Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
This reviewer was born in Chicago – long known as one of the most racially segregated big cities in America -- and grew up in a sundown town – a working-class, industrial suburb west of Chicago. It was understood that no African-Americans were allowed to live in Franklin Park, even though hundreds worked in the factories every day, and nearby towns had large black populations.James Loewen has written a book that is eye-opening, comprehensive and persuasive. There is a wealth of history detailing the grim reality of systematic housing discrimination in the North during most of the 20th Century. In addition to documenting how racial restrictions worked, Loewen connects the dots to explain how segregation causes inequality.Loewen grew up in central Illinois, and started his research in his home state. He initially believed racial exclusion from towns had been limited to a handful of places. He came to realize there was a widespread pattern in northern states. During the first half of the 20th Century, for example, African Americans moved to Detroit, but not to four adjacent suburbs next to the City: Dearborn, Grosse Pointe, Melvindale and Warren. Thousands of blacks who worked at the auto plants in Dearborn and Warren would’ve moved to such close-in suburbs had they been welcome. Dearborn’s longtime mayor, Orville Hubbard (1942-1978), told a reporter that “as far as he was concerned, it was against the law for Negroes to live in his suburb. ‘They can’t get in here. We watch it.’” Whites in the Detroit area were five times more likely than African Americans, controlling for income, to live in the suburbs. At least 47 of 59 suburbs outside Detroit were overwhelmingly white, decade after decade.Based on his research, Loewen concludes that thousands of towns and cities across the North excluded African-Americans from living there from about 1890 until late in the 20th century. This exclusion was enforced either by ordinances warning African Americans and sometimes other minorities to be out of town by sunset, or by informal means such as harassing any blacks who violated the rule. Ordinances in many towns also prohibited blacks from renting or owning property.Ironically, sundown towns were rare in the South, where African-Americans were prevented from voting. “While African-Americans never lost the right to vote in the North, they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county. Probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans” outside the South.The fact is that racial exclusion and segregation did not always exist. African Americans lived in many places prior to 1890 where they no longer resided thereafter. Some towns and even counties drove out their black residents and then posted the signs, while some allowed a single black household as an exception to the rule. Most Americans are familiar with the Jim Crow laws and lynching in the South after the Civil War. Far less well known is the fact that many in the North did not welcome African Americans, before, during or after the war to free the slaves. The Illinois state constitution of 1848, for example, provided that the General Assembly shall adopt laws prohibiting “free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state.”African-Americans were not the sole victims of racial exclusion. Until about 1884, Chinese Americans lived in virtually every town in the West, but between 1885-1920, dozens of communities drove out their entire Chinese population. There was a great black migration from the South to the North starting about 1915, which makes the absolute declines in black population in many northern counties all the more staggering. In Illinois, there were zero counties in 1890 with no black residents, and only 6 with fewer than ten, but by 1930 there were six all-white counties and 17 with fewer than ten. Missouri went from no counties without black residents in 1890 to 12 in 1930. Nebraska went from 9 to 28; Wisconsin from 8-16, Idaho from 1 to 14.By 1970, when the number of sundown towns was probably at the zenith, there were 671 municipalities in Illinois, and 474 or 71% were all-white. Loewen found evidence (beyond census data) of racial exclusion policies from 146 of the 424 all-white towns larger than 1,000 people, and has confirmed 145 of 146 as sundown towns. Based upon the towns he examined, the probability is that a high proportion of the remaining all-white towns were also all-white-on-purpose. In addition, he confirmed that 50 Illinois hamlets with fewer than 1,000 residents also were sundown towns.It wasn’t just small towns that became more segregated. Big cities became markedly more segregated in housing patterns after 1890 and 1900. Prior to 1890, poor neighborhoods and even some middleclass ones had been racially integrated. By 1940, sharply segregated neighborhoods were the norm and the trend continued. Ethnic cleansing was achieved by violence, intimidation, ordinance, and informal actions by police. Violence was used to force out African Americans abruptly. Decatur in northeast Indiana, for instance, went sundown in 1902 after a mob drove the last black residents out of town. Decatur is the county seat of Adams County, which had not a single black household for decades, and reported only five black residents a century later.Bigger riots directed at nonwhites have been better recorded in history than smaller ones, and occurred in dozens of towns including Springfield, Illinois in 1908, East St. Louis, Illinois in 1917, Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1923 and Lincoln, Nebraska in 1929.The rioters in Springfield, Illinois over two days in 1908 lynched two innocent black men, burned down the black business district and blocks of black homes, and chased about two-thirds of the black residents out of town before the state militia intervened. Not a single perpetrator was ever convicted for murder, arson or other crime against the victims. The NAACP was founded in Springfield in response to these crimes.Two days after the riot in Springfield, whites in Buffalo, 12 miles east, became all-white by threatening to shoot any blacks who stayed in the town, which has remained all white since Aug. 17,1908. Eight were killed in Romeoville, Illinois