Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism (50 page)

Read Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism Online

Authors: James W. Loewen

A Detroit suburbanite had a similar experience in the Dearborn area in about 1985: “Dearborn passed a city ordinance that only city residents could use its parks—
i.e.
whites only. I visited my aunt and uncle who lived there and was never asked for any ID to prove I was a resident, but the local papers had several stories about African Americans who were asked for ID and then removed from the parks.”
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White suburbs still pass all sorts of ordinances to discourage nonwhite visitors and residents. Highland Park, Texas, has been a leader in criminalizing ordinary behavior. It may have more “No” signs per capita than any other city in the nation. The Dallas suburb brags about being a city of parks, but it does not want outsiders to use them. Lakeside Park is its largest park and continues into Dallas; Highland Park has made it illegal to eat lunch in its portion of Lakeside. Too much litter, said city officials, but the
Dallas Morning News
suspected that an aversion to the possibility of African American picnickers underlay the ordinance. Highland Park also prohibits swimming, wading, climbing trees, drinking alcohol, sleeping, “protractedly lounging,” and sitting on railings or “any other property in a park which . . . is not designated or customarily used for such purposes.” Outsiders cannot play tennis; reservations are for residents only, and it is illegal to play without one.
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In 1982, the suburb made headlines for ticketing thirteen joggers, ten of whom were nonresidents, for jogging on city streets; this offense cost a $15 fine or a night in jail. It made fishing without a city permit against the law and charged $5 per year for a fishing permit. Highland Park police have also repeatedly arrested African Americans and Mexican Americans for being “drunk in car.” The latter is “a non-existent crime,” according to reporter Jane Wolfe. The fishing permit is legal nonsense too, because a Texas fishing license, “which costs $4.50 a year for state residents, entitles the holder to fish free of charge in any body of public water in Texas,” as reporter Doug Swanson noted. “And the creeks and lakes of Highland Park, [game warden Billy] Walker said, are public.”
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Every department of sundown suburbs has been used to enforce these policies and to maintain their communities’ desired reputation of being unfriendly to minorities. Police in Cicero, Illinois, told African American would-be residents they could not move their own furniture into Cicero without a permit. The school system played its part too. In 1981, when Christopher Phillips began as a new teacher in the Cicero Public Schools, his introduction to the community came at the district’s faculty assembly as the fall semester began. “The superintendent stood at the podium before all the district’s teachers and the first words he spoke were, ‘There are no blacks in the Cicero Public Schools, and there will be none as long as I am superintendent.’ He received wild applause.”
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Dearborn’s longtime mayor Orville Hubbard used the city’s police and fire departments and even its sanitation department to harass black newcomers until they fled the city. African Americans who tried to move in found their gas turned off and their garbage uncollected, by city policy. According to David Good, Hubbard’s biographer, Hubbard told a reporter that “as far as he was concerned, it was against the law for Negroes to live in his suburb.” In 1956, Hubbard said to an Alabama journalist, “They can’t get in here. We watch it. Every time we hear of a Negro moving in—for instance, we had one last year—we respond quicker than you do to a fire.” Good tells that Dearborn police officers and firefighters made wake-up visits to the new black family’s house every hour or so through the night in response to alleged trouble calls. Recall sociologist Karl Taeuber’s finding that whites in the Detroit metropolitan area in 1970 were five times more likely than African Americans, even controlling for differences in income, to live in the suburbs. Certainly these actions by Dearborn’s city government help to explain why.
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Dearborn was an extraordinary case because its mayor was so outspoken, but Good cautions us not to see Hubbard as unique: “In a sense, Orville Hubbard’s view was no different from that in any of a dozen or more other segregated suburbs that ringed the city of Detroit—or in hundreds of other such communities scattered across the country.”
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Restrictive Covenants
 
The U.S. Supreme Court found openly anti-black ordinances unconstitutional in 1917 in
Buchanan v. Warley,
but sundown towns and suburbs nevertheless acted as if they had the power to be formally all-white until at least 1960; informally some communities have never given up this idea. The federal government was hardly likely to enforce
Buchanan v. Warley
until after World War II; on the contrary, it was busily creating all-white suburbs itself until then. After 1917, most sundown suburbs resorted to restrictive covenants. Covenants were usually private, part of the deed one signed when buying from the developer. Like the Great Retreat, restrictive covenants first targeted Chinese Americans in the West, originating in California in the 1890s, and then spread to the East, where Jews and blacks were targeted for exclusion. The United States Supreme Court unanimously declined to interfere with restrictive covenants in
Corrigan v. Buckley,
a 1926 case originating in Washington, D.C. The Court reasoned that restrictive covenants were agreements between private citizens, hence were OK, whereas ordinances were passed by governments.
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Covenants weren’t really private, though, because many suburban governments would not approve new developments without them. Nor would the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insure loans without them. Many communities proceeded to encumber every square inch of their residential land with restrictive covenants, agreement to which became part of the purchase of the property. Thus covenants worked just as well as ordinances to make entire towns all-white. This practice was particularly common in California. In February 1929, for example, the Palos Verdes Homes Association in Palos Verdes Estates, California, published a booklet, “Palos Verdes Protective Restrictions,” including this language: “No person not of the white race (except servants and students) shall use or occupy any part of the property.” That phrasing was unusual; almost never were students exempt from the restriction. Here is a more typical covenant, from a suburb in Montgomery County, Maryland, built shortly after World War II:
No persons of any race other than the Caucasian race shall use or occupy any lot or any building, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by a domestic servant of a different race domiciled with an owner or a tenant.
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Across the United States, suburbs and white residential districts in cities now hastened to adopt restrictive covenants. According to sociologist Douglas Massey, the Chicago Real Estate Board started using them in 1919. By 1940, more than 80% of the Chicago area was covered by covenants, according to the NAACP. Actually, the proportion of the Chicago suburbs that were covered by covenants was much higher than 80%, because the remaining 20% included those neighborhoods in the city where African Americans already lived. Across the United States, exclusionary covenants were the rule rather than the exception.
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In 1948, in
Shelley v. Kraemer,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no court could
enforce
a racial covenant. Although it didn’t make voluntary covenants illegal,
Shelley v. Kraemer
nevertheless began to make a difference. In the late 1940s, civic leaders and realtors in South Pasadena, California, tried to blanket the entire city with restrictive covenants. “When pressed about the status of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans,” historian Charlotte Brooks writes, “they announced that such people could work in the town, as long as they left by dusk.” According to Brooks, “The covenant campaign eventually failed, due to the publicity it received and the
Shelley v. Kraemer
decision.”
Shelley v. Kraemer
implied for the first time (since the neglected 1917 decision) that there might be something wrong or illegal about racial exclusion.
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Real Estate Agents as the Front Line of Defense
 
