Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (82 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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Sometimes old-fashioned protests help. Demonstrators, mostly from Atlanta and mostly African American, marched in Forsyth County, Georgia, in early 1987, continuing into the 1990s. Five residents of Forsyth County marched with the group on the first day, and more thereafter. Racist groups such as Richard Barrett’s Nationalist Movement held counterdemonstra-tions, not understanding that
all
publicity about sundown behavior helps bring about change. Oprah Winfrey gave coverage to the issue on two occasions. By the late 1990s, Forsyth County had several hundred black residents, while sundown counties to its north,
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such as Towns County, without the benefit of demonstrations or publicity, did not.
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White families have standing to bring cases on their own behalf against realtors, city officials, and others responsible for their town’s all-white makeup. Quoting Justice William O. Douglas for a unanimous Supreme Court in
Trafficante v. Met Life et al.,
tenants in a California apartment house whose manager kept out African Americans “had lost the social benefits of living in an integrated community; . . . [and] had suffered embarrassment and economic damage in social, business, and professional activities from being ‘stigmatized’ as residents of a ‘white ghetto.’ ” This 1972 case and others decided more recently provide useful precedents for white families to act to force sundown towns to reverse course and announce that they have done so.
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African American Challenges to Sundown Towns
 
Even well-meaning whites cannot desegregate a sundown town without the help of black households. This book hopes to spur action to end sundown towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods, and some of that action can be taken only by African Americans. I believe a black family, backed by an alert civil rights attorney if necessary, can now buy a home in most of America’s persisting sundown towns. Some towns would still meet them with a freeze-out or violence, but black families have increasingly found welcoming neighbors.
Admittedly, moving into a sundown town differs from any other civil rights action. Unlike the marcher or sit-in participant of years past, the black family moving into a sundown town eats and sleeps on the picket line, and risks all its members, including babies, toddlers, and elderly. “There is a terrible isolation that surrounds the lone black family in a hostile white neighborhood,” pointed out Dorothy Newman, an expert on segregated housing, in the 1970s. Even today, for African Americans to move into a town that has not had any African Americans for decades violates the norm, and sociologists know that norm violators usually get sanctioned. So blacks are right to be cautious. Families do not seek to be pioneers in civil rights; they simply want a nice place to live. Even absent any hostility from whites, there are logistical problems in moving to a sundown town: “Where can we go to get our hair styled? Where will we go to church? Will we find friends?” An African American who lives in Peoria suggested a major reason why black families don’t desegregate the many sundown towns and suburbs around that city: “Black kids raise a fit about being the only black kids in the high school.”
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African Americans have a legacy of heroes who have gone before to inspire them. One I knew personally: Medgar Evers, selfless leader of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. Evers’s vision of the America of the future did not encompass allowing sundown suburbs to remain all-white. In her memoir of him, his widow, Myrlie, makes this clear:
One of Medgar’s greatest pleasures during those summers in Chicago was the chance to explore the suburbs. Whenever he could, he would borrow a car and drive out of the city to wander up one street and down another looking at houses. He had a dream of the sort of house he hoped someday to live in, the kind of street and neighborhood and town where he might raise a family, and the white suburbs of Chicago seemed to him right out of that dream. He would spend whole days just driving slowly through the suburbs of Chicago’s North Shore, looking at the beautiful houses and wishing. Years later, when we were in Chicago together, he took me on these drives and by that time he had picked out specific houses that came closest to his dream.
 
One of the suburbs Evers drove through four decades ago was Kenilworth. Although one black family did live there in the 1960s and ’70s, today Kenilworth still awaits its pioneer. So do many others.
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Black efforts
have
changed sundown towns. In town after town, African Americans have braved appalling conditions, sometimes bringing along friends and family members for backup, usually persevering in the long run and winning the right to live in the former sundown town in peace. Sociologist George Henderson became the first black homeowner in Norman, Oklahoma, when he joined the faculty of the University of Oklahoma in 1967. In his memoirs, Henderson wrote, “Garbage was thrown on our lawn, a couple of car windows were broken, and we received obscene phone calls.” In an interview with the student newspaper 35 years later, he recalled, “I feared for my family, but I was willing to die trying to make a difference. I had to come to terms with the fact I might be killed, but I believe that anything worth living for should be worth dying for.” Henderson’s fears were not exaggerated, for residents of Norman had engaged in repeated acts of real or threatened violence toward African Americans over the years. Indeed, historian Bill Savage, who came to the University of Oklahoma the year before Henderson, was shown a big tree on a hill in Norman by a man who said his father took him there just ten years earlier, in 1957 or ’58, and pointed to a black man hanging from it, “the last black man to violate the sundown rule in Norman.”
