Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (81 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Looking back three decades later, the importance of
Milliken
is obvious. This ruling largely ended the efforts of federal courts to desegregate school systems in the North, following the promise of
Brown.
Today we can see that not only was this decision bad sociology, it also amounted to a tragedy for Detroit and the nation. In effect, it told whites that if they didn’t want to live in a majority-black neighborhood, have their children attend an overwhelmingly black school, and suffer the lower prestige and other disadvantages that such schools and neighborhoods entail, they had better move to a sundown suburb. At the same time, the decision signaled suburbs that they could continue to be all-white, so long as they did not openly say they were. The consequences were further white abandonment of Detroit (and some other central cities), continued resistance to African American newcomers in the suburbs, and further mystification of the sundown process.
24
In
Milliken,
the majority stated, “It must first be shown that there has been a constitutional violation within one district that produces a significant segregative effect in another district.”
25
Perhaps a new case can be brought against those Detroit suburbs that remain overwhelmingly white today, fully revealing the links between past public policies in sundown suburbs and residential segregation, and then making the obvious connection between that residential segregation and today’s overwhelmingly black schools in Detroit.
26
Local Institutions Can End Sundown Towns
 
Litigation is not the only avenue to change racist policies. People connected with institutions—governments, corporations, school systems—can get them to act to undo sundown towns. Here are some specific steps, starting with the gentlest and moving to the harshest. Every sundown town or county should announce officially that it intends to become more diverse and should set up a human relations commission to accomplish that end. The town should then send a letter to every real estate agent in its area informing them that housing in the town is open without regard to race, requiring them to state their intent to show, rent, and sell property to all, and inviting them to contact the human relations commission in case of any problem. Schools and city departments should also state their intent to welcome and hire nonwhite employees to overcome their town’s history of exclusion and should drop any requirement that prospective employees must live within their boundaries before employment.
27
As with historical markers, if a jurisdiction refused a request from citizens to do or say these things, the resulting publicity would be valuable in itself.
Of course, talk is cheap. Many sundown towns have already subscribed to anti-discrimination statements and keep on discriminating.
28
Nevertheless, such statements are a first step. Moreover, the presence of a human relations commission counterbalances the “bad apples” that otherwise can seem to speak for a sundown town while the majority does nothing. It sends a signal that some whites, at least, will oppose acts of hostility toward a black would-be resident, and it provides people of color with a place to report threats or other problems.
29
Fayetteville and Jacksonville, North Carolina, which are among the least segregated cities in the United States, show what leaders of local institutions can do—in this case the local commanders of the United States armed forces. Fayetteville is near Fort Bragg. After the 1964 Civil Rights Act pointed the way, Army leadership helped open Fayetteville’s golf courses, bars, and other public facilities. Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base, made a similar difference in Jacksonville.
30
Because the armed forces realizes that its men and women live or spend time in nearby communities, for decades it has made relationships with nearby communities, including race relations, part of the evaluation process for base commanders. To be sure, some commanders treat this requirement merely as a bureaucratic nuisance. Nevertheless, it helps, and every government agency—state and federal—needs to make these concerns part of the job definitions of those who run its local offices. After all, government offices and agencies exist in almost every sundown town. Imagine what might happen if each of them tried seriously to end their town’s exclusionary policies!
31
Governments in metropolitan areas or state governments can also equalize the amount of money spent on students in different school districts, so students enjoy something approaching equal educational opportunity. In most states, the way we pay for public K–12 education, as well as other local public services, pits suburb against suburb across a metropolitan area. This competition makes it in no suburb’s interest to provide or even allow affordable housing. Equalizing tax dollars across the state or across municipalities in a metropolitan area solves this problem.
32
Although elite sundown suburbs often oppose such tax equity, courts have found unequal property-tax-based school finance systems unconstitutional in twenty-one states, and other states have taken steps toward more equality without the spur of lawsuits. Whites move to sundown suburbs for four main reasons: to achieve status, avoid African Americans, enjoy amenities such as better parks and nicer neighborhoods, and provide better schools for their children—and not necessarily in that order. Fiscal equalizing can remove the last two as incentives luring whites to move to white suburbs.
33
Schools can adopt other policies that promote school and neighborhood integration. In some districts—Denver and Louisville, for example—previously all-white or all-black neighborhoods can get neighborhood schools back, with no busing, if they desegregate residentially. This provides an incentive for residents of sundown neighborhoods to let African Americans move in, so their own children won’t have to be bused out. Some school systems, including Wake County, North Carolina (Raleigh), and LaCrosse, Wisconsin, take care to make each of their schools diverse in social class, as well as race.
34
School districts can also take steps to end “test flight.” In today’s metropolitan real estate markets, lofty school test scores have become a sought-after commodity. One reason why parents move to the suburbs is to get good schools, and an easy—if shallow—way to compare schools is by standardized test scores. In Massachusetts, for example, according to a 2000 report, “school districts that score badly on the MCAS [that state’s standardized test] are likely to have houses for sale as parents try to move their kids to schools with better scores.” The trouble is, high scores on standardized tests correlate with race (white and Asian) and class (affluent) at least as well as with good teaching. Elsewhere I have presented some of the reasons why African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics score lower on these tests.
35
Given these gaps, it is in suburbs’ interest to keep out these groups so their schools will look better as measured by the test scores, so their homes will be worth more.
36
School districts should disaggregate scores by race, income category, and academic program. Disaggregating allows everyone to face the statistics openly. Many white parents will not move into a school district that they think will disadvantage their children. Yet white students in an interracial district may score as well as white students in an elite sundown suburb, so they are
not
being disadvantaged—but that fact cannot be inferred from overall school means that include black students.
37
Similarly, college-oriented parents will not move into a school district if they think its students are likely to score poorly on college entrance exams. Yet some economically diverse high schools prepare their college-bound students at least as well as elite sundown high schools, where almost everyone is college-bound, but their success cannot be inferred from overall school averages that include non-college-bound students.
38
Institutions of higher learning can also help to desegregate sundown towns and suburbs by admitting students without giving so much credit to the stacked deck that elite suburbs provide. This means jettisoning standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT or factoring into account their built-in racial and class biases, as well as the various aids that elite suburban children use to score higher on them.
39
It also means returning to straight high school grade-point averages rather than something called “uncapped GPAs,” which artificially raise the grades students get when they take advanced placement (AP) courses. Enhancing grades in AP courses results in striking geographic unfairness: the
average
uncapped GPA for suburban students admitted to the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 was at least 4.33, for example, when an A equals 4.0. Meanwhile, the valedictorian of an inner-city high school with a straight A average but no AP courses earned “only” a 4.0 and was not even competitive—and all because of where the student lived.
40
Corporations can also do much to undo sundown towns and suburbs. Many companies are already becoming good citizens regarding race relations. Some got the message the hard way, after bad racial practices brought them notoriety. Once a company has been doing a good job hiring and promoting people of color, it naturally becomes more concerned about the race relations of the communities where it is located. Now it has African American managers who want to live in hospitable and pleasant towns, and white executives who want to keep those managers happy. The Quaker Oats Company required Danville, in central Illinois, to pass an open-housing ordinance as a condition of locating a plant there, for example, and Danville isn’t even a sundown town; we can infer that Quaker Oats would never locate in a town that it knew excluded blacks. And not just Quaker; Earl Woodard, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce in Martinsville, Indiana, notorious for its sundown policy, complained in 1989 that owing to “its bad image,” Martinsville “hasn’t nabbed a single one” of the industrial facilities that “rained down on central Indiana” in the 1980s.
41
White Families Can Dismantle Sundown Towns
 
