Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (83 page)
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Authors: James W. Loewen
BOOK: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism
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To be effective, a law must be written to preclude a town from merely
claiming
that it welcomes all newcomers without regard to race. After all, since 1968, towns don’t admit they are all-white on purpose, realtors don’t admit they steer, bankers don’t admit they redline, police deny racial profiling, and in many places, neighbors deny they threaten or shun. Proving that officials of a town or suburb keep out African American residents today can thus be difficult, just as in the early 1960s no southern registrar would admit that would-be voters had to be white to register, even though their majority-black county might have thousands of white and only a handful of black registered voters. Therefore I suggest a Residents’ Rights Act parallel to the registration clause of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (extended and strengthened in 1982). This law provides that in counties with an unusual disparity between the percentage of the black and white electorates registered to vote, the Department of Justice can send in federal examiners, once complaints have been received from ten individuals who were rebuffed when trying to register. Similarly, a blatant disparity between the percentage of a town’s population that is African American compared to the proportion in the metropolitan area (the entire state for independent sundown towns) will trigger sanctions under the Residents’ Rights Act
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—
when coupled with at least two valid complaints from families who were rebuffed when trying to buy or rent a home in the community and a careful showing that it was a sundown town.
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Proving that a community was a sundown town is doable if it was one, even if gathering candid admissions of continuing discriminatory behavior in the present is not. Because sundown policies are typically self-maintaining, it is appropriate to shift the burden to the community to show that it has changed them.
The Residents’ Rights Act in Operationclaiming
that it welcomes all newcomers without regard to race. After all, since 1968, towns don’t admit they are all-white on purpose, realtors don’t admit they steer, bankers don’t admit they redline, police deny racial profiling, and in many places, neighbors deny they threaten or shun. Proving that officials of a town or suburb keep out African American residents today can thus be difficult, just as in the early 1960s no southern registrar would admit that would-be voters had to be white to register, even though their majority-black county might have thousands of white and only a handful of black registered voters. Therefore I suggest a Residents’ Rights Act parallel to the registration clause of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (extended and strengthened in 1982). This law provides that in counties with an unusual disparity between the percentage of the black and white electorates registered to vote, the Department of Justice can send in federal examiners, once complaints have been received from ten individuals who were rebuffed when trying to register. Similarly, a blatant disparity between the percentage of a town’s population that is African American compared to the proportion in the metropolitan area (the entire state for independent sundown towns) will trigger sanctions under the Residents’ Rights Act
60
—
when coupled with at least two valid complaints from families who were rebuffed when trying to buy or rent a home in the community and a careful showing that it was a sundown town.
61
Proving that a community was a sundown town is doable if it was one, even if gathering candid admissions of continuing discriminatory behavior in the present is not. Because sundown policies are typically self-maintaining, it is appropriate to shift the burden to the community to show that it has changed them.
Congress or a state could pass a Residents’ Rights Act.
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If Congress acted, the required complaints would go to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would have the power to hear complaints of recent discrimination and collect evidence on whether the town has a sundown past. The first consequence for towns that trigger the Residents’ Rights Act will be federal housing examiners, parallel to the elections examiners of the Voting Rights Act. These examiners will investigate complaints, provide community relations services to the town, and meet with town officials, real estate agents, schools, and representatives of churches and other organizations to try to create an atmosphere more hospitable to African Americans or others claiming to have been excluded. The examiners can require local officials to proclaim that their town is open to all, set up a human relations commission, and order all real estate agents licensed to sell property in the town to state their intent to show, rent, and sell property without regard to race. The examiners will also be empowered to sit in on meetings between agents and African American would-be renters or purchasers.
