Too Little, Too Late
In 1968, the federal government finally switched sides. Sympathetic reaction to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave Congress the political will to pass Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Often called the Fair Housing Act, this law prohibits racial discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. Also in 1968, the Supreme Court in
Jones v. Mayer
required “all housing, with no exception, open without regard to race, at least as a matter of legal right,” in the words of W.A. Low and V.A. Clift. However, enforcement was left up “to litigation by persons discriminated against.” The 1968 act also did not make the profound difference that its supporters expected, again owing to problems with enforcement. It was left to the victims, or perhaps the Department of Justice on their behalf, to enforce the law by litigation; the department that was supposed to enforce it, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), had no enforcement powers.
36
Sociologist Douglas Massey tells the result very simply: “Discrimination went underground.” In suburbs across the nation, gentlemen’s agreements now came to the fore. It was “understood,” there was a “gentleman’s agreement,” so no one had to say a word. Steering, lying, stalling, special requirements imposed on blacks, missed appointments, wrong addresses—all were used to shut out African American would-be home buyers.
37
Michael Danielson quoted a study of racial exclusion in the San Francisco Bay Area: “Every routine act [in buying a home], every bit of ritual in the sale or rental of a dwelling unit can be performed in a way calculated to make it either difficult or impossible to consummate a deal.” For example, according to David Freund, “the courts did not ban the use of race-specific language in appraisal manuals until the late 1970s.”
38
The 1968 act and
Jones v. Mayer
did prompt some residential integration, at least by the 1990s. Unfortunately, open housing came too late, after suburbia was largely built. Across the United States, whites had kept African Americans out of most suburbs throughout most of the twentieth century. By 1968, suburbs were labeled racially. Once in place, these reputations were self-sustaining. Desegregating them was an uphill struggle, a mountain that we are still climbing. Like anyone else, African Americans don’t want to live in a place where they aren’t wanted, and one way to deduce that they aren’t wanted is to note that no African Americans live there. Today, just a little steering by realtors suffices to keep sundown suburbs nearly all-white. Here is an example from Pennsylvania. Whites and blacks refer to the suburbs across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg as “the white shore.” A man who grew up there wrote me:
I can tell you that there were (are?) sundown towns in Central Pennsylvania. You were right about the “white shore.” I have no objective proof at all. However my mother grew up in Enola, and my uncle lived in Camp Hill. It was common knowledge that African-Americans would not be sold a house in those towns and those that surrounded them. It was indeed a “white shore.”
By August 2002, when a new black employee moved to Harrisburg to take up her new job with the State of Pennsylvania, the pattern was in place. “The realtor told me I could live on the west shore, but it’s really called ‘the
white
shore,’ so I’d probably be happier somewhere else.” She bought in Harrisburg. Such steering is illegal, but it goes on every day.
39
African Americans still have trouble getting equal treatment at each step of the home-buying process, according to speakers at a 2003 conference in Washington, D.C., subtitled “New Evidence on Housing Discrimination.” Speakers presented data to show that in most suburbs of all social classes, realtors, lenders, and other parties to housing sales continue to discriminate covertly against African Americans, although the differences in treatment were not dramatic. In 2003, Shanna Smith, head of the National Fair Housing Alliance, summed up the problem: “The government is not serious about fair housing enforcement. If they were, they would fund it.”
40
As a result, African Americans remain markedly underrepresented in suburbs, and to the degree they do live in suburbia, they are overconcentrated in just a few suburbs. Nationally, in 1950, African Americans occupied 4.6% of all housing units outside central cities but still within metropolitan areas. By 1970, that proportion had actually dropped to 4.2%. Baltimore County, for example, a suburban jurisdiction to the east, north, and west of Baltimore, doubled in population during that interval. Meanwhile, the number of African Americans never budged, so the proportion of African Americans in the Baltimore suburbs fell from 7% to 3%.
41
Even those small percentages were artificially inflated. Geographer Harold Rose points out that most “suburban” African Americans live in three types of towns:
• Historically black towns and townships
42
• Independent industrial towns that then became part of a metropolitan area, such as Chester, Pennsylvania, or Pontiac, Michigan
• Older inner suburbs, contiguous to the city itself, that had become majority-black as early as 1970, such as East Orange, New Jersey (Newark); Seat Pleasant, Maryland (Washington); East Cleveland, Ohio (Cleveland); Hamtramck, Michigan (Detroit); University City, Missouri (St. Louis); and Inglewood, California (Los Angeles)
The first two categories have little in common with what most Americans mean by “suburbia” but account for many “black suburbanites.”
43
The concentration of African Americans into a handful of suburbs is striking in many metropolitan areas. “Long Island has the most racially isolated and segregated suburbs in the nation,” according to reporter Michael Powell, writing in 2002. About 10% of Long Island’s population is African American, but “almost all black residents are bunched into a dozen or so towns, from Roosevelt to Hempstead, Wyandanch, and Uniondale.” Meanwhile, two-thirds of Long Island’s municipalities remained less than 1% black, and half of those had no black residents at all. In northern New Jersey in 1970, 89% of Essex County’s 72,000 African Americans lived in three towns—East Orange, Orange, and Montclair. Meanwhile, only 7 African Americans lived in Roseland and 8 in Fairfield. By 2000, 327,000 African Americans lived in Essex County; East Orange and Orange had gone majority-black; but just 65 African Americans lived in Roseland and Fairfield combined. Similarly, 80% of the African Americans in Oakland County, north of Detroit, lived in just three cities.
