Sundown Town
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[SIZE=+2]When Signs Said 'Get Out'[/SIZE]
In 'Sundown Towns,' Racism in the Rearview Mirror
[SIZE=-1]By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 21, 2006; C01[/SIZE]
Anthony Griffin remembers the signs. How could he forget them?
A black lawyer, he grew up in Baytown, Tex. Back in high school in the late '60s and early '70s, he would borrow his mom's car and drive around East Texas, exploring. He saw the signs in a couple of towns.
"I was terrified," he says. "You're driving with your buddies and you say, 'Thank God, it's not dark. Let's get the hell out.' "
George Brosi remembers the signs, too. Editor of Appalachian Heritage magazine, he recalls seeing one sign in southern Kentucky back in the 1990s when he was a college English teacher.
"It was on Highway 461," he says. "It stayed up for about a year and then it mysteriously disappeared. It was probably five feet across and three feet tall. It was off the right-of-way, up on a hillside in an overgrown pasture."
The signs are gone now but once they were a part of America's roadside culture, posted along the highway at the town or county line, a blunt reminder of brutal racism.
"Most read 'Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set on You in -- ,' " says James Loewen, the Washington-based author of a controversial new book called "Sundown Towns." But sometimes, he adds, the sign makers tried to get clever. "Some came in a series, like the old Burma Shave signs, saying, ' . . . If You Can Read . . . You'd Better Run . . . If You Can't Read . . . You'd Better Run Anyway.' "
Most of the signs were posted in the first half of the 20th century, Loewen says, but some lingered on long afterward. They were not a Southern phenomenon, he stresses. They were found all over the United States with local variations:
In Colorado: "No Mexicans After Night."
In Connecticut: "Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark."
In Nevada, the ban was expanded to include those the sign-writers term "Japs."
All told, Loewen says, he found evidence of more than 150 sundown signs in 31 states. But he wasn't researching the sundown signs . They were just symbols. He was researching sundown towns , which he defines as "towns that were all white on purpose." He found lots of them -- far more than he expected when he began his research in his home state of Illinois about five years ago.
"I thought I was going to discover maybe 10 such towns in Illinois and maybe 50 across the country," he says. "And I've confirmed 204 in Illinois and, in the country, thousands."
What he stumbled on, he says, is a little-known history of an American variety of ethnic cleansing. But other experts say Loewen may be overstating his case.
The Great Retreat
"I had an Aha! moment," says Loewen, 63, sitting in his living room in Northeast near Catholic University. "It was October of 2001. I was speaking in my home town in Decatur."
Loewen, a retired sociology professor who taught at Tougaloo College, a historically black school in Mississippi, and at the University of Vermont, traveled to Decatur, Ill., to lecture on the most famous of his six books: "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong," a liberal critique of American history textbooks that has sold more than 800,000 copies since it was published in 1995.
"When I finished [speaking], I said, 'Now I'm working on a new book about sundown towns, and if you know anything about that, would you come down afterwards and talk about it?' " he says.
"To my astonishment, 20 people trooped down and they told me all kinds of stuff about every town around Decatur. Growing up, I knew those towns were all white, but I didn't give it a second thought. But it turns out that almost every one of those towns was all-white on purpose ."
After researching a century of census data, Loewen, who is white, concluded that his home state was part of a national trend that he calls "The Great Retreat."
After the Civil War, he says, newly freed slaves migrated all over America. In 1890, African Americans lived in all but 119 of America's thousands of counties. But by 1930, 235 American counties had no black residents and 694 other counties has fewer than 10 black residents.
What happened?
Starting around 1890, Loewen says, scores of rural towns in the West and Midwest began expelling black people.
Sometimes, the triggering event was violence: In Henryetta, Okla., in 1907, a black man was accused of killing a white man in a dispute. A white mob lynched the suspect, then drove the rest of the town's black residents away.
Sometimes, the triggering event was a labor dispute: When white coal miners in Pana, Ill., went on strike in 1898, the mine owners hired black strikebreakers and the whites rioted, driving all black people out of town.
