Sundown
Towns
A Hidden Dimension of
American Racism
By James
W. Loewen
Book Review by Kam Williams
|
Beginning in about
1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans
established thousands of towns across the United States
for whites only. A ‘sundown town’ is any organized
jurisdiction that, for decades, was all-white on
purpose. Many towns drove out their black populations,
then posted sundown signs. Other towns passed ordinances
barring African-Americans after dark or prohibiting them
from owning or renting property.
All this residential
exclusion is bad for our nation. In fact, residential
segregation is one reason race continues to be such a
problem in America. The ghetto isn’t the problem.
Exclusion is the problem. The elite sundown suburb is
the problem.
As soon as
we realize that the problem in America is white
supremacy, rather than black existence or black
inferiority, then it becomes clear that sundown towns
and suburbs are an intensification of the problem, not a
solution to it. So long as racial inequality is encoded
in where one can live, the United States will face
continuing racial tension, if not overt conflict.-- from the
Introduction |
Over the years, I have frequently encountered
roadblocks while attempting to rent or purchase a home. I wish I
had a dime for every time a realtor informed me over the phone
that a house or apartment was available, only to turn around and
suddenly say that the place had just been taken when they saw
that I was black.
I have heard similar stories of frustration
from many other African-American friends, such as a very
successful Brooklyn restaurateur who was repeatedly blocked
every time he tried to relocate his business to a more upscale
location. I even have a friend who works in real estate who told
me he had found it impossible to buy in a certain town, despite
a willingness to meet the asking price.
Now the racist roots of this persistent
phenomenon have been exposed by James W. Loewen in
Sundown
Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Loewen,
Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Vermont, is
also the author of a couple of other eye-opening treatises,
namely,
Lies My Teacher Told Me and
Lies Across
America.
Painstakingly researched, extensively
annotated and illustrated with damning photographic evidence,
the book effectively proves that for most of the 20th Century,
thousands of communities all across the country designated
themselves as “White Only.” This meant that blacks, and
often Asians, Native Americans, and Jews as well, were routinely
denied any opportunity to live in these exclusionary
municipalities.
The inhospitable inhabitants of these locales
relied on some combination of discrimination, harassment, arson
and riots, sometimes escalating to outright lynching to enforce
ordinances which mandated a state-sanctioned, lily-white
society. These so-called Sundown Towns got their nocturnal
nickname from the intimidating signs posted at the city limits
which warned, “N-word, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You
[Here].”
Pointing out that a widespread sundown town mentality
persists to this day, Loewen argues that it is about time that
America owned up to the damaging practice. Otherwise, he
concludes, the country has little hope of eradicating the
prevailing housing patterns which continue to keep the majority
of blacks segregated and suffering in the squalor of our
impoverished inner-cities.
* * *
* *
Book Summary
New Book Says Whites-Only Towns Exist and
Segregate Themselves Purposefully from People of Color
I never can quite figure out if it's just
plain ignorance or pollyanna idealism that makes people say that
racism no longer exists in this country.
It's only when instances, like the (now) infamous "Fiesta
Day" dress-up atrocity at Highland Park High School,
happens that people realize that racism is so ingrained in the
national psyche that when it happens most people have a hard
time seeing it.
That's especially true in places like Highland Park, Texas,
Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Darien, Connecticut, the whole state of
Idaho and other small, wealthy suburbs or sections of towns that
have consciously or unconsciously discouraged people of color
from moving within their boundaries.
Places like these have been christened "sundown towns"
by Professor James W. Loewen, professor emeritus of sociology at
the University of Vermont and the author of a new book called
Sundown
Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.
In his book, Dr. Loewen thought he would only
find a handful of sundown towns still in existence. In Illinois
alone, he has found 472 and the list keeps growing.
According to Dr. Loewen, sundown towns get their reference
literally from signs that some of these towns posted on the
outskirts of their towns warning blacks not to stay after dark
in their towns.
Dr. Loewen says that by definition a sundown town is a community
of more than a 1,000 people that has excluded blacks for decades
to such a degree that they have made up less than 0.1 percent of
the population. The exclusion was deliberate, whether or not a
sign was posted.
Though blacks suffer the brunt of the discrimination in these
kinds of towns, Latinos don't trail far behind.What Dr. Loewen found in his research that though blacks
traveled the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North and
Midwest, that is where most sundown towns are actually located.
In fact, Dr. Loewen has found that Milwaukee, Wisconsin is the
most segregated city in the nation.
If you're wondering how this happened, Dr. Loewen reports that
though everyone makes a fuss these days about equal opportunity
and fair housing, none of that started to change until the
1960s.
By then, "white flight" had already taken root in the
suburbs and communities of white people had been established.
After the communities had been set up was when the wealthy
whites made those communities their homes.
To say they frown on sharing their neighborhoods with people of
color is an understatement in some areas.
Who do you think uses racial profiling the most when assessing
"visitors" who drive through their towns?
And we know racial profiling is alive and well.
No wonder it's no big deal to their children to dress up making
fun of the people who do the kinds of jobs that they're being
taught are beneath them, and only done by people with dark skin
or speak with an accent.
Another byproduct, says Dr. Loewen, of such a lopsided lifestyle
where diversity is just a dictionary meaning is that these towns
also serve as a source of such social ills as gaps in academic
achievement. White parts of town typically have the better
schools and better teachers.
Even on a social scale, going out means more choices. From
stores to restaurants, the predominantly white parts of town are
the kinds of areas that are said people "aspire" to
live in.
The reason for that is because within these "bubbles"
people are accepted and they belong - even if it's only to a
particular zip code.
The main struggle for any person of color has always been the
fight to belong.
Dr. Loewen realizes that the fight continues today. He is
conducting further research into sundown towns and asks if
anyone is working on any kind of research like the topics he has
listed
on his site to email him.
If Dr. Loewen's book proves anything, it's the fact that racism
does exist—and too many people think it's normal.
* * *
* *
Responses
When I was on the political science faculty
at Purdue University, which is in West Lafayette, IN, I often
drove to Indianapolis. On the way, I passed through
"White County." I am certain that in the 1990s
and much earlier, people in the region knew what that name
signified. Although born in Gary, Indiana, I didn't grow
up there. In the early 1950s, my family moved to Los
Angeles when I was about 11 or 12 years of age. Hence, I
never knew of Indiana's virulently racist past and present until
I took a job at Purdue—without any doubt the most anti-Black
and racist institution for which I have ever worked.
During my employment at Purdue, I once
visited a retired friend of my parents who told me that when he
was a child in Indianapolis, the KKK had an office right in the
downtown area. I later read about Indiana in the 1920s and
1930s and the extent to which the KKK controlled the state's
politics during that time.
Hence, many whites regularly imposed on
towns, cities, and counties the name "white" in order
to signify white supremacy.—Floyd
posted 27 December 2005
* * *
* *
* * * * *
 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* *
* * *
|
The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 30
January 2012
|