After the Supreme Court emasculated racial covenants, realtors became the front line of defense, keeping suburbs white. According to James Hecht, realtors had conceived of restrictive covenants and popularized them in the first place. After 1948, despite
Shelley v. Kraemer,
realtors could still simply say with impunity, “We don’t sell to blacks.” Indeed, in 1948 the Washington, D.C., Real Estate Board Code of Ethics adopted the following statement: “No property in a white section should ever be sold, rented, advertised, or offered to colored people.” In St. Louis in that year, realtors zoned the entire metropolitan area into “white” and “black” neighborhoods and forbade any realtor “under pain of expulsion to sell property in the white zone to a Negro,” as one realtor explained to Dorothy Newman. Even as late as 1957, a teaching manual for Realtors put out by the National Association of Real Estate Boards counseled against introducing “undesirable influences” into a block. Included among these undesirable influences were bootleggers, gangsters, or “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
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These real estate practices had a long history. In 1913, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (now the National Association of Realtors) instructed its members, according to urban historian Stephen Meyer, “not to contribute to residential race mixing.” In 1924, the same year that the United States passed the Immigration Restriction Act, Realtors added to their Code of Ethics Article 34, which stated:
A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.
 
That African Americans (and sometimes Jews) had this effect was an article of faith. “Through this code,” Hecht writes, “America’s Realtors became committed to segregated neighborhoods.
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Even when a homeowner was willing to sell to a Negro, the Realtor was prohibited from being a party to such a transaction.”
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Usually realtors were surprisingly open about refusing to sell to blacks (see Portfolio 28.) In 1944 in Salt Lake City, Utah, for example, Carlos Kimball chaired a “Non-White Housing Control Committee.” According to an article in the
Pittsburgh Courier,
he got “most Salt Lake real estate dealers” to sign pledges “to restrict non-whites from white communities.” Kimball pointed out that these pledges were “in accordance with the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics which forbids the sale of property to anyone who might ‘lower community standards.’ ” Kimball then sent a circular about the policy to “Negro leaders” in the Salt Lake City area.
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For two decades after
Shelley v. Kraemer,
African Americans routinely encountered open race-based exclusion and could do nothing about it. Most whites thought it was proper to exclude blacks, and exclusion was legal. Consequently African Americans had no available remedy. Consider this complaint, sent to the Connecticut Civil Rights Commission in 1955:
A building firm has been advertising houses for quite some time with a minimum down payment for veterans. Today, my wife and I went out to see about the purchase of one of these houses. When we talked to the man the first thing he told us was that an agreement had been made that they would sell only to white people.... I have tried for months to find some kind of improved living conditions. I have answered hundreds of ads for apartments but the moment they find I am a Negro, the answers given are “Filled,” “The neighbors object,” or someone else might.
 
The commission’s files reveal its totally ineffective response:
A representative called at the construction company named in this letter. They were building 208 homes. A partner in the business said their only interest was in selling the homes as fast as they could be constructed. He felt that if it were known that a Negro family had purchased a house it might be more difficult to sell to white purchasers.
 
The commission could do nothing because “the development has received no subsidy from any public agency and consequently does not come within the purview of the Public Accommodations Act. The complainant was advised to this effect.” Thus seven years after the Supreme Court ruled restrictive covenants unenforceable, this couple had no recourse for housing segregation even in “liberal” Connecticut.
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Since real estate agents depend on other agents to find buyers for their listings, keeping realtors in line usually proved easy. In 1961 the Greenwich, Connecticut, Real Estate Board criticized one of its members, Olive Braden, for selling to Jews. So she sent a memo to her staff: “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere!” In a suburb of Houston, according to Benjamin Epstein and Arnold Foster, “a builder and a real estate agent who joined in selling a home to a Jewish family were punished severely. The builder was not permitted to build any more homes in that village; the agent was refused property listings in the area.”
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