Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (74 page)
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Authors: James W. Loewen
BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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In fact, status and marketability, rather than security, usually drive gating. Often the gating is only symbolic and the gates never close. A development in an elite suburb northeast of Columbus, Ohio, went gated more than a decade after its initial opening. According to a student who had spent most of his life in the community, it had five unsold houses; after it went gated, they sold quickly. Before the gates, no crime had bedeviled the area; the increased security served no real purpose other than increased status and salability. According to a real estate salesman in suburban Maryland. “Any upscale community now would have to be gated. That’s what makes it upscale.”
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We have seen how whites have often used the occasion of retirement to relocate to sundown towns. Today the tradition of retiring to white enclaves continues, often gated and built around private beaches, golf courses, marinas, or all three. They may provide community, because purchase of a house or town house includes use of a clubhouse, restaurant, sports facilities, and other amenities. Whether residents also connect to any larger, more diverse community is dubious. Certainly such old-fashioned aspects of community as Girl Scout cookie sellers, trick-or-treaters, and political canvassers are forbidden. While not quite racially segregated, these new towns and developments advertise themselves as “exclusive” and are often overwhelmingly white, although race goes unmentioned. A friend who stayed in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida, in 2002 reported that she saw no black residents. Conversely, all the workers were people of color, “but they had to be out by nightfall, along with their pickups.” Blakely and Snyder likewise encountered almost no nonwhites while interviewing in gated communities.
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End of the Nadir36
Offsetting such negative developments has been a massive shift in the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, achieved by the Civil Rights Movement, beginning in 1954. The Civil Rights Movement did not take place in a vacuum, of course. Just as race relations worsened after 1890 in the context of national and even international ideological developments, so did the improvements in race relations after World War II. We identified the three
i’
s—Indian wars, immigrants, and imperialism—as underlying causes of the worsening of race relations during the Nadir. Three factors also help explain why the racism of the Nadir began to erode after 1940.
i’
s—Indian wars, immigrants, and imperialism—as underlying causes of the worsening of race relations during the Nadir. Three factors also help explain why the racism of the Nadir began to erode after 1940.
First came the Great Migration. While the move of African Americans from the South to northern cities further inflamed the racism of some white northerners, it also created black voting blocs in northern cities. The Great Retreat further concentrated African Americans from scattered towns across the North into a few large cities. Soon a few African Americans were back in Congress, elected from those cities. African Americans also won seats in state legislatures and on city councils. Although whites continued to dominate the powerful positions of mayor and governor, they now took care not to alienate urban black voters with overtly racist rhetoric. Moreover, this moderation in rhetoric affected both parties, because from 1912 through 1962, neither party could take black votes for granted.
A second crack in the wall of white supremacy came from abroad: the imperialist sun began to set. Emboldened by the erosion of certainty in the European vision prompted by World Wars I and II, conquered nations—India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and later most of Africa—won their independence. Now the United States faced a new international environment: we had to relate to self-governing countries of color around the world. After World War II, engaged in a struggle with the USSR for world supremacy, the United States had no desire to antagonize these newly independent nonwhite nations by behaving badly toward our own citizens of color. On the positive side, seeing African leaders such as Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana on the world stage made it easier for white Americans to understand that African Americans had done and could achieve important things.
Third and most important was the role played by World War II. Germany gave white supremacy a bad name. It is always in victors’ interests to demonize the vanquished, but the Nazis made this task easy. Americans saw in the German death camps the logical end result of eugenics and apartheid, and it appalled us. As we sought to differentiate ourselves from Hitler’s discredited racial policies, our own overt racism now made us uneasy. Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal called this conflict our “American dilemma” and predicted in 1944, “Equality is slowly winning.”
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World War II made a new rhetoric available to those who wanted to treat nonwhites as equal citizens. In Redwood City, 22 miles south of San Francisco, the newly built home of John J. Walker, black war veteran, was burned in December 1946, “after he had received threats to move out,” according to a news story in
Pacific Citizen.
The couple planned to rebuild. Perhaps in reaction, some realtors suggested making the entire San Mateo peninsula, perhaps even including San Francisco itself, a sundown area. On July 11, 1947, Harry Carskadon, an agent in nearby Atherton, proposed that the peninsula was “not a proper place” for “Negroes, Chinese, and other racial minorities” and urged exclusive “white occupancy in the region.” Other realtors were only slightly more tolerant: “Several members of the realty board felt the only way to handle the minority problem was to set aside acreage and subdivide it for minority groups with schools, business districts, etc.,” according to the
Pacific Citizen.
But Emmit Dollarhyde, president of the Santa Clara County NAACP, called this “native fascist racism.” He maintained that “Negro and other minority war veterans” who “risked their lives to protect our country from foreign fascism” deserved better. Carskadon’s proposal was shelved, and by 1950 Redwood City had 410 African Americans among its 25,544 residents.