44
Chicago follows the same pattern. In the 1960s, all of the African Americans who moved to the suburbs, 51,000 people, went to just 15 of 237 suburbs, according to Danielson. These 15 suburbs had 83% of Chicago’s 128,300 suburban African Americans. Three of these—Harvey, Ford Heights, and Robbins—were overwhelmingly black and ranked among the poorest suburbs in the nation. Meanwhile, all other Chicago suburbs remained overwhelmingly white. By 1980, of Chicago’s 285 suburbs, 9 had populations 30 to 50% black, while 117 were less than 1% black. “It is evident that those racial housing patterns didn’t develop by accident,” wrote Arthur Hayes in
Black Enterprise.
A study of suburban Chicago in 1993 demonstrated what Meyer called “the tenacity of segregation.” Only 423 African Americans were among the 183,000 denizens of McHenry County, about 0.2% African Americans made up more than 10% of the population of Will County, but three-fourths of them lived in just three communities. Kane County was 5.8% African American in 2000, but nearly 96% of those black residents lived in just two towns, Aurora and Elgin.
45
Sundown suburbs are the key reason why geographer Jeff Crump was able to maintain that “cities in the United States 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 greater concentration, like the distribution of, say, Italian Americans.
46
The next chapter explores the underlying reasons why towns and suburbs went sundown in the first place.
PART III
The Sociology of Sundown Towns
6
Underlying Causes
One of the most striking aspects of racial segregation in 1993 is the national sense that it is inescapable.
—John C. Boger, “Toward Ending Residential Segregation,” 1993
1
T
HIS CHAPTER SEEKS ANSWERS to important “why” questions, the most basic of which is: Why have African Americans been particularly targeted for exclusion? Other key questions are: Why did thousands of towns and counties across America go sundown? What caused a town to expel its African Americans or resolve never to let any in? Why did another town, a few miles down the road, always allow African Americans to live in it? What predicts which suburbs opened to African Americans when most remained closed?
Why African Americans?
We have seen that sundown towns did not always direct their exclusionary policies against African Americans but sometimes drove out or prohibited Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Native, or Mexican Americans. For shorter periods, a few towns kept out Greeks, Sicilians, or other European ethnic minorities. Still other towns drove out or excluded Mormons, homosexuals, labor union members, and perhaps Seventh Day Adventists.
2
Nevertheless, African Americans have been excluded much more universally than any other group.
3
Although a few Western counties did exclude Chinese Americans, none did so after 1970. I know of no county that ever prohibited any other group countywide. Indeed, after about 1970, few sundown towns or suburbs kept out any minority other than African Americans.
Why?
The answer to this last question
seems
to be that African Americans differ more from whites physically: in color, features, and general appearance. On reflection, however, this is not so obvious. Neither skin color in itself, nor aesthetics, nor physical characteristics explain racism. History does. Events and processes in American history from the time of slavery to the present explain why we think it “natural” to differentiate based on skin color. In his important book
Minority Education and Caste,
anthropologist John Ogbu observed that historically, European Americans systematically subjugated three groups: Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, taking the land of the first two and the labor of the third. As part of the process of justifying American history, European Americans have therefore systematically stigmatized these groups as inferior. That’s why Ogbu called Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans our “caste minorities,” which he differentiated from other “voluntary minorities.”
4
Among these three caste minorities, whites encountered African Americans
primarily
as slaves for almost 250 years—from 1619 through at least 1863. To be sure, whites enslaved some Native Americans, but the most common encounters between European Americans and Native Americans were not master-to-slave. Even less was this true between Anglos and Mexicans. White racism therefore became first and foremost a rationale for African slavery. That is why America’s
“real
non-whites,” if you will, have for centuries been its African Americans. Ultimately, then, even after it ended, slavery was responsible for the continuing stigmatizing of African Americans, expressed in their exclusion from sundown towns, among other ways. Even today, whites feel most strongly about differentiating themselves from African Americans, not Jewish, Mexican,
5
Native, or Asian Americans.
The Nadir Made Sundown Towns Possible
Answering the other questions—why did so many towns go sundown? what caused one town to do so but not another?—is not so easy. It is always hard to assign causes for large-scale historical movements, and all the more so when the movement entails attitudes and actions that are embarrassing or repugnant in retrospect. I suggest two kinds of underlying factors were at work. First, the spirit of the times—the zeitgeist—changed. I am referring to the deepening racism known as the Nadir of race relations, of course, between 1890 and 1940. This change in our national culture affected towns all across America. But it did not affect them equally. The second type of underlying social and cultural causes predisposed some towns—but not others—to go sundown. These factors included a Democratic voting majority, mono-ethnic makeup, and strong labor movement. Such characteristics did not determine that a town would go sundown, but as the Nadir deepened, African Americans in these towns lived on the knife edge. The actions of a few individuals on one side or the other often swayed the outcome. Even chance played a role.
Chapter 2 analyzed how and why racism intensified after 1890 across the United States. Lynchings rose to their all-time high, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn as a national institution, and whites drove blacks from occupation after occupation. Causal factors underlying the Nadir included the three
i’
s—Indian wars, increasing opposition to immigrants, and imperialism—as well as the rise of Social Darwinism to justify the opulence of the Gilded Age. Of course, the racism that had arisen earlier in our culture as a rationale for slavery was always a key underlying ingredient.