Black Avoidance Helps Maintain Sundown Towns
Today, residents of all-white towns and suburbs often blame African Americans for being overly cautious. A longtime resident of Arab, Alabama, thinks so. After telling how whites used to keep African Americans out of Arab even during the day, he assured me in 2002, “It’d be different now.” Of course, blaming blacks for not moving in serves as a handy excuse for whites who do not want to acknowledge that their town ever had a policy to keep them out. However, sometimes whites have a point. Certainly African American sociologist Orlando Patterson thinks they do: “Persisting segregation is partly—and for most middle-class Afro-Americans, largely—a voluntary phenomenon.” In response to the Civil Rights Movement, whites lost some of their sense of privilege, especially in the South. No longer do most whites assume they are entitled to exclude African Americans. On public opinion polls, fewer and fewer whites agree with such items as “Blacks should not push into areas where it is known they are not wanted.” Ironically, however, in the black community pessimism about white attitudes has grown. In 1968, 47% of African Americans felt whites wanted to see blacks “get a better break,” 31 % thought them indifferent, and 22% thought whites wanted to “keep blacks down.” By 1992, just 22% of African Americans believed whites wanted to see them get a better break, 52% thought them indifferent, and 26% felt whites wanted to keep them down. Such pessimism is hardly conducive to social action.
9
Most black families merely follow the line of least resistance. In 2001, reporter David Mendell spoke with 66-year-old Willie Buchanan, who bought a house in “Blackfish Bay,” as wags call the majority-black neighborhood near Whitefish Bay, an overwhelmingly white suburb north of Milwaukee. Buchanan “said he moved where he felt most comfortable,” according to Mendell. “You like to live around people who you feel want to be your neighbor,” said Buchanan. “I don’t think prejudice is as bad as it used to be. But it’s still around, so I just decided to move here.”
10
Such thinking is understandable. Law professor Sheryll Cashin calls it “integration exhaustion.” As actor Sidney Poitier put it, explaining why the Poitier family moved to Mt. Vernon, an interracial suburb of New York City, after having problems trying to buy a house in West Los Angeles: “Our children are established in a multi-racial community in Mount Vernon. They attend multi-racial schools.... We don’t want to barter that kind of atmosphere for something that is hostile.” Ruby Dee, another black actor who with her husband, Ossie Davis, chose an already integrated neighborhood in New Rochelle, New York, offered a similar explanation: “I want to be friends with my neighbors. I don’t want to be tolerated, on my best behavior, always seeking my neighbor’s approval.... I admire the pioneers who risk so much in the process of integration, but I cannot break that ice.” Reasonably enough, many African American families want to live near neighbors who will accept them, and the best way to find whites like that is in neighborhoods where they already live near African American families.
11
Choosing this line of least resistance may not lead to the best results for the family in the long run, however. African Americans moving into those neighborhoods that are known to be open to them often wind up in areas with higher tax rates and lower tax bases than whiter suburbs. Eventually these economic realities take their toll, and families find that their homes did not appreciate as fast as those in whiter suburbs. Cashin points to a host of more serious social problems that arise after suburbs go majority black. Certainly following the line of least resistance does not lead to the best results for the metropolitan area. When black families move to an interracial suburb that everyone knows is open—indeed, that is likely to go all black—they only contribute to the sundown suburb problem.
12
Nevertheless, calling African American complicity in residential segregation “voluntary” overstates the case. According to sociologist Gary Orfield, speaking in 2000, African Americans do still believe in the integrated American dream: 99% favor desegregation, and 59% favor busing if needed to get there. Worry about sundown reactions deters many. In Detroit, Reynolds Farley and others pointed out, only 31% of African Americans said they would be “willing to be the African American pioneer on an all-white block” in 1992, compared to 38% in 1976. But sociologist John Logan stresses, “Black preferences are strongly affected by beliefs about whites’ attitudes and behavior,” so “their reluctance to live in a predominantly white neighborhood is due to their belief that whites would react negatively.” Reputations are important. In Arab, for instance, the 2000 census showed just a single black household among 7,139 total population. “Why so few?” I asked a longtime resident. He referred to the violent exclusion of the past: “That happened a long time ago, and it’s still in their [blacks’] minds.”
13
Before smiling at the old ex-CCC worker who still avoids Taft six decades after he learned it was sundown, we might note that Taft also did not change for decades. According to Ronald McGriff, chair of social sciences at the nearby College of the Sequoias, “as recent as the 1980s, [residents of Taft] trashed a black home (with paint and graffiti) and [the family] was told to ‘get out of town.’ ” Before making light of the black man who would come for Sunday dinner in Paxton only if his white host drove him, whites might remember that one can never be sure when one’s car might break down. Before blaming African Americans for not moving into Arab, we must note that Arab boasted a sign, “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On Your Black Ass in Arab, Alabama,” until the early 1990s, according to Benjamin Johnson, a former University of Alabama student—hardly “a long time ago.” I must confess that I felt unsafe and uneasy when I first started doing this research in such notorious sundown towns as Alba, Texas, and Cicero, Illinois. I worried lest “they” discover my liberal attitudes, before I fully understood that my white skin made me safely part of the in-group.