Sometimes, Loewen says, there was no specific trigger. Whites simply passed ordinances forbidding black people from buying or renting homes and, in some cases, even appearing on the street after sundown. To advertise their actions, the towns sometimes posted sundown signs on the highway or in the railroad station.
"There was a contagion of ordinances," says Loewen. "Many small towns expelled the black population or decreed a policy of not allowing any blacks."
Loewen dug up many examples of towns touting their whiteness. In 1907, Rogers, Ark., published a guide that announced: "Rogers has no Negroes or saloons." In 1936, Owosso, Mich., proudly declared: "There is not a Negro living in the limits of Owosso's incorporated territory." In 1958, the chairman of Maryville, Mo.'s Industrial Development Corp. touted his town to businessmen with this pitch:
"We don't have any niggers here in Maryville. . . . We had to lynch one back in 1931 . . . and the rest of them just up and left."
Driven out of rural towns, many Northern blacks moved to urban ghettos, where they joined Southern blacks who had fled Jim Crow segregation. Meanwhile, the rise of the automobile permitted whites to move to newly created suburbs, most of which, Loewen says, were designed to be all white.
"Almost all suburbs were sundown towns," he says.
He rattles off the names of celebrated American suburbs that once barred black people, and in some cases Jews -- Levittown, N.Y.; Dearborn, Mich.; Kenilworth, Ill.; Edina, Minn. and Darien, Conn., which achieved fame as the model for the town that barred Jews in the 1947 movie "Gentlemen's Agreement."
And, Loewen adds, Chevy Chase.
These suburbs did not post sundown signs. They saved their racist language for their legal documents, adding "restrictive covenants" to their deeds. Chevy Chase, for instance, had a restrictive covenant barring sale or lease to "any person of negro blood" or "any person of the Semetic [sic] race."
Washington Grove, the Montgomery County town, once had a restrictive covenant barring "anyone of a race whose death rate is of a higher percentage than that of the white or Caucasian race."
"It's tied to life expectancy," Loewen says, laughing. "They make it sound as if it's a health measure."
Greenbelt -- one of three model suburban communities built by the federal government in the 1930s -- was originally restricted to whites. In those days, the Federal Housing Administration advocated restrictive covenants, claiming that they "provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment."
In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, banning discrimination in housing, and the Supreme Court ruled in Jones v. Mayer that housing discrimination was unconstitutional. Since then, Loewen says, "sundown towns have been in retreat."
But, he's quick to add, "there are still hundreds of towns where blacks would risk their mental well-being as well as their physical well-being by living in them."
Loewen's book has been favorably reviewed in several newspapers, including this one, but some historians say that he has taken his argument beyond the scope of his evidence.
"Those who are skeptical of Loewen's argument will find plenty of gaps in his research," Thomas J. Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania professor of history and sociology, writes in the liberal magazine the Nation. "Some of his most provocative assertions rest on tiny shards of evidence; in particular, he relies on oral histories and e-mails from residents of sundown towns, making it difficult to differentiate rumor from fact."
Another skeptic is Andrew Wiese, a history professor at San Diego State University whose book on blacks in suburbia, "Places of Their Own," was cited in "Sundown Towns."
"One thing that concerns me is the definition of sundown town, which is a little slippery and shifty," says Wiese. "It conflates places that practiced housing discrimination with places that forcibly kept blacks out after dark.
"What is a sundown town? It's a place that forcibly kept blacks out after dark. But that's different than a place like Scarsdale, New York, where black people could not buy a house but where many lived as gardeners and domestics and were not forced out after dark."
Loewen responds: "I don't think there's a big difference. I think many places where blacks could not buy a house were also places where blacks wouldn't be safe after dark. . . . I think suburbs tended to have a little more finesse [in their racism] but I'm not going to back off."
Unwritten Laws
Loewen searched the United States for sundown signs but found only one. It's in the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Ga. Once posted in an unidentified Connecticut town, its wording is pretty genteel as these things go: "Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark."
Loewen had no better luck finding photographs of sundown signs. They're not the kind of pictures local librarians and historical societies tend to collect.