when whites expelled all the town’s African Americans in 1893. Other race riots in small Illinois towns came in East Alton and Spring Valley (1893), Virden (1898), Pana (1899), Carterville (1901), Eldorado (1902), Anna-Jonesboro (1909), West Frankfort (1920), and Vienna (1954).The increasing frequency of mass “spectacle lynchings” played a role in spreading fear and creating sundown towns. Announced in advance, these events drew hundreds or thousands of spectators to public murders. The lynching of a black man by whites from Toluca and Lacon, Illinois, north of Peoria, in 1898 sparked an exodus of black residents from those towns. Though lynchings are usually associated with the South, the truth is that – controlling for the size of the black population – lynchings were as common in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and California as in southern states.All-white suburbs were no accident. Sundown suburbs, beginning around 1900, achieved racial segregation by design. Elite suburbs built by a single developer kept out African Americans from the beginning, including Park Forest, Illinois, a suburb south of Chicago.Kenilworth, Illinois, two suburbs north of Chicago, incorporated as all-white town; “sales to Caucasians only” was part of the suburb’s founding documents. Jews were also unwelcome in Kenilworth, as well as in Lake Forest, Barrington and Palatine, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Kenilworth didn’t admit Jews until the 1970s.The three Levittowns – in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania – were built by Levitt & Sons, who refused to sell to blacks for two decades after WWII. Consequently, not a single one of the Long Island Levittown’s 82,000 residents was black in 1960. Oak Park, Illinois, which abuts Chicago’s west side, was originally a sundown suburb, as Dr. Percy Julian and his wife, both Ph.Ds, found out when they tried to move there in 1950. By 1970, just 500 black families lived in white suburban Chicago, and most of them were confined to 5 or 6 towns. After 1917, when the Supreme Court dcclared unconstitutional openly anti-black ordinances, most sundown suburbs resorted to racially restrictive covenants, which were part of the deed. Many suburbs refused to approve developments without restrictive covenants. In addition, the FHA refused to insure loans without them. Consequently, covenants covering the entire town were just as effective as ordinances in keeping towns all-white.The Chicago Real Estate Board started using restrictive covenants in 1919, and by 1940, more than 80 percent of the Chicago area was so covered; “across the US, exclusionary covenants were the rule rather than the exception.” The Federal Housing Administration advocated restrictive covenants, its Manual containing a model covenant until 1948, making it clear that the government believed black families were a danger from which whites required protection. .In 1938, the FHA held that to retain “neighborhood stability, it is necessary that its properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.”FHA and VA loans were “the most important single cause of postwar suburbanization.” More than 98% of the home loans guaranteed by the FHA and VA after WWII were available only to whites. . More single-family homes were purchased in the decade after the war than during the previous 150 years. African Americans were shut out of the suburbs and the surest route to wealth accumulation – federally subsidized home ownership – which includes the mortgage interest deduction for owners, not renters.The proportion of African Americans living in suburbia was 4.6% in 1950, and 4.2% in 1970, during the era of explosive suburban growth. The huge modern disparity in median household wealth between whites and blacks – 20 to 1 – can be attributed in large part to housing appreciation that whites enjoyed since the late 1940s. When the feds did spend money on black housing, it was in huge high-rise projects concentrated in the inner city. Vacant land was cheaper in the suburbs. To justify building on higher priced land that needed to be cleared in the central cities, officials piled hundreds of units onto the tracts.Federal policy changed in 1968 with passage of the Fair Housing Act (aka Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act). . This act prohibits racial discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of housing. But HUD had no enforcement powers, and victims had to litigate themselves. Consequently, discrimination went underground, and involved steering, lying, stalling and creating obstacles for blacks seeking to buy in white areas.“A striking characteristic of sundown towns is their durability,” given the mobility of Americans, including African Americans. That durability is due to a variety of enforcement mechanisms that keep towns all-white decade after decade.White boys and young men would attack or threaten to attack blacks who came through town; in Pana, Illinois, for instance, black porters would hide under the seats when their trains went through Pana. Gas stations refused to sell to black motorists in some towns, such as Mt. Olive and Gillespie, Illinois, where the policy lasted through the 1950s. “Driving While Black” has long been a reason for police to pull over black motorists. Frequently being pulled over and searched makes it uncomfortable for African Americans to live or work in towns where officers know they don’t live and therefore pull them over on sight.Even after the sundown sign was removed in Gillespie, Illinois near St. Louis in the early 1960s, it was still an unwritten rule that black people would not be tolerated in town.After the federal law made it difficult to exclude blacks openly, suburbs did it by controlling the kind of development allowed. Zoning laws typically allowed only single-family housing and imposed minimum lot sizes, such as 5 acres in South Barrington, Illinois. The DuPage County Housing Authority was established in 1942, but had yet to construct a single unit 30 years later by 1972. Some sundown towns passed ordinances requiring public employees to live in town; this made African Americans ineligible for future openings, since they would first have to move in.Violence was also used after ordinances and covenants