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If Congress acted, the required complaints would go to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would have the power to hear complaints of recent discrimination and collect evidence on whether the town has a sundown past. The first consequence for towns that trigger the Residents’ Rights Act will be federal housing examiners, parallel to the elections examiners of the Voting Rights Act. These examiners will investigate complaints, provide community relations services to the town, and meet with town officials, real estate agents, schools, and representatives of churches and other organizations to try to create an atmosphere more hospitable to African Americans or others claiming to have been excluded. The examiners can require local officials to proclaim that their town is open to all, set up a human relations commission, and order all real estate agents licensed to sell property in the town to state their intent to show, rent, and sell property without regard to race. The examiners will also be empowered to sit in on meetings between agents and African American would-be renters or purchasers.
Real estate agents may not be the problem, or at least not the whole problem, so housing examiners may not lead to real progress. In that event, the examiners will have the power to penalize the town. What sanctions are appropriate? Everyone from city officials to bankers to police to nearby neighbors may play a role in making it hard for African Americans to move to sundown towns and suburbs. So sanctions must make it in all these actors’ interest to open up. The Clean Air Act offers a useful parallel. Under its provisions, if a city’s air quality falls below a certain minimum, no more tax dollars can be spent on highways and development until it cleans up its air. Similarly, under the Residents’ Rights Act, no more tax dollars can be spent on discretionary programs in a sundown town or suburb until it cleans up its segregation. Tax money that assists innocent people, such as for disaster relief, aid to disabled children, and the like, will still flow. Ongoing expenditures will not be affected. But the town will be shut out from seeking new funds for sewage facilities, police training, and 1,001 other programs. After all, every dollar of federal or state tax money spent in a sundown community is a dollar spent only on white Americans, yet collected from all Americans.
There are precedents for this. In 1947, under the auspices of the American Heritage Foundation, the United States government and America’s railroads sent a “Freedom Train” around the country, carrying original copies of the Declaration of Independence and other important documents. This joint public-private venture proved very successful, drawing some 3,500,000 visitors in 322 cities. Columnist Drew Pearson helped instigate the effort. When Pearson learned that the train was scheduled to stop at Glendale, California, knowing that Glendale was a sundown town, “on his national radio broadcast he stated that the train would not stop in Glendale because Negroes could not stay there after dark,” according to Bob Johnson, who remembers the broadcast.
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The train also bypassed Birmingham, Alabama, after city officials there refused to let African Americans visit it except during hours specifically set aside for them. Langston Hughes wrote a poem about the Freedom Train, including the line “Everybody’s got a right to board the Freedom Train.” In its refusal to visit segregated Birmingham and sundown Glendale, the Freedom Train indeed lived up to its name.
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The train also bypassed Birmingham, Alabama, after city officials there refused to let African Americans visit it except during hours specifically set aside for them. Langston Hughes wrote a poem about the Freedom Train, including the line “Everybody’s got a right to board the Freedom Train.” In its refusal to visit segregated Birmingham and sundown Glendale, the Freedom Train indeed lived up to its name.
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The chief federal judge for southern Illinois wants to deny Benton federal tax dollars today because it is a sundown town. His district, the Southern District of Illinois, epitomizes the sundown problem in America. The United States District Court holds court in two cities there: East St. Louis, 97.7% black, and Benton, 99.5% white. Judge G. Patrick Murphy is trying to keep a new $70,000,000 federal courthouse from being built in Benton. “I think it is fundamentally wrong to send the resources of the federal government, particularly in regard to the court system, to a community that is not diverse and is not enthusiastic about letting our employees participate fully in community life,” said Murphy in October 2002. The mayor of Benton, Patricia Bauer, made her position clear: “We are a very small community, and I don’t apologize
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for Benton’s racial makeup.”
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for Benton’s racial makeup.”
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Murphy is not the only official concerned about sundown towns. An attorney in Monticello, Illinois, said that his central Illinois sundown town had similar “trouble getting federal funding” for a county courthouse project, because they had no nonwhite workers. In 1982, a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of African Americans alleged widespread deliberate housing discrimination throughout East Texas. In response to the complaint, U.S. District Court judge William Wayne Justice ordered desegregation of public housing in towns throughout East Texas. Several, including Vidor and Alba, were sundown towns, so of course their public housing projects were all-white;
every
public expenditure in those towns was reserved for whites. In 1992, Vidor gained national notoriety when several black households moved into a public housing project, became the town’s first African American residents, and were all driven out by Ku Klux Klan demonstrations, racial slurs, and threats.
