Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (75 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Proponents of integration have also won additional legal victories striking down some of the ordinances that suburbs have used to keep out undesirables. Brenden Leydon sued Greenwich, Connecticut, after a guard kept him from jogging on Greenwich Point, a 147-acre park with a beach on Long Island Sound. Greenwich allowed nonresidents to walk on its beaches only if they paid a $6 fee and were accompanied by a Greenwich resident. In 2000, the Connecticut Appellate Court said the ordinance “violates a public trust doctrine that says municipalities hold parks on behalf of all citizens.” In the late 1990s, a similar challenge invalidated Dearborn’s ordinance that only residents could use its parks. In 2003, nearby Grosse Pointe lost the tax exempt status of its parks when a judge ruled that they were not “open to the public generally.” Several other sundown suburbs faced comparable legal challenges as of 2004.
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Hispanics and Asians Prompt Change
 
Today, Hispanics and Asians live throughout the United States, not just in the West. In the 2000 census, Hispanics and “Others” outnumbered African Americans by 20% in America’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, and while the West has America’s most diverse population, other sections have become surprisingly multicultural as well. Hispanics will soon outnumber African Americans in the Midwest. Asians now are the largest nonwhite group in many towns in the upper Midwest.
Even during the depths of the Nadir, most sundown towns did not keep out Mexican Americans. Except in the West, most did not bar Asian Americans. As a result, nationally, Hispanics or Asians with third-grade educations are more likely to live among whites than is an African American with a Ph.D. today. Historically, even sundown suburbs such as Cicero and Berwyn, Illinois, long notorious for their hostility to African Americans, allowed Mexican Americans as residents. By the 2000 census, Cicero’s 85,616 population was almost 80% Hispanic, and Berwyn’s was almost 40% and rising.
Today, not only Mexican Americans but Mexican nationals, right off the truck that brought them to work for a chicken processing factory in a little Arkansas Ozarks town or a broom corn factory in Arcola, Illinois, are immediately allowed to live in those sundown towns and have their children attend school. Most can speak no English and may also have had little schooling in Spanish in Mexico. Some are unfamiliar with such basics of modern life as a supermarket, laundromat, or library. Asian Americans—even Hmongs and Khmers with little English and very different cultural backgrounds—have found even readier acceptance. As Ricardo Herrera put it, speaking of California in 2000, “For the purposes of suburban migration ‘out and up’ from Los Angeles, in certain complex ways Asian Americans and Latinos have been treated as ‘non-black’ in contradistinction to being treated as ‘non-white.’ ” Although they have much less in common with white Americans than do black Americans, these immigrants are admitted by towns and suburbs that continue to keep out African American families who have lived in this country, worshiped Jesus Christ, and spoken English for ten generations.
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However, once sundown towns admit Hispanics and Asian Americans, to admit African Americans may seem tolerable, rather than a catastrophe to be mobilized against.
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The rush of Latino and Asian Americans into Cicero and Berwyn finally loosened the prohibitions against African Americans, and both suburbs now have black householders, including homeowners. In 2000, Cicero had 956 African Americans in 275 households; 54 own their homes; Berwyn had 588 African Americans in 221 black households; 81 own. This is a transformation: such numbers would have been inconceivable in 1981, when the school superintendent bragged that there would be no blacks in the Cicero Public Schools “as long as I am superintendent” and was wildly applauded.
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Ironically, some of the more racist whites have been leaving Cicero and Berwyn because the suburbs have grown “too Mexican” for them. For decades, Cicero had required firefighters and police officers to live within the city, partly to avoid hiring African Americans. Since African Americans were kept out of town, they couldn’t be hired, and since no African Americans worked in the police and fire departments, it was easy to mobilize those departments to keep blacks out of town. Now Cicero’s firefighters are trying to eliminate the residency requirement, supposedly to encourage African Americans living elsewhere to apply. “But critics suspect another motive,” according to reporter Danielle Gordon: “White workers want the freedom to escape . . . [Cicero’s] fast-growing Latino population.” The irony that racist whites are arguing for a rule change that may lead to the hiring of nonwhites is not lost on African Americans, who have suffered decades of humiliation in Cicero and Berwyn.