were struck down, and when steering, discriminatory lending and the town’s reputation didn’t suffice. The most extensive violence occurred in the North during the two decades following WWII. In Chicago during just the first two years after WWII, whites bombed 167 homes bought or rented by African Americans in white neighborhoods, killing four, crippling eight and injuring scores of others. Percy Julian’s home in Oak Park suffered both bomb and arson attacks in 1950. The first black family to enter suburban Deerfield, Illinois moved out of their rented apartment after windows were broken and excrement smeared on the walls.Starting in 1976, however, 5,000 African American families were located into predominantly white communities under the Gautreaux litigation against the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). Compared to black families who weren’t selected for the move, black families in white neighborhoods prospered.Some 95% of children graduated from high school and 54% went to college, despite the fact that the Gautreaux families were generally headed by single mothers on welfare, who nonetheless had remarkable outcomes. Researcher James Rosenbaum concluded that residential segregation was the problem, promoting hopelessness and keeping poor black families from contact with the larger society. It is estimated that the quality of life across American cities would improve markedly if housing segregation were cut in half. For some reason, this solution to urban ills never makes the to-do list.The problems of inner-cities are rarely attributed to the impact of sundown suburbs, but are typically blamed upon the relatively powerless ghetto residents. Of 167 sundown towns in Illinois, about 40% still zero black residents as of 2000. In the Milwaukee metro area, an astonishing 96% of all African Americans live in Milwaukee, an indicator that sundown suburbs are still going strong.When sundown suburbs today have a handful of black residents, that may allow denial that the town kept out blacks for decades, and may make it seem “natural” that a town is less than 5 percent or 1 percent black. Token desegregation is also used to claim racism is over. Yet black students are more likely to go to segregated schools today than they were several decades ago.The reality is that African Americans remain underrepresented in suburbia, and those who do live there are concentrated in relatively few towns. Suburban Chicago has a typical pattern: Almost all blacks who moved to suburbs during the 1960s went to just 15 of 237 suburbs. By 1980, 9 of Chicago’s 285 suburbs were 30-50% black, while 117 were less than 1% black. Kane County was about 6% black in 2000, but 96% lived in two towns, Elgin and Aurora. “Sundown suburbs are the key reason why geographer Jeff Crump was able to maintain in 2003 that ‘cities in the US are the most racially segregated urban areas in the world.’” The normal processes of the marketplace would result in a sprinkling of African Americans everywhere, albeit with some areas of concentration, like the distribution of, say, Italian Americans.It would be comforting to believe that racial segregation during the 20th Century was mainly due to freedom of choice, that policies enforcing it were aberrations. The unvarnished truth, asserts Loewen, is that racial segregation has not occurred “naturally” in this country, but is in large part the result of deliberate government policies.Americans today almost universally denounce racism, but they don’t want to discuss racial segregation, even though residential segregation persists at high levels. The status quo is considered appropriate, with all-or-predominately white towns and schools. Northern whites, Loewen argues, are comforted by their misapprehension that discriminatory laws were the exclusive province of Southern racists. Americans typically ignore the effects that discriminatory laws have had in creating ghettoes, preferring to blame the poor for their poverty. It’s easier to ignore the fact that residential segregation keeps black students out of better suburban schools, and it isolates African-Americans from job opportunities, which have grown in white suburbs much faster than elsewhere. Segregation also isolates blacks from social networks where jobs openings are discussed. Detroit – the nation’s most segregated metro area in 2000 – illustrates the harm caused by hyper-segregation. Detroit was 82% black in 2000, surrounded by sundown suburbs. Some would try to attribute segregation to simple economics, arguing it’s not race discrimination that kept blacks out of suburbs, but the high cost of housing. That may be true for a handful of elite towns such as Kenilworth, but it doesn’t explain why blue collar towns with affordable housing and factory jobs, like Cicero or Franklin Park, Illinois had no black residents for many decades. Controlling for income, fewer than half the expected proportion of blacks live in most suburbs. Besides, economics hasn’t kept poor whites and Latinos from living in suburbia. So what should be done now? Loewen recommends the following:* Create Truth and Reconciliation Commissions to investigate how towns and counties became and remained all-white. * Enact a Residents Rights Act, modeled on the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court struck down in 2013. * Apologize and compensate to remedy for the real harm government caused in promoting segregation. * Sanction recalcitrant towns that persist in exclusionary policies.None of that will happen so long as most Americans deny there is or has been any harm done. The problem today, says Loewen, is that towns don’t admit they are all-white on purpose. Most Americans today, even conservatives, agree with the landmark Brown decision that desegregated the public schools. As the Supreme Court said in that decision, when whites segregated schools, they were implying black inferiority. This made the segregated school inherently unequal. Americans have never applied that logic to segregated towns, preferring the comfortable fiction that stark racial separation in housing is merely a function of choice and income.“Until we solve the problem of sundown neighborhoods and towns,” writes Loewen, “we do not have a chance of solving America’s race problem.”