"I would ask a librarian, 'Do you have any photos of the sundown sign?' " he recalls. "And a typical reply would be, 'Why on earth would we keep that ?' "
But Loewen found abundant evidence of sundown signs in old newspaper stories.
In 1922, when college students in Norman, Okla., hired a black jazz band to play at a dance one night, a white mob carrying guns and nooses attacked the dance hall.
"Negroes are occasionally seen on the streets of Norman in the daytime, but the 'rule' that they leave at night is strictly enforced," the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, a black newspaper, reported, and noted, "Several other Oklahoma towns have similar customs."
Among those other towns was Marlow, Okla. In 1923, a mob killed a Marlow hotel owner and the black man he'd hired as a janitor. The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, reported:
"Marlow's unwritten law, exemplified by prominent public signs bearing the command: 'Negro, don't let the sun go down on you here,' caused the death Monday night of A.W. Berch, prominent hotel owner, and the fatal wounding of Robert Jernigan, the first colored man who stayed here more than a day in years. Marlow, one of the several towns in Oklahoma which has not allowed our people to settle in their vicinity for years, has abided by the custom of permitting no members of the race to remain there after nightfall."
Nearly 40 years later, in 1962, black rocker Fats Domino played a gig in Rogers, Ark., and the Rogers Daily News ran a front-page editorial congratulating the town on its tolerance:
"The city which once had signs posted at the city limits and at the bus and rail terminals boasting 'Nigger, You Better Not Let the Sun Set on You in Rogers,' was hosting its first top name entertainer -- a Negro -- at night!"
Loewen found references to sundown signs in newspaper articles, memoirs and local histories as well as several works of American literature -- Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending," William Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions."
The stories are invariably grim and depressing. Except for one.
That one was told by Herbert Aptheker, a pioneer of African American history, author of the seven-volume "A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States." But it's not a story Aptheker uncovered. It's a story he lived. He told it to the Los Angeles Times in 1994, nine years before he died in 2003 at 87.
It happened during World War II, when Aptheker, a white Jewish Communist from New York, commanded a group of black solders stationed at an Army base near Pollock, La., a town with a nasty sundown sign.
As part of their training, the soldiers were required to complete a 25-mile march. Aptheker and a black sergeant decided to march through Pollock -- at midnight.
"It was all arranged by the men," Aptheker recalled. "As we approached
Pollock around midnight . . . we all began singing 'John Brown's Body' at the top of our voices -- a hundred black men with rifles and one crazy white man in front with a pistol."
Telling the story, Aptheker burst out laughing.
That might be the only comic moment in the long, grim history of sundown towns.
In 'Sundown Towns,' Racism in the Rearview Mirror
[SIZE=-1]By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 21, 2006; C01[/SIZE]
Anthony Griffin remembers the signs. How could he forget them?
A black lawyer, he grew up in Baytown, Tex. Back in high school in the late '60s and early '70s, he would borrow his mom's car and drive around East Texas, exploring. He saw the signs in a couple of towns.
"I was terrified," he says. "You're driving with your buddies and you say, 'Thank God, it's not dark. Let's get the hell out.' "
George Brosi remembers the signs, too. Editor of Appalachian Heritage magazine, he recalls seeing one sign in southern Kentucky back in the 1990s when he was a college English teacher.
"It was on Highway 461," he says. "It stayed up for about a year and then it mysteriously disappeared. It was probably five feet across and three feet tall. It was off the right-of-way, up on a hillside in an overgrown pasture."
The signs are gone now but once they were a part of America's roadside culture, posted along the highway at the town or county line, a blunt reminder of brutal racism.
"Most read 'Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set on You in -- ,' " says James Loewen, the Washington-based author of a controversial new book called "Sundown Towns." But sometimes, he adds, the sign makers tried to get clever. "Some came in a series, like the old Burma Shave signs, saying, ' . . . If You Can Read . . . You'd Better Run . . . If You Can't Read . . . You'd Better Run Anyway.' "
Most of the signs were posted in the first half of the 20th century, Loewen says, but some lingered on long afterward. They were not a Southern phenomenon, he stresses. They were found all over the United States with local variations:
In Colorado: "No Mexicans After Night."
In Connecticut: "Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark."
