Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (78 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Ohio seems to have made more progress. It had no county in 2000 with fewer than about 40 African Americans. Waverly, which stoned and drove out its sole African American resident decades ago, had 51; nearby Piketon, which likewise drove out its lone black resident, had 21. The cities of Parma and Cuyahoga Falls, which had achieved national notoriety for keeping out African Americans, had almost 1,000 each.
Sundown Suburbs and Neighborhoods
 
Because social scientists have computed the Index of Dissimilarity for metropolitan areas throughout the period studied by this book, D is useful to assess change in sundown neighborhoods and suburbs over time.
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From 1860 to 1960, the index increased until the average northern city had a D of 85.6; southern cities averaged 91.9—close to the total apartheid denoted by D = 100. After about 1968, D finally started to decline. Black suburbanization then grew during the 1970s and 1980s, although much of the increase went to a few black suburbs. The average D for all metropolitan areas with large black populations was 69 in 1980 and 64 in 1990. The number of hypersegregated cities (D > 85) decreased from 14 to 4 during the ’80s, while the number showing only moderate segregation (D < 55) increased from 29 to 55.
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Residential segregation declined further in the 1990s. By 2000, some midsize cities in the South and West boasted D’s as low as 40 to 45—low enough to suggest that residential segregation was drawing to a close there. The largest changes took place in the South, owing partly to desegregated countywide school systems. In such metropolitan areas, moving to whiter suburbs does not secure a whiter school district, eliminating one reason for such moves.
Older cities in the Midwest and Northeast—exactly the areas most plagued by sundown suburbs—showed the smallest decreases. Between 1968 and 1980, when the proportion of black students in overwhelmingly minority schools (90–100%) was falling in the rest of the nation, in the Northeast it actually rose 6% to almost half, higher than any other region. In Milwaukee, jeers and flying bricks met black marchers in the 1960s when they crossed the bridge over the Menomonee River to the white neighborhoods on the other side. In 2000, an astonishing 96% of all African Americans in the Milwaukee metropolitan area still lived within Milwaukee itself. David Mendell pointed to the role sundown suburbs played in contributing to this statistic:
In Milwaukee, many middle-class blacks have settled in mostly black city neighborhoods on the north side. That trend follows a history of racial inequity in the Milwaukee area. Until the civil rights era, some suburbs enforced laws that forbade blacks to buy homes in their communities or to walk the streets after 10 PM
 
For the Milwaukee metropolitan area, D was 83 in 1990 and 82 in 2000. This means 82% of all African Americans in the Milwaukee area would have to move to white neighborhoods for Milwaukee to achieve a uniform racial mix. Moreover, at its current rate of improvement, it will take four hundred years for the level of segregation in Milwaukee to resemble such southern metropolitan areas as Greenville, South Carolina, or Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, today. Detroit, Philadelphia, and some other “rustbelt” metropolitan areas showed equally minuscule declines.
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Even around Detroit, however, most suburbs have admitted a few African Americans. Patti Becker, who has mapped Detroit for decades, calls this “honest integration” to distinguish it from the expanding black ghetto of Detroit, now spilling over into suburbs. Despite this progress, segregated neighborhoods remain the rule, especially in the East and Midwest. In 1995, Maggie Jorgensen, a longtime advocate of integration in Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of the few integrated suburbs in the Midwest, said, “It’s still a battle to convince [white] people that it’s OK to live in an integrated community.” Ingrid Ellen, taking an optimistic view, began her 2000 book,
Sharing America’s Neighborhoods,
with the claim “Racially mixed neighborhoods are no longer as rare or as unstable as people tend to think. Nearly one-fifth of all neighborhoods in the United States were racially mixed in 1990.”
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But this is hardly an impressive rebuttal of what “people tend to think,” since more than 80% of all neighborhoods were
not
racially mixed, according to her.
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Some elite suburbs have given in, if at all, only barely. Kenilworth, for example, the elite Chicago suburb, admitted an African American family in the mid-1960s, but that didn’t go so well. A woman who graduated from high school in Kenilworth in 1971 wrote,
I clearly remember when the first black family moved in around 1964. They were very nice and both parents were professionals. I was in seventh grade. Some boys from my class actually stuck a large wooden cross in the family’s lawn and burned it. Even during those times I was shocked at the prejudice.
 