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Sundown suburbs can be equally threatening. In 1957, William and Daisy Myers were the first African Americans to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, built as a sundown suburb after World War II. They faced telephoned death threats, a mob milling across the street, and burning crosses on neighboring lawns. Daisy Myers, wife and mother of the family, kept a journal during the ordeal. She makes vivid the possible costs they anticipated:
We thought we should take the three children to York, Pennsylvania [to stay with their grandparents], but because Lynda was so young we decided to keep her with us. I felt that she would be too much of a burden on Bill’s family, with a formula to prepare and the other attention an infant requires. I remember saying to Bill that if we were killed in the house, Lynda would be too young to know. At least we would have the boys to carry on.
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Despite the initial tension, usually the enterprise ends happily. A lawyer who left the black ghetto of San Francisco for a white neighborhood was struck “that for the first time I was friendly with my immediate neighbors. They have the same interests we do.” In his 1970 book about housing desegregation, James Hecht summarized, “When a Negro family moves into a white area there are problems which few whites appreciate, but these problems usually are far less than the blacks anticipated.” He traced records of some 500 black families who had moved into previously all-white neighborhoods in the Buffalo, New York, area since 1964. “None are known to have moved back to the ghetto,” he reported. “About fifty of these families, including most of those who experienced unpleasant incidents, were interviewed in some depth. All were glad they had made the move. All would do it again.” Hecht was able to generalize these results beyond Buffalo:
Most of the families who moved found something else they had not anticipated, a warm welcome by some of their new neighbors. Fair housing groups throughout the nation report that black families moving into white neighborhoods usually had more friendly calls of welcome than did white families who moved into the same neighborhoods.
 
The Gautreaux program in Chicago likewise proves that whites
do
accept African American neighbors, even low-income ones.
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Victor Ward started the process of change in Cherokee, Oklahoma, during the summer of 1977. A young petroleum engineer newly minted by Marietta College in Ohio, Ward landed a job with Conoco, and they assigned him to Cherokee. “I arrived at the beginning of the summer and started to look for a place to live. I started with my work associates, and then asked around. And they sent me from one person to the next and I got ‘No, that’s not available,’ and ‘Sorry, that’s been rented.’ ” Ward ended up “in a shack, really, at the edge of town, didn’t even have electricity.” Then he got a breakthrough: a woman who had earlier turned him down phoned him at the Conoco office. She said she had talked with her pastor about it. Ward repeated her words to him: “I’m thinking, if I’d sent my son to some other town, I would hope they wouldn’t treat him the way the people of Cherokee have treated you.” So she rented to Ward, who became the first African American to live in previously sundown Cherokee, at least the first in decades. His co-workers socialized with him after work and invited him to their homes, and he had a fine summer. That he came in under the aegis of Conoco surely helped, but so did Ward’s positive outlook. “I think at the end of the day, I kind of won the town.” The census showed Cherokee with no African Americans in 1950, 1960, and 1970, but five in 1980, after Ward’s breakthrough. Cherokee may need another Ward, however, because in 1990 it was back to its former all-white status, and in 2000 it had but two African Americans, and no black households.
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Often blacks do “win the town.” Henderson is now a treasured senior member of the faculty and community in Norman. Although it took decades, Levittown now honors the Myerses: in December 1999, Bristol Township mayor Sam Fenton invited Daisy Myers to Levittown (her husband had died in 1987) and offered her a public apology. Levittown named a blue spruce tree in front of the municipal building “Miss Daisy” and uses it as the township Christmas tree. There can be no doubt that white residents now fully accept the right of African Americans to live in both Norman and Levittown.