In Nevada, the ban was expanded to include those the sign-writers term "Japs."
All told, Loewen says, he found evidence of more than 150 sundown signs in 31 states. But he wasn't researching the sundown signs . They were just symbols. He was researching sundown towns , which he defines as "towns that were all white on purpose." He found lots of them -- far more than he expected when he began his research in his home state of Illinois about five years ago.
"I thought I was going to discover maybe 10 such towns in Illinois and maybe 50 across the country," he says. "And I've confirmed 204 in Illinois and, in the country, thousands."
What he stumbled on, he says, is a little-known history of an American variety of ethnic cleansing. But other experts say Loewen may be overstating his case.
The Great Retreat
"I had an Aha! moment," says Loewen, 63, sitting in his living room in Northeast near Catholic University. "It was October of 2001. I was speaking in my home town in Decatur."
Loewen, a retired sociology professor who taught at Tougaloo College, a historically black school in Mississippi, and at the University of Vermont, traveled to Decatur, Ill., to lecture on the most famous of his six books: "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong," a liberal critique of American history textbooks that has sold more than 800,000 copies since it was published in 1995.
"When I finished [speaking], I said, 'Now I'm working on a new book about sundown towns, and if you know anything about that, would you come down afterwards and talk about it?' " he says.
"To my astonishment, 20 people trooped down and they told me all kinds of stuff about every town around Decatur. Growing up, I knew those towns were all white, but I didn't give it a second thought. But it turns out that almost every one of those towns was all-white on purpose ."
After researching a century of census data, Loewen, who is white, concluded that his home state was part of a national trend that he calls "The Great Retreat."
After the Civil War, he says, newly freed slaves migrated all over America. In 1890, African Americans lived in all but 119 of America's thousands of counties. But by 1930, 235 American counties had no black residents and 694 other counties has fewer than 10 black residents.
What happened?
Starting around 1890, Loewen says, scores of rural towns in the West and Midwest began expelling black people.
Sometimes, the triggering event was violence: In Henryetta, Okla., in 1907, a black man was accused of killing a white man in a dispute. A white mob lynched the suspect, then drove the rest of the town's black residents away.
Sometimes, the triggering event was a labor dispute: When white coal miners in Pana, Ill., went on strike in 1898, the mine owners hired black strikebreakers and the whites rioted, driving all black people out of town.
Sometimes, Loewen says, there was no specific trigger. Whites simply passed ordinances forbidding black people from buying or renting homes and, in some cases, even appearing on the street after sundown. To advertise their actions, the towns sometimes posted sundown signs on the highway or in the railroad station.
"There was a contagion of ordinances," says Loewen. "Many small towns expelled the black population or decreed a policy of not allowing any blacks."
Loewen dug up many examples of towns touting their whiteness. In 1907, Rogers, Ark., published a guide that announced: "Rogers has no Negroes or saloons." In 1936, Owosso, Mich., proudly declared: "There is not a Negro living in the limits of Owosso's incorporated territory." In 1958, the chairman of Maryville, Mo.'s Industrial Development Corp. touted his town to businessmen with this pitch:
"We don't have any niggers here in Maryville. . . . We had to lynch one back in 1931 . . . and the rest of them just up and left."
Driven out of rural towns, many Northern blacks moved to urban ghettos, where they joined Southern blacks who had fled Jim Crow segregation. Meanwhile, the rise of the automobile permitted whites to move to newly created suburbs, most of which, Loewen says, were designed to be all white.
"Almost all suburbs were sundown towns," he says.
He rattles off the names of celebrated American suburbs that once barred black people, and in some cases Jews -- Levittown, N.Y.; Dearborn, Mich.; Kenilworth, Ill.; Edina, Minn. and Darien, Conn., which achieved fame as the model for the town that barred Jews in the 1947 movie "Gentlemen's Agreement."
And, Loewen adds, Chevy Chase.
These suburbs did not post sundown signs. They saved their racist language for their legal documents, adding "restrictive covenants" to their deeds. Chevy Chase, for instance, had a restrictive covenant barring sale or lease to "any person of negro blood" or "any person of the Semetic [sic] race."