I remember traveling with my family when I was very young. My mother always packed lunches for us. My father would sometimes get perrturbed when my sisters or I would not go to the restroom when he stopped for gas. Little did I know then that there were only certain places he would stop (after consulting family and friends who had made that journey before) only at certain places to avoid putting our family through needless stress while spending long hous behind the wheel driving from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Southwestern Arkansas. After I grew up and joined the Air Force I heard many discussions in the barracks about where we (African Americans) could go off base for some recreation and a meal. The myth of the "Sundown Town" was not a myth, but a reality for African Americans, military and civilian. This book explains in depth where they are, how they got started, how they perpetuate themselves. A fantastic book. A bit lengthy for the recreational reader, but an exceptional learning tool for those who want more than a bit of titillation or escape from reality. This book hits you right in the mouth with reality. I was surprised to find my hometown, Milwaukee discussed therein, but it explained a lot about why there were certain neighborhoods we were warned aginst going into when I was growing up. Read it! You will be affected by it.
What do You think about Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (2006)?
I picked this up for research towards an article, and haven't been able to put it down.A few pages into the book I was shocked by the revelation that so many northern cities (hundreds or thousands) prohibited blacks not only from traveling through after dark but from living in them at all.James Loewen did an astounding amount of research towards this hefty and exhaustively detailed book. He spells out a truth that has been hidden in plain sight for decades, but that polite middle class people never speak about: The all-white suburbs were created, not by accident, but by deliberate, systematic and concerted efforts. The federal government refused to back loans, except in all-white neighborhoods. Homeowners associations created deed restrictions that forbade the sale of homes to nonwhites. More shockingly, when blacks moved into almost anyplace other than a large, multiracial city, they faced the danger of being run out of town or killed. America is the most segregated country in the world, and Americans continue to pretend that this happened by accident, he points out. The racism Loewen discusses did no take place long ago, or in some forgotten pocket of the deep south. The apex of violence, in this war to keep communities white, was reached in the 1980s. Most of the battles took place north of the Mason Dixon Line. Loewen recounts a multitude of shocking stories about cities small and large that intimidated their black residents into moving away, or simply slaughtered them and burned their homes down. Most of these incidents happened in the northern part of the U.S., despite conventional wisdom that racism has been quarantined in The South.He also details how white residents, and most businesses, have abandoned cities or neighborhoods where blacks were able to settle.Lowen goes on to explain that Sundown Suburbs are the cause of problems associated with inner cities (e.g. violent crimes, drugs and poverty).This book can change your perspective on almost everything, because the world looks a lot different when you consider that white neighborhoods were rioting to drive out black homeowners in the 1970s and 1980s. When you know this, it's difficult to even listen to the morons who would oppose affirmative action. And it really should remove the scales from the eyes of people who previously did not understand the reaction of blacks to the Rodney King incident and the O.J. Simpson trial.
—Clarence Cromwell
On one hand, this is a frequently overlooked and utterly important piece of American history. Unfortunately, I didn't find James Loewen's style of writing to be in sync with they way I best absorb information. It was dry and dull at times, causing me to lose focus on the book despite being interested in the subject. It's an important read and the information is priceless, but unfortunately, the tediousness really took away from losing myself in the book as I typically will. Long story short: I wanted to like this read, but truth be told, making it all the way through was tedious at best.
—Jay
This is one of the most important books I’ve read in my lifetime.James Loewen does a fantastic job of informing a nation of discrimination, white supremacy and racial exclusion that has been right under our noses, and that continues in some parts of the US today. Many who read this book (myself included) go into it with little or no prior knowledge of the existence of Sundown Towns. Yet, here they are, all around us.This novel is surprisingly easy to read and understand, given it’s disturbing subject matter. It’s filled with accounts from people who have lived (or are currently living) in Sundown communities, and from those who have visited.Loewen fills the text with facts & figures, in his usual style. However, the human element is alive in this book, compared to some of his others, and that difference makes it one of my favorites.I read the book cover to cover, but this would be an excellent book to skim, or read for just the chapters that interest you. Loewen uses recurring themes and examples that carry throughout, but that are explained in the context of each chapter.I highly recommend this book to each and every citizen of the United States, as a powerful reminder of discrimination that still occurs throughout the nation, and that desperately needs to cease.
—Artistlace