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every
public expenditure in those towns was reserved for whites. In 1992, Vidor gained national notoriety when several black households moved into a public housing project, became the town’s first African American residents, and were all driven out by Ku Klux Klan demonstrations, racial slurs, and threats.
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Making sundown towns ineligible for federal or state funds may not suffice, especially in affluent communities. Some school districts and institutions of higher education similarly turned their back on funds for education, loans for dormitories, and the like, choosing to stay segregated. If needed, a simpler sanction will come into play, making use of the income tax code: denial of the federal home mortgage interest deduction. This deduction has long been one of the important ways our tax code favors middle- and higher-income Americans, allowing homeowners to deduct the largest single component of their housing outlay, while renters get no such break. The rationale for this deduction is our national interest in encouraging home ownership. Surely America has no national interest in encouraging home ownership in sundown towns, however. So it should grant no exemption for mortgage interest payments by homeowners who choose to live in such communities.
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Denial of the mortgage interest exemption has additional benefits that should make it attractive to lawmakers. It costs nothing and commits the federal government to no massive new program of housing construction; on the contrary, it brings in revenue. Second, we have seen that because all-white suburbs have more prestige, typically they enjoy higher housing values.
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Removal of the interest exemption will make such property less valuable, offsetting this gain from sundown policies.
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Third, it allows for local control. A sundown town or suburb can opt to stay all-white. Alternatively, it can desegregate any way it wants, from developing low-cost housing to recruiting African American families to buy existing homes. Best of all, eliminating the mortgage interest exemption avoids problematizing “the poor black family,” for whom perpetual government assistance seems required. Instead, the Residents’ Rights Act recognizes segregated white communities as the problem and makes it in their residents’ interest to stop their problematic behavior.
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Removal of the interest exemption will make such property less valuable, offsetting this gain from sundown policies.
70
Third, it allows for local control. A sundown town or suburb can opt to stay all-white. Alternatively, it can desegregate any way it wants, from developing low-cost housing to recruiting African American families to buy existing homes. Best of all, eliminating the mortgage interest exemption avoids problematizing “the poor black family,” for whom perpetual government assistance seems required. Instead, the Residents’ Rights Act recognizes segregated white communities as the problem and makes it in their residents’ interest to stop their problematic behavior.
Indeed, all a town has to do to end or avoid these sanctions is to publicize that it is now open to all, take the steps suggested by federal housing examiners, and admit a few African American residents. As soon as its population no longer displays the blatant racial disparity that triggered suspicion in the first place, it will be off the list. For example, Grosse Pointe will need to become about 2.3% black, 1.5% higher than its 2000 proportion, 0.8%. Since it had 5,670 people in 2000, this requires it to welcome 85 more African Americans—an easy task, since neighboring Detroit has 775,000 African Americans and is more than 82% black. Independent sundown towns such as Arcola might find it harder. Arcola would need about 38 more African Americans to reach 1.54% black, one-tenth as black as Illinois statewide. It could (and should) recruit them, perhaps from larger nearby towns such as Decatur and Champaign—after all, it now draws white flight from those towns. If it finds this problematic, then after recruiting two or three families, thus moving beyond the sundown town threshold, it could ask the examiners to be removed from the sanction list, so long as they concur that the town has ended its discriminatory practices. The Residents’ Rights Act requires not integration but an end to exclusion. It merely uses demography as evidence that exclusion has ceased. Recovering sundown towns can submit other evidence showing they have ended their restrictive policies and thus avoid any penalty.