Washington Grove, the Montgomery County town, once had a restrictive covenant barring "anyone of a race whose death rate is of a higher percentage than that of the white or Caucasian race."
"It's tied to life expectancy," Loewen says, laughing. "They make it sound as if it's a health measure."
Greenbelt -- one of three model suburban communities built by the federal government in the 1930s -- was originally restricted to whites. In those days, the Federal Housing Administration advocated restrictive covenants, claiming that they "provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment."
In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, banning discrimination in housing, and the Supreme Court ruled in Jones v. Mayer that housing discrimination was unconstitutional. Since then, Loewen says, "sundown towns have been in retreat."
But, he's quick to add, "there are still hundreds of towns where blacks would risk their mental well-being as well as their physical well-being by living in them."
Loewen's book has been favorably reviewed in several newspapers, including this one, but some historians say that he has taken his argument beyond the scope of his evidence.
"Those who are skeptical of Loewen's argument will find plenty of gaps in his research," Thomas J. Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania professor of history and sociology, writes in the liberal magazine the Nation. "Some of his most provocative assertions rest on tiny shards of evidence; in particular, he relies on oral histories and e-mails from residents of sundown towns, making it difficult to differentiate rumor from fact."
Another skeptic is Andrew Wiese, a history professor at San Diego State University whose book on blacks in suburbia, "Places of Their Own," was cited in "Sundown Towns."
"One thing that concerns me is the definition of sundown town, which is a little slippery and shifty," says Wiese. "It conflates places that practiced housing discrimination with places that forcibly kept blacks out after dark.
"What is a sundown town? It's a place that forcibly kept blacks out after dark. But that's different than a place like Scarsdale, New York, where black people could not buy a house but where many lived as gardeners and domestics and were not forced out after dark."
Loewen responds: "I don't think there's a big difference. I think many places where blacks could not buy a house were also places where blacks wouldn't be safe after dark. . . . I think suburbs tended to have a little more finesse [in their racism] but I'm not going to back off."
Unwritten Laws
Loewen searched the United States for sundown signs but found only one. It's in the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Ga. Once posted in an unidentified Connecticut town, its wording is pretty genteel as these things go: "Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark."
Loewen had no better luck finding photographs of sundown signs. They're not the kind of pictures local librarians and historical societies tend to collect.
"I would ask a librarian, 'Do you have any photos of the sundown sign?' " he recalls. "And a typical reply would be, 'Why on earth would we keep that ?' "
But Loewen found abundant evidence of sundown signs in old newspaper stories.
In 1922, when college students in Norman, Okla., hired a black jazz band to play at a dance one night, a white mob carrying guns and nooses attacked the dance hall.
"Negroes are occasionally seen on the streets of Norman in the daytime, but the 'rule' that they leave at night is strictly enforced," the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, a black newspaper, reported, and noted, "Several other Oklahoma towns have similar customs."
Among those other towns was Marlow, Okla. In 1923, a mob killed a Marlow hotel owner and the black man he'd hired as a janitor. The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, reported:
"Marlow's unwritten law, exemplified by prominent public signs bearing the command: 'Negro, don't let the sun go down on you here,' caused the death Monday night of A.W. Berch, prominent hotel owner, and the fatal wounding of Robert Jernigan, the first colored man who stayed here more than a day in years. Marlow, one of the several towns in Oklahoma which has not allowed our people to settle in their vicinity for years, has abided by the custom of permitting no members of the race to remain there after nightfall."
Nearly 40 years later, in 1962, black rocker Fats Domino played a gig in Rogers, Ark., and the Rogers Daily News ran a front-page editorial congratulating the town on its tolerance:
"The city which once had signs posted at the city limits and at the bus and rail terminals boasting 'Nigger, You Better Not Let the Sun Set on You in Rogers,' was hosting its first top name entertainer -- a Negro -- at night!"
Loewen found references to sundown signs in newspaper articles, memoirs and local histories as well as several works of American literature -- Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending," William Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions."
The stories are invariably grim and depressing. Except for one.
