where Is “the Problem”?
 
Most people, looking around their metropolitan area, perceive inner-city African American neighborhoods as “the problem.” It then follows all too easily that African Americans themselves can get perceived as the source of the problem. Residents of affluent sundown suburbs rarely see such newly black elite suburbs as Country Club Hills, south of Chicago, or Mitchellville, east of Washington, D.C., but problematic inner-city and inner-suburban neighborhoods are on their commute to the city’s center. So whites generalize: blacks can’t do anything right, can’t even keep up their own neighborhoods. All African Americans get tarred by the obvious social problems of the inner city. For that matter, some ghetto residents themselves buy into the notion that they are the problem and behave accordingly.
Focusing on African Americans and overlooking the impact of sundown suburbs on the social system as “the problem” is understandable. When I visit central cities and sundown suburbs, the former look problematic to me too. As I drove with friends in the late 1990s through an overwhelmingly white elite section of Lower Merion, just outside Philadelphia, for example, no problems seemed evident. The streets were in good repair, the houses were in perfect condition, the landscaping was gorgeous. White racism was nowhere visible. A few miles west, in the Ardmore part of Lower Merion, problems struck our eyes, sometimes our noses, or even our buttocks, transmitted by the suspension of our car. Ardmore is an interracial neighborhood; most of the people visible walking on the streets, playing on the sidewalks, or washing their cars are African Americans. Ardmore has been saddled with most of Lower Merion’s disamenities, such as halfway houses and maintenance yards, perhaps because its residents are not as politically connected or socially powerful as families in the rich white neighborhood.
The affluent white and interracial working-class parts of Lower Merion are part of the same political jurisdiction, so the unfairness in clumping most of Lower Merion’s disamenities in one area is clear. It is not quite so obvious how the pleasures of a lovely spring day in Kenilworth, say, are the flip side of the problems in distressed neighborhoods just eight miles away in Chicago. Since affluent sundown suburbs are not politically connected to nearby inner-city neighborhoods, the system of white supremacy that makes them so much nicer is not obvious. Most people automatically problematize the ghetto. The problems in black neighborhoods look like black problems.
It takes an exercise of the sociological imagination to problematize the sundown suburb. As one drives west from downtown on Chicago Avenue toward Oak Park, the adjacent suburb, the problems of the Near Northwest neighborhood in Chicago are plain. Oak Park then presents its own problem: can it stay interracial, having gone from 0.2% African American in 1970 to 22.4% in 2000? The source of both problems lies not on Chicago Avenue in either city, however, but elsewhere—in neighborhoods miles away that look great, such as Kenilworth, which in 2000 had not one black household among its 2,494 total population. Once one knows its manifestations, white supremacy is visible in Kenilworth, the sundown suburb, and in Near Northwest Chicago, and it is inferable in Oak Park as well. Lovely white enclaves such as Kenilworth withdraw resources disproportionately from the city. They encourage the people who run our corporations, many of whom live in them, not to see race as their problem. The prestige of these suburbs invites governmental officials to respond more rapidly to concerns of their residents,who are likely to be viewed as more important people than black inner-city inhabitants. And they make interracial suburbs such as Oak Park difficult to keep as interracial oases.
Are these problems of metropolitan areas getting worse or better? Is our nation getting over sundown towns, or do they continue unabated into the 21st century? What effect is America’s increasing racial and ethnic complexity having on sundown towns and suburbs? These are the questions the next chapter will address.
PART VI
 
