Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (84 page)

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Authors: James W. Loewen

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The recent past offers hope for an end to racial exclusion, however. The previous chapter showed that at least half of our sundown towns and suburbs have probably given way. Surely we can desegregate the last half. Some tough towns have cracked. Residents of Valley Stream on Long Island intimidated realtors and black clients in the 1980s. Nevertheless, by 1990, it had 149 African Americans among its 33,946 residents, and in 2000, 2,714 African Americans called Valley Stream home. Even Martinsville, Indiana, whose sundown notoriety was confirmed by new episodes of hateful behavior in the 1990s, may have given in. The 2000 census showed two African American households, and reports indicate that one or two other families have since moved in.
Entire suburbs have resisted “tipping point” theory, which predicts that once African Americans reach a certain proportion—often said to be 15%—whites will flee. Park Forest, Illinois, shows how. Its leaders made a conscious decision to stop being a sundown town in 1961. Ted Hipple, who lived in Park Forest at the time, described the process:
Blacks were moving from Chicago to the suburbs, and some looked at housing in Park Forest. Leo [Jacobson] and others in the government, to avoid any possible clustering of the black families and any resulting blockbusting consequences, were instrumental in allocating them to various parts of town, well separated from each other, with prior notification of the neighbors that a black family would be moving in.
 
As of 2000, Park Forest was still stably integrated, with 9,247 African Americans in a total population of 23,462. Another Chicago suburb, Oak Park, employed a similar strategy. In the early 1970s, Oak Park “began to experience substantial black in-migration,” according to Carole Goodwin, who wrote
The Oak Park Strategy
about its methods for staying interracial. Oak Park garnered national renown as an integrated suburb after giving up its sundown status. “In 1977,” Goodwin wrote, “Oak Park could not confidently be called a racially stable, integrated community.” But by 2000, Oak Park could be, having 11,788 African American residents among more than 52,000 total population, about 22%. White demand for houses continues to be strong; Oak Park led all suburban zip codes in housing appreciation over the period 1998–2003.
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In the last twenty years, whites have sometimes moved
into
majority-black neighborhoods.
75
When this happens, liberals often cry gentrification, but the resulting class and racial mix usually lasts for many years, to the betterment of municipal services and the city’s tax base. Tipping point theory cannot explain gentrification. Nor can it explain Mt. Rainier, Maryland, a working-class suburb of Washington, D.C., that was 56% black in 1990, 62% in 2000, and probably 59% in 2005. “The experiment of living together,” said one white newcomer in 2003, “as opposed to being polarized as black or white or Latino, makes those labels break down and leaves a whole lot more room for finding common ground.”
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Once a town eases its restrictive policies, all kinds of interesting people may move in. Among the families that seek to live in multiracial towns are multiracial families. D’Vera Cohn visited meetings of the Interracial Family Circle, a Washington, D.C., area group, in 2002. “The pros and cons of different neighborhoods are constant topics of conversation,” she wrote. She quoted the group’s president, Nancy Leigh Knox: “People want to be where it’s diverse. Everyone talks about it as being the primary criterion.” Knox and her husband are white but have two black adopted sons. “We want our children to live where there are lots of different kinds of people,” Knox said. It turns out lots of people are like Knox, and not just members of interracial families. A librarian in Decatur, my central Illinois hometown, spoke with pride of his interracial neighborhood in the West End, which had been a sundown neighborhood when I grew up in it. “And there’s a gay couple on the block, and no one thinks anything about it!” Because of whites who want to live in tolerant places, towns such as Mt. Rainier and Oak Park and interracial neighborhoods within cities not only survive but develop cachet. Other towns and neighborhoods may not be as well known for being integrated, especially those that are working- and lower-middle-class, but they endure, decade after decade, providing African Americans and European Americans (and Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans) with unheralded places to live that are stably 10% to 80% black.
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The goal is worth pursuing, partly because living in an integrated environment causes each racial group to define “we” nonracially. Interracial contact itself thus usually becomes a humanizing process. Here is an example from Baltimore, back in about 1947, in the words of a white housewife, 37 years old, the mother of three children:
When a colored family moved next door to us I was horrified. I just couldn’t see why they wanted to live where white people lived. I wanted my husband to move right away. We have lived here for fifteen years and we own our home. I would never let our children play with the children next door, or even talk with them. But in spite of all I told them about colored people, they still talked with them. One day my youngest boy came in the house with a ball that he said the little colored boy next door had given him. I was mad and made him give it back. My child was hurt, and it seemed that I was both cruel and unfair to him. After several weeks it suddenly occurred to me that those people weren’t bothering me at all. They were polite and always spoke to us. Their children were—well—just children. My husband and Mr. W __ soon began to talk to each other over the back fence, and Mrs. W __ and I also began to exchange greetings. The children run back and forth to both houses. We do favors for each other just as other neighbors do. They’re no different now from any of my other neighbors.
 
