Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (80 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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What of the owners of the black private school in Eldorado, Illinois—Eldorado Normal and Industrial Institute—who were stoned in 1902, “and the principal, Jefferson D. Alston, his wife, and pupils were compelled to leave for fear of mob violence,” in the words of the
Indianapolis Freeman
? Governor Richard Yates of Illinois said they would get protection, but that never happened, and all African Americans in Eldorado fled to nearby Metropolis to save their lives. Did they get a fair price for their property? Certainly it was a distress sale. As Gordon Morgan, whose monograph
Black Hillbillies of the Arkansas Ozarks
is the pioneering treatment of the disappearance of African Americans from that region, asked in 1973, “To what extent are those counties legally liable for allowing the forcing of blacks out, under duress, without assuring that they or their descendants were adequately compensated for loss of life, property, or opportunities?”
12
We are not talking ancient history. In 2004, I talked with Almarion Hollingsworth, whose father, A. W. Birch, owned the hotel in Marlow, Oklahoma, a sundown town, refused to fire his black porter, and was shot by a mob that then killed the porter. She has lived 81 of her 83 years without a father. Does she have a claim? What of the porter’s children? What about Cleveland Bowen, who was 3 years old when whites in Forsyth County, Georgia, “told us we had to be out by sundown,” according to testimony taken in 1987, when he was 78?
We left that same night. It was kind of rainy. I slept. I was only about three years old, but everybody was so scared and everything, I remember it. We came off and left cotton and corn in the field and two mules and two cows standing in the yard. My daddy said he picked just two bales of cotton and sold ’em and the rest was left in the field. I heard my Daddy say he was just one payment from having paid for the farm. We had 40 acres. My daddy—it hurt him so bad, he cried like a whupped child. We rented a farm out here, and my daddy never did get it together to buy another farm.
13
 
And what about the black children of Vienna, Illinois, driven from their homes in a firestorm in 1954 and now in their fifties? What about the lost opportunities of all the people driven out in all the expulsions described in this book—opportunities to make a living in the towns from which they were “cleansed”? Most of them were employed, after all. What about the possibilities African Americans lose out on today, growing up in central city neighborhoods surrounded by poor people and rusting factories, while whites in sundown suburbs grow up surrounded by resources and opportunities?
Legal Remedies
 
There are precedents for reparations. After the 1885 murder and expulsion of Chinese coal miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, the United States paid survivors and heirs $150,000. Springfield, Illinois, did pay damages to black citizens whose property was destroyed in the 1908 riot; indeed, the city had to issue bonds to pay all the claims. More famously, the United States paid $20,000 to every Japanese American who had been placed in a concentration camp during World War II. More recently, North Carolina made modest reparations to people its Eugenics Board ordered sterilized between 1929 and 1974. On one occasion, a state paid monetary reparations to African Americans to compensate them for losing their homes and employment as the result of violent expulsion. In 1994, Florida paid nine survivors of the 1923 Rosewood massacre—in which whites destroyed an entire black town, leaving a sundown town nearby—$150,000 each. A state commission recommended that Oklahoma follow suit in 2001, to compensate survivors and heirs of blacks attacked in the 1921 riot when whites tried to make Tulsa a sundown city, killing somewhere between 30 and 300 African Americans in the process. But Oklahoma and Tulsa seem to lack the political and moral backbone to emulate Florida, even though a similar breakdown of the state and city function of maintaining order made the riot possible. Having failed to get Oklahoma to pass a reparations bill, attorneys have launched a lawsuit in federal court.
14
Nevertheless, Rosewood remains a useful precedent for reparations, particularly since it resulted in at least one sundown town, Cedar Key. So does what happened in West Frankfort, Illinois. Whites drove Sicilians and African Americans from that southern Illinois city on August 5 and 6, 1920. Many of the Sicilians returned to live in West Frankfort within the week, but African Americans have not returned in any number to this day. Some Sicilians then brought suit for damages, and a U.S. federal court eventually awarded them more than $11,000 (the equivalent of more than $100,000 in 2005). African Americans won nothing, having no chance to obtain justice from a town that had just expelled them. According to a newspaper account, “They have sent back a representative to settle their bills and wind up all affairs of the colored race in this city.”
15
The case for reparations resulting from the many violent expulsions that led to sundown towns avoids most of the issues that are brought up by opponents of reparations for slavery. We do know or can learn who specifically was injured in each expulsion. Some victims and many heirs are still alive. Also, slavery was not illegal, while the expulsions of the Nadir were, yet federal, state, and city governments refused to provide African Americans with the equal protection of the laws guaranteed them under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In 1863, the federal government punished the whites from Anna, Illinois, who had expelled African Americans from Union County—and that was
before
passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. But from 1890 to 1968, the federal government rarely if ever interfered with a sundown town. It showed no interest in prosecuting the whites who expelled African Americans from Anna in 1909, for example. State and local governments were often equally lax. As David Zimmermann put it, writing about the 1905 and 1909 race riots that drove African Americans from Harrison, “Diligent research has failed to reveal any records of actions taken by law enforcement officers or any other local officials to protect Harrison’s African American community at any time preceding, during, or after the attacks.” Thus not only the perpetrators but also local and state governments share responsibility for repairing the damages caused by the expulsions and the sundown towns that resulted.
16
Legal actions can remedy other governmental actions and inactions that have helped sundown towns last so long. As we have seen, beginning in the 1930s, the federal government
required
neighborhoods to be all-white for participation in mortgage and housing programs, and it even built several sundown towns itself. State governments were also complicit bystanders that ignored or facilitated actions that created sundown towns and counties. Most local governments of sundown towns and counties worked actively to keep their jurisdictions all-white; some still do. Governmental complicity yesterday can provide openings for judicial intervention today. The previous chapter gave examples of lawsuits that have succeeded against sundown towns and their exclusive ways. The 1977 Seventh Circuit decision known as “Arlington Heights II” held that plaintiffs do not have to prove that town officials had a conscious intent to keep out minorities; it is enough to show that their policies had that effect. Of course, since sundown towns and suburbs have oral traditions of intent as well as effect, sound historical research can make lawsuits against them very winnable.
17
State courts hold promise, too, because many states already have useful open housing laws on their books, some dating to the Reconstruction era.
18
The Mount Laurel judgment in New Jersey and the New Castle case in New York, as summarized by historian Kenneth Jackson, require suburbs “to accept a ‘fair share’ of the disadvantaged populations in their areas and to make ‘an affirmative effort to provide housing for lower-income groups.’ ” In 1999, “an affordable housing developer” sued Bluffdale, “an all-white suburb of 4,500 people south of Salt Lake City, Utah, for what they contend is a discriminatory zoning scheme that will continue to exclude racial and ethnic minorities and people with disabilities,” according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Apparently the plaintiff succeeded in winning new policies from Bluffdale. And in 2000, a federal district court found that Sunnyvale, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, had long engaged in what the court concluded was “discriminatory zoning.”
19
The judge’s opinion includes a careful and useful review of federal law in these cases and notes that “the Fair Housing Act prohibits not only direct discrimination but practices with racially discouraging effects.”
20
These decisions offer important precedents, because many sundown suburbs have used zoning, minimum lot size, and related polices to keep out African Americans. If such cases as Sunnyvale can be won without specific evidence of exclusionary practices, then testimony about these practices should make successful legal actions against sundown towns and suburbs still easier. That these practices originated decades ago does not render them moot, for once a policy is in effect, the burden shifts to the community to show that its policy has changed. Many sundown towns have done nothing to publicize or implement a new policy, which is why they continue to be all-white. Now that suburbs have become more populous and more important economically than inner cities or small towns and rural areas, it is critical that they shake off their sundown origins.
Undoing
Milliken v. Bradley
 