That family stayed for more than a decade but eventually left, and by 2002, no African American households existed in Kenilworth. Tuxedo Park, New York, America’s first gated community, had at most one black or interracial family in the 2000 census. The four municipalities that made up Chevy Chase, Maryland, next to Washington, D.C., had just six families with at least one African American householder; their 19 people comprised 0.3% of Chevy Chase’s population.
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On the other hand, Edina, the upper-class sundown suburb west of Minneapolis, had 546 African Americans among 47,425 total population, more than 1%. Beverly Hills and Palos Verdes Estates, elite suburbs of Los Angeles, were also open: Beverly Hills had about 500 African Americans, almost 2% of its population, while Palos Verdes Estates had 132, almost 1%.
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Perhaps the best summary is to say that progress has been real but uneven.
100
Metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast have maintained “almost an iron curtain,” in sociologist John Logan’s phrase, dividing black neighborhoods from white. Most suburbs in the South and West have torn this curtain down.
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One Step Forward, One Back?
 
It would be wrong to end our analysis of the present on this optimistic note. Clouds loom. Despite the symbolic importance of the 1968 law, in 1993 law professor John Boger gave a pessimistic summary of its impact: “By most accounts, the Fair Housing Act has been a disappointing failure.” Nancy Denton agrees, finding that “hypersegregation persists and often is worsening” in most metropolitan areas.
102
If the positive zeitgeist of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years in the North was undone by the view of African Americans as “the problem” during the Nadir, then the changes wrought by the Civil Rights Movement are endangered by the fact that many whites see African Americans as “the problem” today. Even if many white Americans no longer think that sundown towns and suburbs are appropriate ways to deal with that “problem,” most people still do not turn first to history and social structure to explain why African Americans have less wealth, lower test scores, and are concentrated in inner cities and a few suburbs. Refurbished as “the ghetto as problem,” this rhetoric remains alive and well and is both the result of unequal race relations in America and the cause of further inequality.
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The solution still seems to be flight to outlying communities that are, if not quite sundown, preponderantly white and affluent. Thus “the ghetto as problem” continues to legitimize overwhelmingly white suburbs and neighborhoods in the eyes of many non-black residents.
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To be sure, many former sundown towns and suburbs now include a handful of African American families. Although this marks an important first step toward real integration, the danger of soclexia lurks close behind. Just as living in an all-white community once seemed “natural,” now token desegregation quickly comes to seem natural. To paraphrase Billy Bob Lightfoot, quoted about Comanche County, Texas, as a sundown county, almost immediately it seems as though there had always been a few African Americans in Grosse Pointe, Edina, or Beverly Hills. Now these elite suburbs may develop an ideology that endangers further progress. Their new demography now allows their white residents to claim they never were racist—“it’s class.” In other words, token residential desegregation can prompt whites to forget that their town or suburb flatly kept out African Americans for decades. Without this memory, how can whites understand why there are so few African Americans there now?
I can explain this best by analogy. In the 1990s, many former “segregation academies,” founded in the South around 1970 when public schools massively desegregated, relaxed their whites-only policies. Jackson Preparatory Academy in Mississippi now proclaims this goal on its web site: “To achieve the broader educational goal of preparing students to participate in the world community, Prep is committed to diversity in race, color, and national origin in the student body, faculty, and programs.” Its student body looks integrated to whites, now that African Americans are no longer shut out entirely. White students may not remember that “Prep” was founded for whites only, to avoid contact with African Americans, but the black community remembers, making many black students reluctant to apply. White students can infer that it is “natural” for a school to be less than 5% black, but it isn’t, not in central Mississippi. Even worse, they may conclude that the shortage of black students results from differences in merit, with African Americans being less able on standardized tests.
105
We have seen how residents often interpret the continued overwhelmingly white population of sundown suburbs as the result of economic differences and individual housing decisions, including those made by black families. Even worse, suburban whiteness can get laid at the eugenics doorstep: whites can blame African Americans for being too stupid or lazy to be successful enough to live in their elite all-white town. Token desegregation makes these interpretations easier to believe, because now nonblacks can point to a handful of black families to “prove” that “we have nothing to do with the overwhelming whiteness of our suburb.” Such “explanations” only compound the problem, because whites can infer that racism is over, the metropolitan area and the nation are fair regarding race, and African Americans are responsible for whatever racial inequalities remain. Between 2000 and 2005, arguments such as these have intensified in America, not just in discussions about residential segregation but about affirmative action and many other policy areas. That is why it is so important to know the history of sundown towns and suburbs—to give this cheery optimism the lie.
Perhaps the most prestigious suburban mix at present is 1% African American—just enough to avoid the charge of sundown policies but not enough “to be a problem,” not enough to pull down school test scores or perpetrate much crime. That old “African Americans as the problem” line of thought comes through once again. Thus in the 1990s, Forsyth County was the fastest-growing county in Georgia and the second-fastest in the United States, according to the census, partly because it was so white, yet no longer sundown.
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Unfortunately, 1% is not black enough to prompt a town or county to face that its schools and other institutions are still white in culture, rather than American in culture. Maybe elite suburbs will go just this black and no further, since elite suburbs seem to get what they want. I doubt it, however, because when a town is only 99% nonblack, rather than 100% nonblack, it is harder to mobilize the white violence, police harassment, and other tools required to keep out additional black newcomers.
One Future: Increasing Exclusion
 