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In Dearborn, Michigan, thousands of Arab Americans moved in while African Americans were kept out. The statue of Orville Hubbard, mayor of Dearborn from 1942 to 1978, was one of the 100 historic sites treated in my last book,
Lies Across America.
I poked fun at its accompanying historical marker—“He made Dearborn known for punctual trash collection”—and pointed out that Hubbard actually made Dearborn notorious for being a sundown suburb. In 2000, Dearborn’s director of public information wrote me to complain about the entry: “We are proud to be home to more than 70 nationalities, including African-Americans, Arab-Americans, and Hispanics in addition to people from Western and Eastern Europe.” Dearborn also makes this point on its web site. In the 2000 census, Dearborn had 1,275 African Americans, more than 1% of its nearly 100,000 total population, a sea change from twenty years earlier. Surely Dearborn’s Arab Americans and Hispanics helped make this possible, if only by contributing to a new rhetoric. To brag about Dearborn’s diversity is not compatible with keeping out African Americans.
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Recent research by Nancy Denton suggests that this complexity helps to desegregate formerly all-white neighborhoods across the nation. Whites do not often flee neighborhoods that become 50% nonwhite
if
those nonwhites include substantial numbers of Asian Americans and Hispanics as well as African Americans, and the number of census tracts with all four groups has soared. Nationally, residential segregation against African Americans decreased most in metropolitan areas where Asians and Latinos were most prevalent.
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Even in small independent towns across the Midwest, including sundown towns, Mexicans and Mexican Americans now do much of the work. In 2000, Arcola, Illinois, for example, was 20% Mexican, mostly employed by its broom corn factories. Beardstown, Illinois, west of Springfield, also had about 20% Mexicans, mostly employed by Excel, a meatpacker. Both were sundown towns, and Arcola may still be, but Beardstown has changed. Wyatt Sager, a lifelong resident, welcomes the change: “We would never have heard Mexican music 10 years ago. Now it is commonplace to hear different ethnic music. Beardstown has a much greater world scope now than it did 10 years ago.” Immigrants from Senegal followed the Mexicans to Excel, and Beardstown now has eleven black households among its 5,766 residents. But Arcola shows that it is too early to tell: perhaps Mexican Americans and Asian Americans will become “honorary whites,” leaving African Americans again shut out.
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A realtor in Barry County, a sundown county in the Missouri Ozarks, leaned in this direction in remarks made in 1994:
Blacks are so different that I just can’t stand them. I can’t help it, I hate them. My Doberman pinscher, Lady, used to terrorize Blacks. I really enjoyed that. I can tolerate Mexicans—I even have some Mexicans working for me—but I just can’t tolerate Blacks.
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The Process of Change
 
In the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the new millennium, even in the absence of Asians or Hispanics, many formerly sundown communities caved in peacefully and no longer keep out African Americans. A composite depiction of the process goes something like this: a white couple or two with adopted biracial children moved to town and enrolled their school-age children, thus desegregating the school system. Then a young white woman, daughter of longtime residents, left for the big city, had an affair with a young African American man, and returned home with her biracial child to live in the town. Eventually the child’s father joined them. White residents did nothing to him, partly because he wasn’t exactly an outsider, with his family connections. An African American couple moved in perhaps a year later . . . and lo, the town was no longer sundown.
Even towns that have not yet accepted a black household often do include adopted biracial children of white parents or children of interracial couples. “We see more and more interracial families,” said a librarian in Cullman, Alabama. Most are young white women with interracial children, divorced, with no father living in town. This pattern is so common that I came to believe it happens on purpose. It may be too strong to suggest that some white teenage girls, disgusted at the hypocrisy shown by their parents and sundown community on race relations, deliberately set out to get pregnant by an African American male. Certainly they do set out to experience what their narrow-minded towns have told them is forbidden fruit.