That one was told by Herbert Aptheker, a pioneer of African American history, author of the seven-volume "A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States." But it's not a story Aptheker uncovered. It's a story he lived. He told it to the Los Angeles Times in 1994, nine years before he died in 2003 at 87.
It happened during World War II, when Aptheker, a white Jewish Communist from New York, commanded a group of black solders stationed at an Army base near Pollock, La., a town with a nasty sundown sign.
As part of their training, the soldiers were required to complete a 25-mile march. Aptheker and a black sergeant decided to march through Pollock -- at midnight.
"It was all arranged by the men," Aptheker recalled. "As we approached
Pollock around midnight . . . we all began singing 'John Brown's Body' at the top of our voices -- a hundred black men with rifles and one crazy white man in front with a pistol."
Telling the story, Aptheker burst out laughing.
That might be the only comic moment in the long, grim history of sundown towns.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Darkness on the Edge of Town
A bold book argues that thousands of American towns were deliberately kept whites-only.
Reviewed by Laura Wexler
Sunday, October 23, 2005; Page BW03
SUNDOWN TOWNS
A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
By James W. Loewen
New Press. 562 pp. $29.95
In Oct. 2001, James W. Loewen stopped at a convenience store in the small Illinois town of Anna -- a name that, as a store clerk confirmed, stands for "Ain't No Niggers Allowed."
On Nov. 8, 1909, nearly a century before Loewen stepped into the store, a mob of angry white citizens drove out Anna's 40 or so black families following the lynching in a nearby town of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Anna became all-white literally overnight, Loewen reports, and embraced racial exclusiveness for the long haul. According to the 2000 census, just one family with a black member lives among Anna's 7,000 residents.
Anna is far from unique, as Loewen, a sociologist, argues in his powerful and important new book, Sundown Towns . On the contrary, Loewen reports that -- beginning in roughly 1890 with the end of Reconstruction and continuing until the fair-housing legislation of the late 1960s -- whites in America created thousands of whites-only towns, commonly known as "sundown towns" owing to the signs often posted at their city limits that warned, as one did in Hawthorne, Calif., in the 1930s: "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne." In fact, Loewen claims that, during that 70-year period, outside the traditional South, "probably a majority of all incorporated places [in the United States] kept out African Americans."
Such a bold claim would seem to require an exact count of sundown towns to back it up. But Loewen admits that the challenges of uncovering and confirming the existence of each sundown town -- when everything from census figures to local histories proved misleading -- limited his ability to nail down an exact figure. Instead, he writes, "I believe at least 3,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 independent towns went sundown in the United States, mostly between 1890 and about 1930."
This vagueness, along with Loewen's almost evangelical passion for his material, raises questions of credibility -- or at least of potential overstatement. But Loewen expertly dodges those accusations. He devotes almost an entire chapter to explaining his research -- detailing his rationale for defining sundown towns, laying out his statistical methods and revealing how he triangulated oral history, written sources and census data to arrive at a "confirmation." So when he reports that he's personally verified the existence of roughly 1,000 sundown towns between 1890 and 1930, you believe him. And because he pairs that finding with an analysis of the history, causes and patterns of sundown towns that shows that they were, in many ways, as logical -- and often as violent -- an outgrowth of American racism as lynching, he ultimately makes a strong case that sundown towns were a significant feature of the American landscape. As is often the case when the subject is race, the relative lack of hard evidence ultimately becomes part of the story, rather than a hindrance to it.
As in Anna, whites in about 50 towns used mob violence to expel and keep out African Americans, and many more relied on the threat of violence, Loewen reports. Some towns, he writes, passed "legal" ordinances banning hiring blacks or renting or selling them homes; others relied on citizens to pay informal visits to warn visiting African Americans that they "must not remain in the town." In 1960, the press reported that realtors in Grosse Pointe, Mich., had conceived of an altogether more clinical way to insure racial exclusivity: a "point system" used to assess a potential buyer's eligibility that included a rating for swarthiness.