14
David Grann, a
New Republic
journalist visiting Vidor, Texas, in 1998, made light of African Americans’ continued concern about that town: “Several blacks in the surrounding area told me they still don’t stop there for gas at night, even though the hand-painted sign on Main Street saying ‘Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Vidor’ was taken down some 30 years ago.” He obviously thought African Americans were overdoing their prudence. But if one doesn’t know for sure, one is putting oneself and one’s family at risk. African Americans have a legitimate right to fear violent consequences, as well as such lesser repercussions as shunning, if they move into a sundown community. Moreover, just five years before Grann’s visit, racial slurs, shunning, refusals to hire, and death threats drove four black households from Vidor’s public housing complex, leaving the town again all-white by design. This book is replete with examples of vicious white retribution visited upon unsuspecting African Americans who didn’t know enough to be wary of sundown towns and might have survived had they been more prudent. Today, most sundown towns and suburbs would react more placidly than Vidor back in 1993, but some residents might not be welcoming. As an elderly African American in a neighboring town said in 2002, explaining why there are no African Americans in Nashville, Illinois, “If people are inhospitable to you, you leave.”
15
Still, African Americans can overdo their caution into their own form of racial paranoia. Sometimes African Americans take a certain pleasure in overstating the danger: “look what those white folks have done
now
!” There is a streak of gallows humor in black rhetoric that takes mordant satisfaction in seizing on, retelling, and even exaggerating examples of racist white behavior. Patterson writes that African Americans perceive whites as “technically clever, yes; powerful, well armed, and prolific, to be sure; but without an ounce of basic human decency.” Despite all the wretched acts by whites recounted in this book, that is too strong. Such thinking only exaggerates the extent and importance of white racism and invites African Americans to show too much caution. The African American woman who “was not happy about” having to go to Effingham, Illinois, in broad daylight in 2002 showed this paranoia, just like the white suburbanite from Naperville who frets about going to a concert in Chicago’s Loop. In both cases, a self-fulfilling prophecy sets in: nothing bad happens to the person who avoids places dominated by the other race, and that happy fact legitimizes the avoidance, leaving intact the belief that the opposite race still poses a threat.
16
Psychological Costs of Sundown Towns
No other group, not even Native Americans, has been so disparaged by the very structure of American society. No other group has been labeled a pariah people—literally to be kept outside the gates of our sundown towns and suburbs. As Daisy Myers put it in 1960, “The housing market, above all else, stands as a symbol of racial inequality.” Just as sundown towns drained the morale of African Americans during the Nadir, so sundown suburbs, especially elite suburbs, still contribute to demoralization in black neighborhoods elsewhere in the metropolitan area.
17
Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy observed about Watts, the African American ghetto that exploded into violence in Los Angeles in 1965: “A crushing weight fell on the spirit of the neighborhood when it learned that it was hemmed in, that prejudice and malice had thrown a wall around it.” On the other side of the country, Irwin Quintyne moved in 1961 to North Amityville, one of the “black townships” that adjoin sundown suburbs on Long Island. He remembered in 2003 how “other growing Long Island communities, Levittown in particular, made it clear that they didn’t want blacks.” The message hammered home to black suburbanites by their neighboring all-white community is “We do not care who you are or what you have done; so far as
this
town is concerned, you are a nigger and unfit for human companionship.” Partly as a result of this message, North Amityville; Kinloch, Missouri; and several other black townships lost morale and came to house drug markets and problem families.
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Successful African Americans may be particularly upset by these slights, because their peers, elite whites, are the least likely of all white Americans to accept African Americans into their neighborhoods and organizations. As Ellis Cose famously raged:
I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have stayed out of trouble with the law, gone to the right schools, and worked myself nearly to death.
What more do they want?
Why in God’s name won’t they accept me as a full human being?
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It
is
frustrating: even voicing the hurt can hurt, because it can seem as if affluent African Americans are only whining because white people won’t be their friends. A similar misinterpretation gets applied to school desegregation: “What is it about black people? Do they
need
white children next to them to learn successfully?” But that was not Cose’s point in 1993, nor was it the point of
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954. As the Supreme Court pointed out in decisions flowing from
Brown,
whites are the lawmaking group in America. When they segregated the schools, it was part of a program of white supremacy that declared blacks inferior. That is why segregated schools were
inherently
unequal, as the
Brown
decision stated: the enforced racial separation itself both presupposed and signified black inferiority.
Every time black ingress into a previously white neighborhood prompts white egress to more distant sundown suburbs, all African Americans in the metropolitan area are invited to remember that they are still so despised by our mainstream culture that whites feel they must flee them en masse. Black poet Langston Hughes mused on this matter in 1949 in “Restrictive Covenants,” which said in part:
When I move
Into a neighborhood
Folks fly.
Even every foreigner
That can move, moves.
Why?
Cose goes to the heart of the matter: residential exclusion (and the school segregation it purchases) strikes at blacks’ worth
as full human beings.
That’s why it festers. That’s why black respondents on Long Island were significantly less satisfied with their lives than whites with significantly lower incomes, in a 1990 study reported by Cose.
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After experiencing some of Chicago’s sundown neighborhoods and sundown suburbs firsthand in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. observed, “Segregation has wreaked havoc with the Negro.... Only a Negro can understand the social leprosy that segregation inflicts upon him. Every confrontation with restriction is another emotional battle in a never-ending war.” “Social leprosy” is an evocative term for the pariah status that sundown towns and suburbs enforce upon African Americans, inexact only in that leprosy can now be cured.
21
Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident,” written in the 1920s, suggests the sting that African Americans can internalize from racial slights:
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.