At present, instead of penalizing sundown towns, governments reward them. For the last quarter of the twentieth century, sundown towns in southern Illinois, for example, got
more
than their share of federal expenditures. During that era, Kenneth Gray, representative in Congress for the region, earned the nickname “Prince of Pork” for all the federal money he brought to his hometown, West Frankfort, all-white since it drove out its African Americans in 1920, and to nearby sundown towns. Independent sundown towns often languish economically: their leaders don’t seek new ideas or new companies, so employment plummets. Instead of withdrawing state and federal aid from these towns, governments award them prisons and juvenile detention centers to give their economies a boost. To penologists, places such as Chehalis, Washington; Clarinda, Iowa; Izard County, Arkansas; Pollock, Louisiana; Brown County, Dwight, Pinckneyville, Vandalia, Vienna, and other locations in Illinois; Perry County, Indiana; Wayne County and various other white valleys in Pennsylvania; the Adirondack counties of New York; Garrett County, Maryland; and other places with overwhelmingly white populations
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seem to be ideal. In a circular process, prisons then put more people into sparsely settled, overwhelmingly white districts—people who cannot vote—magnifying the clout of their representatives in state legislatures.
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more
than their share of federal expenditures. During that era, Kenneth Gray, representative in Congress for the region, earned the nickname “Prince of Pork” for all the federal money he brought to his hometown, West Frankfort, all-white since it drove out its African Americans in 1920, and to nearby sundown towns. Independent sundown towns often languish economically: their leaders don’t seek new ideas or new companies, so employment plummets. Instead of withdrawing state and federal aid from these towns, governments award them prisons and juvenile detention centers to give their economies a boost. To penologists, places such as Chehalis, Washington; Clarinda, Iowa; Izard County, Arkansas; Pollock, Louisiana; Brown County, Dwight, Pinckneyville, Vandalia, Vienna, and other locations in Illinois; Perry County, Indiana; Wayne County and various other white valleys in Pennsylvania; the Adirondack counties of New York; Garrett County, Maryland; and other places with overwhelmingly white populations
71
seem to be ideal. In a circular process, prisons then put more people into sparsely settled, overwhelmingly white districts—people who cannot vote—magnifying the clout of their representatives in state legislatures.
72
Governments also often honor sundown towns. At their city limits, sometimes right where the infamous sundown signs used to be, now stand congratulatory signs toasting the towns with such designations as “Governor’s Hometown Award,” “Illinois Main Street Community,” “Illinois Certified City,” “Michigan Educational Excellence Award,” “U.S. Dept. of Education Exemplary School,” and the like. Surely no sundown town deserves these awards. The Illinois Main Street program, for example, run by the lieutenant governor’s office, has to do mostly with revitalizing downtowns. Among its guidelines are “Demonstrate broad-based private- and public-sector support for downtown revitalization” and “Develop vision and mission statements.” Surely “broad-based support” should include support from people other than whites. Surely a town should have a vision of itself as a multiracial community, moved beyond its petty prejudices. Surely Main Streets that a state recognizes as exemplary should be streets that people of color can feel comfortable strolling down. Owosso, Michigan, won the 2000 Michigan Educational Excellence Award, but Owosso High School cannot help but impart racism, along with chemistry, algebra, and its other subjects, owing to its historically intentional racial makeup. Mariemont, Ohio, boasts a plaque saying “U.S. Dept. of Education Exemplary School,” but an all-white school can hardly be exemplary. Surely citizens should demand that civic and educational competitions like these establish standards of racial tolerance that communities must meet before they can receive these awards.
Integrated Neighborhoods and Towns Are PossibleThe Residents’ Rights Act would have aided integration in Southfield, Michigan, which, according to
Detroit Divided,
had “the distinction of being the only prosperous Detroit suburb with a large and growing black population: 29% in 1990.” Precisely because it had this “distinction,” by 2000 Southfield was 56% black. In the absence of policies that would open up overwhelmingly white suburbs, towns such as Southfield are likely to become overwhelmingly nonwhite.
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Detroit Divided,
had “the distinction of being the only prosperous Detroit suburb with a large and growing black population: 29% in 1990.” Precisely because it had this “distinction,” by 2000 Southfield was 56% black. In the absence of policies that would open up overwhelmingly white suburbs, towns such as Southfield are likely to become overwhelmingly nonwhite.
73
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