That is only one woman’s opinion, of course, but other researchers made a systematic comparison of the attitudes of white residents of two integrated public housing projects and two white-only projects. Attitudes in the integrated projects were much more favorable toward people of different races.
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In suburbs like Oak Park and Mt. Rainier, whose residents made a decision to stay integrated, white residents have perforce made black friends. As Emilie Barnett of Shaker Heights, Ohio, put it, “Because there was a need to do this, we came to know people intimately. It was the only way we could get past race.”
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Desegregating independent sundown towns benefits their residents, especially their children, by lessening their unease about the interracial outside world, thus expanding their options for college, vacations, and places to live and work. Children in elite sundown suburbs already have lots of options, but desegregation can likewise help them decrease their stereotypes about other races and be more comfortable in interracial milieux. Research by Orfield shows that most students in desegregated schools hold positive views about their experience. More than 90% of a sample of high school juniors in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, say they are comfortable working with students of another race. Whites and blacks also feel they can discuss racial issues across racial lines. Adults benefit too. In her Philadelphia-area research, Carolyn Adams found that “the most liberal racial attitudes were observed among whites living in neighborhoods that were racially integrated—defined as those in which at least 5% of the local population was black.”
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Merely encountering African Americans as neighbors, PTA members, and so on can improve white rhetoric, because social and political discussions are impoverished by the absence of African Americans. We have seen that sundown towns both collect and create racists, while integrated towns both collect and create anti-racists. Just as cognitive dissonance makes whites more racist when they live in a sundown town, which they must justify, so it makes whites less racist, even anti-racist, when they live in a multiracial town, which they must justify. Ideology and attitudes thus flow from social structure, with profound consequences for the next generation. For readers wanting a personal rationale for living an integrated lifestyle, this is one.
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Moving Toward an Integrated America
 
America should not
have
white neighborhoods or black neighborhoods. It should have just neighborhoods. People who live in interracial neighborhoods and towns have taken an important stand in favor of better race relations. Integration is no panacea, but there is no substitute. There seems to be no stable resting point between slavery—which, though stable in a way, required constant vigilance—and fully equal democracy. Since we have not yet attained fully equal democracy, race relations remains unstable, fluid, a source of continuing contention in our society. In this situation, those who act for racial justice are also helping to build social stability—maybe even the “beloved community” yearned for in the Civil Rights Movement. Integrated towns and suburbs are a necessary first step to integrated hearts and minds. Until we solve the problem of sundown neighborhoods and towns, we do not have a chance of solving America’s race problem.
It all seems to be taking a very long time. As the last chapter noted, “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed” Anna—the town with which this book began—still may not allow African Americans to live within its city limits. Surely its continued existence as a sundown town—and that of all the other sundown towns and suburbs that still have not changed—tells us it is taking far too long.
The remedies suggested here—especially the Residents’ Rights Act—remove the all-important badge of governmental approval or at least government neutrality from sundown towns and suburbs. In “Black and White,” their 1972 hit song about school integration, the rock group Three Dog Night showed that they understood the importance of government action. After the federal government finally enforced school desegregation in the South, they sang, “Now a child can understand / This is the law of all the land /
All
the land.” But was it? School desegregation was the law only in the South. In the North, after
Milliken,
sundown suburbs maintained school segregation by excluding African Americans from their neighborhoods.
So now the child remains confused.
Blacks passing through may be abused.
What is the law of all the land?
Do sundown policies still stand?
 
Or might we yet, as Three Dog Night put it, “learn together to read and write”? Then indeed, as they go on to sing, “The whole world looks upon the sight / A beautiful sight.”
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Appendix
 
Methodological Notes on
Table 1
 
General notes
 
Several states, including Minnesota, the Dakotas, and notably Texas, had counties with as few as 3 to 999 residents, especially in 1890.
Table 1
excludes them; such tiny populations should not be given equal weight as datapoints compared to counties with 5,000 or 50,000 people. Moreover, there is little reason to believe that African Americans were shut out if none appear in a county with a mere handful of inhabitants. Leaving out such counties also accords with my general omission of hamlets smaller than 1,000.
The second column under each date, counties with “<10 bl.,” includes counties listed in the first column, counties with “0 bl.” This is appropriate: any county with no African Americans obviously also has fewer than ten. Thus the columns “<10 bl.” convey correct information without requiring addition from another column.
Why does
Table 1
omit Alaska and Hawaii?
 
I omitted Alaska and Hawaii because they were not states during the Nadir and have had quite different racial histories since. Both are complexly multiracial, with Native American and Inuit populations in Alaska, and Native Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino Americans, and others in Hawaii. Perhaps enterprising readers can investigate whether whites created sundown neighborhoods, suburbs, or towns in those states.
Minnesota’s mixed pattern
 
Minnesota showed more counties in 1890 with no blacks, but more in 1930 with just a few blacks; however, in 1890 its counties had much lower total populations. Nine had fewer than 5,000, compared to just one in 1930. Their average population, excluding the counties containing Minnesota’s three major cities—Duluth, Minneapolis, and St. Paul—was 18,502 in 1930, 50% more than the 1890 average of 12,102. Since their total populations were up, Minnesota counties should have had more African Americans in 1930. Instead, by 1930, seven of every eight black Minnesotans lived in Minneapolis–St. Paul, compared to less than one-third of whites, thus confirming a retreat to the city.
States with no counties in either year with fewer than ten blacks
 
Having only three counties, Delaware could not show any trend using county analysis. Neither could Rhode Island with five, although blacks did lose ground in three of Rhode Island’s five counties and showed a sizable population increase only in Providence. In Connecticut, only three counties showed increases in African American population, comparing 1930 to 1890: Fairfield County near New York City, Hartford, and New Haven. These are Connecticut’s most urban counties, and whites moved to them too, but whites also moved to other counties such as Middlesex, Windham, Litchfield, and New London. Blacks did not. The same pattern held in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. By 1930, New York held many sundown towns and suburbs but at most one sundown county.

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