Keeping out people who do not live the way “we” live is an increasingly common response to America’s increasing gap between the affluent and the working class, not to mention the poor. Some analysts consider São Paulo, Brazil, a city of 18,000,000, an augury of future urban life in our country. São Paulo is “populated by the fantastically wealthy and the severely poor with little in between,” to quote
Washington Post
reporter Anthony Faiola, writing in 2002. And São Paulo illustrates where gated communities and microscopic economic segregation may be taking us. Faiola told of life in Alphaville, “a walled city where the privileged live behind electrified fences patrolled by a private army of 1,100.” Affluent residents “whisk to and from their well-guarded homes to work, business meetings, afternoons of shopping, even church,” via helicopter. The city boasts 240 helipads, compared to 10 in New York City. “Brazil has one of the most marked disparities of wealth in the world,” continued Faiola, “with the richest 10 percent of the population controlling more than 50 percent of the wealth.” While this sentence may be correct,
107
it is embarrassing that Faiola did not seem to know that in the United States, the richest 10 percent of the population controls more than 66 percent of the wealth.
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Certainly, residential exclusion is still the norm within the United States. The census took what it calls the American Housing Survey (AHS) in 1993 (and earlier years), including 680 subsamples called kernel clusters. Within these clusters, the AHS begins with one respondent and then asks the same questions of up to fifteen others in residences nearest the respondent. According to sociologist Samantha Friedman, in 1993 about 80% of all whites lived in all-white clusters.
109
The only reason this book doesn’t treat 80% of American cities and towns is that larger municipalities escape getting listed because they have black neighborhoods as well as white neighborhoods. Especially in the East and Midwest, most white neighborhoods remain overwhelmingly white, but overwhelmingly black neighborhoods elsewhere in these cities deflect them from being classed as sundown. Sundown neighborhoods persist today partly because our social system, a captive of its history, still builds in residential segregation in many ways. Business principles in the three key industries related to where Americans live—development, banking, and real estate—continue to encourage the new forms of residential exclusion described above.
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