Often, Sundown Towns argues, a community used a variety of methods in order to remain all-white through the years. To demonstrate this, Loewen charts the course of segregation in Wyandotte, Mich.: In the early 1870s, whites there drove out a black barber; in 1881 and 1888, they expelled the town's black hotel workers; in 1907, four white men beat and robbed a black man at the train station; nine years later, a mob of white townspeople "bombarded" a boardinghouse, driving out all the African Americans and killing one. "In the 1940s," Loewen writes, "police arrested or warned African Americans for 'loitering suspiciously in the business district' or being in the park, and white children stoned African American children in front of Roosevelt High School." In the early 1950s, a University of Pennsylvania professor who grew up in Wyandotte told him, all the members of a black family who moved into town ended up dead.
If Loewen's first priority is to unveil what he calls the "hidden history" of sundown towns, his second is to debunk the widely held idea that when the issue is race, the South is always "the scene of the crime," as James Baldwin famously wrote. The incidence of sundown communities in the South, Loewen reports, was actually far lower than it was in a Midwestern state such as Illinois, in which roughly 70 percent of towns were sundown towns in 1970. "This does not make whites in the traditional South less racist than [those] in . . . other regions of the country," he suggests.
With the rise of the automobile, among other things, came the birth of sundown suburbs. In 1909, Loewen reports, Chevy Chase, Md., became one of the nation's first after the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company sued a developer to whom it had sold a parcel of land because of rumors that he planned to build affordable housing for African American workers. The company ultimately prevented the development, and the land sat vacant for decades before becoming home to Saks Fifth Avenue, its current resident. No doubt, the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company would approve of the suburb's current racial makeup; in 2000, Loewen writes, "its 6,183 residents included just 18 people living in families with at least one African American householder." But even that isn't white enough anymore, Loewen charges: Whites are increasingly fleeing nearly all-white suburbs for lily-white exurbs, adding sprawl to the already numerous economic, psychological and sociological tolls of residential segregation.
Much has been written about the history of segregation within American cities, but this is the first full-length study of places that sought to exclude African Americans entirely. Loewen's desire to be exhaustive is therefore understandable. But in this case, exhaustive sometimes means exhausting. The book would have been more enjoyable to read had Loewen focused in depth on a few representative sundown towns, teasing out the history and sociology of the phenomenon in a more narrative, less textbook-like form.
That said, for its meticulous research and passionate chronicling of the complex and often shocking history of whites-only communities, Sundown Towns deserves to become an instant classic in the fields of American race relations, urban studies and cultural geography. After reading it, you'll view your own community, and the whole of the American landscape, more suspiciously -- and rightly so.
Laura Wexler is the author of "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America."
A bold book argues that thousands of American towns were deliberately kept whites-only.
Reviewed by Laura Wexler
Sunday, October 23, 2005; Page BW03
SUNDOWN TOWNS
A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
By James W. Loewen
New Press. 562 pp. $29.95
In Oct. 2001, James W. Loewen stopped at a convenience store in the small Illinois town of Anna -- a name that, as a store clerk confirmed, stands for "Ain't No Niggers Allowed."
On Nov. 8, 1909, nearly a century before Loewen stepped into the store, a mob of angry white citizens drove out Anna's 40 or so black families following the lynching in a nearby town of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Anna became all-white literally overnight, Loewen reports, and embraced racial exclusiveness for the long haul. According to the 2000 census, just one family with a black member lives among Anna's 7,000 residents.
Anna is far from unique, as Loewen, a sociologist, argues in his powerful and important new book, Sundown Towns . On the contrary, Loewen reports that -- beginning in roughly 1890 with the end of Reconstruction and continuing until the fair-housing legislation of the late 1960s -- whites in America created thousands of whites-only towns, commonly known as "sundown towns" owing to the signs often posted at their city limits that warned, as one did in Hawthorne, Calif., in the 1930s: "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne." In fact, Loewen claims that, during that 70-year period, outside the traditional South, "probably a majority of all incorporated places [in the United States] kept out African Americans."
Such a bold claim would seem to require an exact count of sundown towns to back it up. But Loewen admits that the challenges of uncovering and confirming the existence of each sundown town -- when everything from census figures to local histories proved misleading -- limited his ability to nail down an exact figure. Instead, he writes, "I believe at least 3,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 independent towns went sundown in the United States, mostly between 1890 and about 1930."