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The children have mixed experiences. “I hope it will get better and I think it has some,” reported a resident of Piggott, Arkansas, a sundown town near the Missouri Bootheel. “We have two black children in our church now with a white mother, who grew up in this community. She married while in college. They were accepted pretty well up until teen age. I know it has been hard on them.” Often the dating age poses a problem. In 1992, the one African American student in Benton High School in Illinois, a girl in the junior class, accepted an invitation from a white football player to the junior/senior prom. “And that was it,” in the words of a teacher in the school. “She was ostracized by the students from then on.” She stuck it out for the rest of the school year and her family then moved. In these cases, the students never achieved full individuality in white eyes but remained merely representatives of a problematic race.
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Things were a little better in Comanche, Texas. In 2000, after an absence of more than a century, Comanche again had African American children in school: Talila Harlmon and her brother. “I do things by myself a lot,” said Talila.
I feel like I have to try harder to fit in. That’s why I keep my hair braided and long, to look like the other girls.... The other girls, they go out to get their hair done—but I can’t go, because the hairstylists here can’t do my hair. I wish there were more black kids. I’d have someone to relate to in history class, when they’re talking about the slaves or Martin Luther King. If I were at a school with black kids, I could go to their house, they could come to mine. With a bunch of kids’ parents here, the white girls can’t date Hispanics or blacks. It bothers me. Some people aren’t like that. I went to the prom with a white boy whose parents didn’t mind. But sometimes kids in our school will be having a party, and if I find out and say why wasn’t I invited, you could tell that they really want to invite me but they can’t.
 
Thus Talila went to her prom and was not ostracized for it. Still, she gets lonely. “But my mom takes me places, and we go do stuff. My mom tells me it’s just life, you just have to deal with it.”
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Students Can Make a Difference
 
Whites in several sundown towns in Arkansas, Illinois, and Wisconsin report that even one or two African American high school students can help to humanize a community. Some residents use their existence as grounds to stop defining their towns as sundown towns. When this is done as a first step toward welcoming African American families, it is a positive step. Interaction with the one or two African American or mixed-race children can help white students learn to treat nonwhites with respect. Maybe Talila Harlmon had that effect in Texas.
In the 1990s in Sheridan, Arkansas, not long after white football fans were screaming, “Get the nigger,” as told in Chapter 4, Sheridan High School got its first African American student. He lived outside Sheridan; for several more years, Sheridan still did not allow African Americans to be in town after dark. Regardless, “they made a mascot of him, loved him to death,” my source reported. “Of course,
some
didn’t.” Being “a mascot” in Sheridan continues the pattern of the “pet Negro” who often played an ultra-humble or clown role in previous decades. But sometimes whites accept the lone African Americans as people, not mascots or Tontos or other “representatives of their race.” They get known as individuals and beat the file folder phenomenon. Often they find themselves particularly well liked, partly because some white students are consciously doing what they can to break through their cocoon of isolation and prejudice and join the larger interracial world.
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Students have sometimes prompted the collapse of a town’s racist policies. ABC students, mostly African American, came into Appleton in the early 1970s. Hayden Knight, born in Trinidad and raised in Brooklyn, remembers when he arrived in Appleton as a high school student in 1973: “Appleton knew about the Green Bay Packers and that was it.”
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He went on to add, “It was quite a shock. Appleton was small-minded at that time. We ABC kids helped them get through that.” In 1960, exactly one African American lived in Appleton, a sundown city of almost 50,000 people. Twenty years later, 47 did, but most were students at Lawrence University or the ABC program. But in the 1980s, Appleton finally relented: the 1990 census found 163 African Americans among 65,695 residents, and by no means were they all students. Knight ended up returning to Cedarburg, Wisconsin, where he coaches soccer in the high school and helps to diversify another formerly all-white town.
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