The Present and Future of Sundown Towns
 
14
 
Sundown Towns Today
 
In 1968, the Kerner Commission . . . warned that the United States was in danger of splitting into “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Over thirty years later, that danger seems to have been realized. The dream of a residentially integrated society has been laid to rest by the phenomenon of white flight from the cities and a marked unwillingness of whites to live in neighborhoods with significant numbers of those of another race.
—Donald Deskins Jr. and Christopher Bettinger, “Black and White Spaces in Selected Metropolitan Areas,” 2002
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D
URING THE LAST FEW YEARS while I have been doing the research for this book, many people have asked, after learning that hundreds or thousands of sundown towns and suburbs dot the map of the United States, “Still? Surely it’s not like that today?” It is a good question—so good that it’s hard to answer, because it is hard to know for sure whether a town remains sundown as of the present moment. But those who ask the question usually mean it rhetorically and assume the answer to be “Of course not.”
Unfortunately, many towns are still locked into the exclusionary policies of the past, and this chapter will begin by looking at a few of them. We will then see that some social scientists conclude that America as a social system is moving toward more intense residential segregation; such innovations as neighborhood associations and gated communities support that judgment.
Discouraging as those trends are, I take a more optimistic view. Sundown towns have been on the defensive since the start of the Civil Rights Movement, which prompted the zeitgeist to move back toward what it had been before the Nadir of race relations set in. We will see that 1968 may be as important a date in changing the spirit of race relations in America in a positive direction as 1890 was in a negative direction. Since 1968, residential prohibitions against Jews, Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics have mostly disappeared. Even regarding African Americans, the sundown signs and formal policies have come down everywhere. Many towns and suburbs relaxed their exclusionary policies in the 1980s and 1990s, and we will probe why. In the end, whether we are moving toward more or less racial exclusion will be left for you to assess.
The Persistence of Sundown Towns
 
It’s easy to empathize with those who assume that sundown towns cannot still be “like that today.” That they still might be interferes with our sense of progress and our claim to live under law. And progress has been made. As recently as the 1990s, some sundown towns still flaunted their condition with signs saying “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You in __,” according to credible reports from Arab, Alabama; Marlowe, Oklahoma; and Sullivan, Missouri; in 1998, a related text was posted in White County, Indiana. By 2005, I knew of no town so reckless, although two small towns in Tennessee still displayed black mules painted near their city limits (see Portfolio 8)
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But was this apparent progress real? Are sundown policies no longer enforced? Consider the experience of Clarence Moore, a pioneering archaeologist in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In 1910, mostly using black workers, he excavated American Indian sites on Little River, which parallels the Mississippi a few miles northwest of Memphis. Dan and Phyllis Morse, who reissued Moore’s classic work in 1998, state in their preface that Moore “dared not proceed beyond Lepanto, Arkansas, on Little River because blacks were not tolerated there. Race relations remain strained in that region.” That’s a polite way of saying what my research in the area confirms: almost a century later, African Americans
still
do not and probably cannot live in much of the northeastern corner of Arkansas or the western half of the Bootheel of Missouri. Nor is this area unique.
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Many decades ago, some Americans were shocked that towns and counties openly kept out people of color. During World War II, Malcolm Ross of the federal Fair Employment Practices Commission learned about Calhoun County, the sundown county 65 miles southwest of Springfield, Illinois. He was outraged, calling the county “an earthly paradise for those who hate Negro Americans. But can the rest of America remain indifferent to their ‘self-determination?’ ” Ross obviously meant the question rhetorically. Surely he would have been dismayed to learn that sixty years later, the 2000 census would record not one black household in Calhoun County.
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Similarly, in 1952 Paul Angle wrote in
Bloody Williamson,
his famous history of Ku Klux Klan and other violence in southern Illinois, “Even today, in several Williamson County towns . . . no Negro is permitted to remain overnight.” More than half a century later, in several towns in Williamson County and adjacent Franklin County, no African American is yet permitted to live.
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Zeigler, for example, had no black householder in 2000, and when I asked the town librarian in 2002 if she thought Zeigler had stopped being a sundown town, she replied, “I wish it would change, but I don’t see it changing here.” According to Deidre Meadows, who graduated from Johnston City High School in 1990, “When I was a sophomore in high school, we had a black family move in town for about a month. They were driven out by hate crimes.” The 2000 census showed not one African American family among 3,557 residents in Johnston City. Speaking in 2002 of a third sundown town, Sesser, which also had no black household in the 2000 census, an African American in nearby Du Quoin said, “You would have some problems if you went there, right now.” Angle’s phrase “even today” connotes his sense that sundown towns were an anachronistic relic from our past in 1952. I wonder what he would think to learn that such practices were still allowed in 2005.
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