This vagueness, along with Loewen's almost evangelical passion for his material, raises questions of credibility -- or at least of potential overstatement. But Loewen expertly dodges those accusations. He devotes almost an entire chapter to explaining his research -- detailing his rationale for defining sundown towns, laying out his statistical methods and revealing how he triangulated oral history, written sources and census data to arrive at a "confirmation." So when he reports that he's personally verified the existence of roughly 1,000 sundown towns between 1890 and 1930, you believe him. And because he pairs that finding with an analysis of the history, causes and patterns of sundown towns that shows that they were, in many ways, as logical -- and often as violent -- an outgrowth of American racism as lynching, he ultimately makes a strong case that sundown towns were a significant feature of the American landscape. As is often the case when the subject is race, the relative lack of hard evidence ultimately becomes part of the story, rather than a hindrance to it.
As in Anna, whites in about 50 towns used mob violence to expel and keep out African Americans, and many more relied on the threat of violence, Loewen reports. Some towns, he writes, passed "legal" ordinances banning hiring blacks or renting or selling them homes; others relied on citizens to pay informal visits to warn visiting African Americans that they "must not remain in the town." In 1960, the press reported that realtors in Grosse Pointe, Mich., had conceived of an altogether more clinical way to insure racial exclusivity: a "point system" used to assess a potential buyer's eligibility that included a rating for swarthiness.
Often, Sundown Towns argues, a community used a variety of methods in order to remain all-white through the years. To demonstrate this, Loewen charts the course of segregation in Wyandotte, Mich.: In the early 1870s, whites there drove out a black barber; in 1881 and 1888, they expelled the town's black hotel workers; in 1907, four white men beat and robbed a black man at the train station; nine years later, a mob of white townspeople "bombarded" a boardinghouse, driving out all the African Americans and killing one. "In the 1940s," Loewen writes, "police arrested or warned African Americans for 'loitering suspiciously in the business district' or being in the park, and white children stoned African American children in front of Roosevelt High School." In the early 1950s, a University of Pennsylvania professor who grew up in Wyandotte told him, all the members of a black family who moved into town ended up dead.
If Loewen's first priority is to unveil what he calls the "hidden history" of sundown towns, his second is to debunk the widely held idea that when the issue is race, the South is always "the scene of the crime," as James Baldwin famously wrote. The incidence of sundown communities in the South, Loewen reports, was actually far lower than it was in a Midwestern state such as Illinois, in which roughly 70 percent of towns were sundown towns in 1970. "This does not make whites in the traditional South less racist than [those] in . . . other regions of the country," he suggests.
With the rise of the automobile, among other things, came the birth of sundown suburbs. In 1909, Loewen reports, Chevy Chase, Md., became one of the nation's first after the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company sued a developer to whom it had sold a parcel of land because of rumors that he planned to build affordable housing for African American workers. The company ultimately prevented the development, and the land sat vacant for decades before becoming home to Saks Fifth Avenue, its current resident. No doubt, the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company would approve of the suburb's current racial makeup; in 2000, Loewen writes, "its 6,183 residents included just 18 people living in families with at least one African American householder." But even that isn't white enough anymore, Loewen charges: Whites are increasingly fleeing nearly all-white suburbs for lily-white exurbs, adding sprawl to the already numerous economic, psychological and sociological tolls of residential segregation.
Much has been written about the history of segregation within American cities, but this is the first full-length study of places that sought to exclude African Americans entirely. Loewen's desire to be exhaustive is therefore understandable. But in this case, exhaustive sometimes means exhausting. The book would have been more enjoyable to read had Loewen focused in depth on a few representative sundown towns, teasing out the history and sociology of the phenomenon in a more narrative, less textbook-like form.
That said, for its meticulous research and passionate chronicling of the complex and often shocking history of whites-only communities, Sundown Towns deserves to become an instant classic in the fields of American race relations, urban studies and cultural geography. After reading it, you'll view your own community, and the whole of the American landscape, more suspiciously -- and rightly so.
Laura Wexler is the author of "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America."