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Pacific Citizen.
The couple planned to rebuild. Perhaps in reaction, some realtors suggested making the entire San Mateo peninsula, perhaps even including San Francisco itself, a sundown area. On July 11, 1947, Harry Carskadon, an agent in nearby Atherton, proposed that the peninsula was “not a proper place” for “Negroes, Chinese, and other racial minorities” and urged exclusive “white occupancy in the region.” Other realtors were only slightly more tolerant: “Several members of the realty board felt the only way to handle the minority problem was to set aside acreage and subdivide it for minority groups with schools, business districts, etc.,” according to the
Pacific Citizen.
But Emmit Dollarhyde, president of the Santa Clara County NAACP, called this “native fascist racism.” He maintained that “Negro and other minority war veterans” who “risked their lives to protect our country from foreign fascism” deserved better. Carskadon’s proposal was shelved, and by 1950 Redwood City had 410 African Americans among its 25,544 residents.
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The anti-Nazi ideology opened more sundown suburbs to Jews than to African Americans. Probably
Gentleman’s Agreement,
Elia Kazan’s 1948 Academy Award–winning movie exposing Darien, Connecticut, as an anti-Jewish sundown town, would not have been made except in the postwar anti-Nazi era.
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To be sure, Darien did not immediately open to Jews. Four decades later, a realtor still cautioned that if a Jewish client asked him about Darien, “Would I be comfortable there?” he would caution her, “No. Don’t even look. The brokers will be nice and you can buy a house. But can you enjoy the amenities? Can you join the club?” I suspect he would answer the same in 2005. Many other sundown suburbs did welcome Jews, however.
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The Civil Rights MovementGentleman’s Agreement,
Elia Kazan’s 1948 Academy Award–winning movie exposing Darien, Connecticut, as an anti-Jewish sundown town, would not have been made except in the postwar anti-Nazi era.
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To be sure, Darien did not immediately open to Jews. Four decades later, a realtor still cautioned that if a Jewish client asked him about Darien, “Would I be comfortable there?” he would caution her, “No. Don’t even look. The brokers will be nice and you can buy a house. But can you enjoy the amenities? Can you join the club?” I suspect he would answer the same in 2005. Many other sundown suburbs did welcome Jews, however.
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Those three factors underlay the legal challenge to segregation and the ensuing Civil Rights Movement. In turn, the Civil Rights Movement, coupled with the legal campaigns that civil rights lawyers waged against segregated schools and other institutions, began to open sundown towns and suburbs to African Americans. Of course, the movement and the lawsuits mostly took place in the South, where independent sundown towns were few, but they did lead to the quick desegregation of most southern sundown suburbs.
The Civil Rights Movement rarely addressed northern sundown towns and suburbs directly, and when it did, such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 march for open housing in Cicero, Illinois, it usually failed. Still, the movement’s success in the South did help to undercut the rationale for sundown towns in the North. White northerners were jolted by the televised images of black young people peacefully picketing and sitting in and getting beaten or jailed in the process. These images made clear that white misbehavior—not alleged black inferiority—was the source of America’s racial problem. Now that African Americans were no longer seen as the problem, white students and faculty pressured their colleges and universities to participate in the solution by recruiting and admitting black students. Now welcoming African Americans was the thing to do in college, while just the opposite still held in the sundown suburbs and neighborhoods from which so many college students had come.
The Civil Rights Movement took actions that exposed some of America’s racial contradictions, which helped President Lyndon Johnson, leaders of Congress, and Earl Warren and other Supreme Court justices mobilize the power of the federal government to oppose racial segregation. However, the government did little about housing, because whites were most opposed to residential desegregation. A 1961 poll by the Connecticut Civil Rights Commission shows this in an allegedly liberal New England state. The commission’s survey of Connecticut residents, “Attitudes Toward Specific Areas of Racial Integration,” found that 95% of whites “favored” or “would accept” racial integration in public schools, 86% in parks and recreational areas, and 76% in hotels. But only 28% favored integration in “private residential neighborhoods,” while another 29% would accept it; a plurality, 37%, opposed such integration. Opposition to residential integration was higher than to any other form of integration except “[private] parties.” Ironically, Connecticut, like many northern states, had supposedly outlawed racial discrimination in housing decades earlier, although its open-housing law was not enforced. The commission concluded drily, “Opposition to integration in both public and private housing is greater than might be expected in view of the fact that such discrimination has been illegal for years.”
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1968 as Turning Point41
While the foregoing factors and the Civil Rights Movement did begin to erode the ideological foundation of sundown towns, such communities kept forming, especially in the suburbs, probably reaching their peak number in 1968. Three critical events took place in that year that began to weaken sundown towns directly. First, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white racist in Memphis.