Unfortunately, one legal decision constitutes a dangerous precedent. The previous chapter told how school desegregation decisions in southern states helped lead communities there toward residential desegregation. This same process had begun to desegregate northern metropolitan areas too, until halted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974. In
Milliken v. Bradley,
the Court “largely freed white suburban districts from any legal obligation to participate in metropolitan desegregation efforts,” as Jack Balkin put it, writing in 2001. African Americans in Detroit had recognized that the Detroit public schools were going overwhelmingly black, so they sought desegregation with white populations in the suburbs. Of course, the white schools of Dearborn, Warren, and other suburbs did not admit to being white as a matter of law or public policy—de jure. They merely served the children who lived within their district boundaries, and those children just “happened” to be all white—de facto.
21
The
Milliken
opinion awarded primacy to suburban school district boundaries. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart cast the deciding vote, denying African American students’ request for integration with suburban schools. We have seen how most white Americans came to view residential segregation as natural, rather than resulting from governmental policies. Like them, Stewart claimed to be baffled about the causes of residential and school segregation:
It is this essential fact of a predominantly Negro school population in Detroit—caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as immigration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears—that accounts for the “growing core of Negro schools,” a “core” that has grown to include virtually the entire city.
22
 
The factors behind all-white suburbs
are
knowable, of course. “Immigration, birth rates, and economic changes” do
not
explain why thousands of workers built cars in Dearborn and Warren, but the black ones all lived in Detroit or Inkster while the white ones lived where they worked. “Private racial fears” do play a role, but not merely because they motivate thousands of private decisions by individual white and black families. These private racial fears result in part from a panoply of private
and public
policies that have been responsible for making and keeping suburbs white. Indeed, sundown towns show that no clear distinction can be maintained between de jure and de facto segregation. For decades, as we have seen, government officials were decisively involved in keeping Dearborn white, for example. Previous chapters told of the repeated attempts by African Americans to live in Wyandotte and the repeated private acts of violence by Wyandotte residents and formal acts by its city government to keep them out. A similar list of violent and nonviolent actions performed or condoned by city governments has interfered with the free choices of African Americans to live in Grosse Ile, Grosse Pointe, and other suburbs in the Detroit area. When the perpetrators of violence go unpunished, the government is again involved, albeit one step removed from the actual acts against black would-be residents.
Evidently little of this information about Detroit’s sundown suburbs—including the explicit actions over the years taken by their governments to stay all-white—was considered by the Supreme Court.
23
In the absence of this information, five of the nine justices held, as Potter Stewart put it, “the mere fact of different racial compositions in contiguous districts does not itself imply or constitute a violation.” Therefore they said that residential segregation was not open to remedy by litigation. In turn, school segregation resulting from residential segregation was also not open to remedy. Absurdly, so long as a sundown suburb avoided segregating its handful of black students into a majority-black school, the judges held that it was operating lawfully. Thus because Dearborn, Grosse Ile, the Grosse Pointes, Warren, Wyandotte, and others had been so racist as to exclude African Americans almost totally, in 1974 their school systems were declared not racially segregated.

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