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Sometimes it takes two attempts. After the first family is forced out from a town, the racists who rebuffed them may be surprised to receive mixed messages, even condemnation, from other residents, so they don’t mount another attack when another family tries, a year or so later.
Passing a Residents’ Rights Act
 
All the solutions suggested thus far may not suffice to remedy the tougher cases, whether these turn out to be independent towns like Anna or elite suburbs like Kenilworth. Indeed, the remedies America has tried thus far are reminiscent of the “freedom of choice” phase of school desegregation ( 1955–69). Just as policies in that discredited era placed the burden of desegregating our nation’s schools on individual black children, so our attempts at desegregating our nation’s neighborhoods have placed the burden on individual black families. But our nation has a
national interest
in desegregating white communities.
What is needed is a law—a Residents’ Rights Act—that makes it in an entire town’s interest to welcome African Americans. This proposed remedy embodies the conclusion reached by Zane Miller, who wrote a history of Forest Park, Ohio, established as a sundown suburb of Cincinnati in the 1950s. He noted that African Americans first began to move into Forest Park during 1967, and by 1970, 470 lived in “larger Forest Park.” This was more than enough to make Forest Park a frontline suburb, and by 2000 its population was 56% black. Miller understood the key role played by Cincinnati’s all-white suburbs in Forest Park’s transformation and realized that the only way to achieve stable racial desegregation in metropolitan areas is by attacking sundown suburbs.
What Forest Park . . . needed was a national and metropolitan policy which would . . . open up the wedges of overwhelmingly white suburbs on the metropolitan area’s western and eastern flanks.... Until that happened, the pattern of metropolitan ghettoization within scattered political jurisdictions would persist.
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Sociologist Herbert Gans, who studied New Jersey’s Levittown (now called Willingboro), came up with a similar recommendation: “If all communities must integrate, no one can expect to live in all-white communities.” So did William Levitt himself, whose company built more sundown suburbs than any other. Levitt knew that sundown suburbs were bad for America. Nevertheless, he continued to build them. “Only when all builders are forced to sell on a fair basis, he reasoned, would any of them be able to ‘afford’ an end to discrimination,” according to housing expert Dorothy Newman. Otherwise, if Levitt didn’t keep African Americans out, he’d be the only developer that didn’t, so all the blacks would flood into his towns. When members of CORE demonstrated at his sundown development in Belair, Maryland, Levitt called on President John F. Kennedy to put some real teeth into his ineffectual order opposing discrimination in housing, to force all suburbs to end discrimination. Kennedy did not respond, and Levitt took no steps on his own to desegregate the communities he built.
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Ironically, the evolution of Levitt’s development in New Jersey shows that Levitt had a point. The three Levittowns developed very differently. The first black family moved into Levittown, Pennsylvania, in 1957; the town wasn’t very welcoming and by 2000 was still only 2.4% black. “Not a single one of the Long Island Levittown’s 82,000 residents was black” in 1960, according to Kenneth Jackson, and by 2000 only 266 were, just 0.5% of 53,067 residents, a clear reflection of its racist heritage. The third Levittown, now Willingboro, New Jersey, had a very different history. In 1958, William Levitt announced that he would not sell any of its homes to African Americans. New Jersey’s governor ordered an investigation; U.S. Senator Clifford Case requested that the FHA refuse to insure mortgages in Levittown; and two African Americans who were turned away from the development sued Levitt in state court. Levitt took the case to the New Jersey Supreme Court, claiming his houses were a private matter, but the court held that the involvement of the FHA and other agencies made them publicly assisted, and Levitt was forced to desegregate Willingboro. Eventually, agents began to steer African Americans
toward
Willingboro, which by 1980 was 38% black. Willingboro residents struggled to stay interracial in the midst of overwhelmingly white competitors; one step was to ban “For Sale” signs, to slow white flight. But the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the ban, finding that the town failed to establish that it was necessary to maintain integration. In 2000, Willingboro does remain integrated, being 61% black, but some commentators dismiss it as “black” or “80% black,” which may be a self-fulfilling description. Thus Willingboro may wind up proving Levitt’s (and Gans’s and Miller’s) larger contention: that it is hard for one suburb to stay interracial while others stay all-white. Willingboro also shows that government action—in this case by a governor, senator, and court—is the surest way to cause change.
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