Those of us not a part of any large corporation or other institution and without much governmental influence—what can we do? Surely every American has a stake in remedying sundown towns and suburbs. White people created sundown towns, and whites—and “others”—can dismantle them.
People who live in an overwhelmingly white community can move. After they realize that choices by white families to live in white neighborhoods aggregate to form a social problem that then affects an entire metropolitan area, some whites refuse to live in a place that is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
42
When they move to an interracial neighborhood, often they help it get better schools, parks, and all the other accoutrements that make a successful community.
Moving into an interracial or majority-black community can seem intimidating for whites from sundown towns who have never known African American friends and neighbors. It needn’t be. Sociologist Karyn Lucy found the best race relations in majority-black suburbs. Whites who moved into these suburbs after they were already substantially black “get along [particularly] well with their neighbors and are involved in neighborhood activities.” My experience confirms her findings.
43
Whites do not have to be so bold as to move to predominantly black neighborhoods, however. Almost every metropolitan area contains at least one majority-white suburb that is struggling to stay interracial against the pressures deriving from sundown suburbs. Moving there not only provides such suburbs with incoming white families that help them stay integrated, it can also deter white flight by families who already live there.
44
People who don’t live in sundown neighborhoods can challenge the “paradox of exclusivity” described in Chapter 11. Asking “Why?” with quiet astonishment when acquaintances announce that they are thinking of moving to a town or suburb known to be overwhelmingly white invites people to explain their decision—suddenly no longer obvious—to live in such places and may make them think. So do questions such as “But don’t you hate to send your children to such an overwhelmingly white school system?” put to residents of such towns. Such conversations begin to reverse the status hierarchy that confers prestige on residents of all-white or overwhelmingly white communities, in turn, decreasing their hold on the popular definition of “the nice part of town.” This challenging of racial exclusion is beginning to happen: as early as 1992, the authors of
Detroit Divided
noticed that some whites in the Detroit area rated Dearborn—renowned for its sundown policies—undesirable because they did not want racist neighbors. Suddenly where one is “supposed to” live isn’t so clear. Decreasing the prestige of all-white neighborhoods and towns helps all parts of the metropolitan area become more open and attractive to all races and social classes.
45
Whites who don’t want to move from their overwhelmingly white communities can instead move their towns toward diversity and justice. White residents can persuade their school system that it cannot be competent without a seriously interracial faculty. Nor can a police department be fair—or perceived as fair—while being all-white. They can persuade their zoning board that these new teachers, police officers, etc., need to be able to live in the community where they teach, so affordable housing must become a priority. They can represent the excluded, who by definition cannot represent themselves because they have been kept out. They can even bring them in: in 1969, residents of Valparaiso, in northern Indiana, brought families from Chicago public housing projects to new homes in Valparaiso. The residents made the mistake of revealing their plan before finalizing their first home purchase, and a white supremacist stepped in to buy the house at a higher price. Eventually, however, they relocated Barbara Frazier-Cotton and her children, and later another family, to Valparaiso. At first, telephoned threats and cars slowly driving by were terrifying. Frazier-Cotton tells of “sleeping with the lights and television on to dissuade would-be intruders.” Valparaiso University students set up patrols outside the house at night, and white couples sometimes slept in the home to provide support. Despite the opposition, Frazier-Cotton stuck it out for ten years, during which she earned a bachelor’s degree from Valparaiso and her six children got a start that helped each of them build middle-class careers. Valparaiso was a tough case. If a few white liberals could crack it in the 1970s, surely most sundown towns and suburbs can be overcome today.
46

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