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As some Democrats embraced President Lincoln in his martyrdom, so some formerly recalcitrant whites now mourned King and, to a degree, accepted his cause. Second, and in reaction to King’s murder, Congress passed Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the Fair Housing Act. Even though enforcement has been spotty, by its very existence this law clearly put the federal government on the side of prohibiting rather than promoting racial discrimination in housing. Third, the Supreme Court held in
Jones v. Mayer
that an 1866 civil rights law bars discrimination in the rental and sale of property.
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As some Democrats embraced President Lincoln in his martyrdom, so some formerly recalcitrant whites now mourned King and, to a degree, accepted his cause. Second, and in reaction to King’s murder, Congress passed Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the Fair Housing Act. Even though enforcement has been spotty, by its very existence this law clearly put the federal government on the side of prohibiting rather than promoting racial discrimination in housing. Third, the Supreme Court held in
Jones v. Mayer
that an 1866 civil rights law bars discrimination in the rental and sale of property.
Sociologist Karl Taeuber summarized the positive results of these changes:
Most federal housing programs did strengthen their anti-discrimination policies and practices during the 1970s. The Department of Justice filed and won court cases and settlements against state and local housing agencies and private real estate companies. Many state and municipal fair housing agencies were provided some tools for effective enforcement. There was a proliferation of private fair housing groups and neighborhood efforts to foster and preserve racially mixed neighborhoods.
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Then, as commonly happens, public opinion shifted in the wake of public policy. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) asked Americans to agree or disagree with the statement “White people have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods if they want to, and blacks should respect that right.” In 1968, only 43% disagreed, but four years later, 63% did. Even in the Detroit metropolitan area—the most segregated in America—the proportion of whites agreeing with the NORC statement fell from 60% in 1964 to 20% in 1990. Thus, since 1968, whites who argue for sundown towns and suburbs have been on the defensive. Indeed, the proportion of whites openly in favor of racial segregation of neighborhoods declined nationally to just 15% by 1994.
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These responses must be taken with a large grain of salt. There is a huge gap between what people say when asked by strangers and what they do.
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Depending on the situation, the proportion of whites who discriminate against people of color is often much higher than the proportion who admit they do. Still, it is an important first step that many closet white supremacists are now unwilling to be white supremacist when asked.
After 1968, Sundown Towns Began to Desegregate45
Depending on the situation, the proportion of whites who discriminate against people of color is often much higher than the proportion who admit they do. Still, it is an important first step that many closet white supremacists are now unwilling to be white supremacist when asked.
The Civil Rights Movement wound down around 1970, leaving sundown towns and suburbs largely untouched in the North. But wheels had been set in motion. Developments in American popular culture comprised another force for change. Beginning with Elvis Presley in the 1950s, American popular music grew increasingly interracial. So have most sports, many television shows, and some movies, beginning with 1961’s
A Raisin in the Sun,
which specifically treated sundown neighborhoods. In the 1970s, white teenagers put up posters of such African Americans as Diana Ross and Jimi Hendrix in their bedrooms. In the 1980s, it was Bill Cosby and Alice Walker, among others. In the 1990s, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Denzel Washington were popular, and in the new millennium, Venus and Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, and an endless succession of hip-hop stars were in fashion.
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Nor can the influence of Oprah Winfrey be discounted: it is harder to keep African Americans out of your town when you keep inviting them into your living room via television.
A Raisin in the Sun,
which specifically treated sundown neighborhoods. In the 1970s, white teenagers put up posters of such African Americans as Diana Ross and Jimi Hendrix in their bedrooms. In the 1980s, it was Bill Cosby and Alice Walker, among others. In the 1990s, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Denzel Washington were popular, and in the new millennium, Venus and Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, and an endless succession of hip-hop stars were in fashion.
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Nor can the influence of Oprah Winfrey be discounted: it is harder to keep African Americans out of your town when you keep inviting them into your living room via television.
In 1972, the National Association of Realtors finally adopted a pro-fair-housing position. The federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 required banks to release data on their lending patterns, making it possible to see if they were redlining. In 1977, redlining was officially outlawed by the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend money throughout the regions they serve, including poor neighborhoods (without taking undue risks). Although the federal government showed less concern about segregated housing in the Reagan-Bush years (1981–93), the 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act strengthened the enforcement of open housing laws and increased the punitive damages that plaintiffs could win for proving housing discrimination. White residents still resorted to violence to keep out blacks, but increasingly in the 1980s and ’90s, the perpetrators got arrested. All this made a difference: in the 1990s, the number of African Americans concentrated in all-black census tracts declined dramatically.
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