Another Future: Decreasing Exclusion
As I took my leave of John Peters, the black retiree with whom I talked in Du Quoin in 2002, a biracial town in southern Illinois, a retired white neighbor dropped in unannounced, to chat and maybe go somewhere with Peters. After spending so many days in towns and suburbs where casual interaction simply could not take place across racial lines, I’m afraid I stared at the two of them. Racially integrated towns and neighborhoods are becoming more common and more stable, however. Soon, I believe, they will no longer be viewed as unusual. At least, I believe it when I’m in my “glass half full” frame of mind.
At the same time, many sundown towns and suburbs have not caved in. In one sundown town, the reference librarian, sympathetic to my research, warned me twice in 2002 to “be careful who you talk with.” She wasn’t kidding; she was concerned for me, and I am white. I also recall my last conversation in Arcola, Illinois, also in the library. I was talking with the librarian and her mother about Arcola’s remarkable history of exclusion and asked if it was still a sundown town. In the 2000 census, Arcola had one household with an African American householder, a family of three, but neither woman knew of such a household. One said, and the other concurred, “There was a black family here ten or fifteen years ago, but they moved on.” They didn’t know if the family was forced out, but they agreed Arcola was a sundown town. Just then a young man, maybe eighteen years old, walked in. His ears perked up as soon as he heard “black family,” and he stopped, shocked. “Blacks in Arcola?” he asked intently. “Where? Who?” We hastened to assure him that we were just talking about things in the past. Was he just curious? Or fixing to act? I could not tell.
Nationally, research popularized around the 50th anniversary of
Brown v. Board
in 2004 shows that many African American students attend class in metropolitan areas whose schools are now more segregated by race than they were ten or twenty years ago. Perhaps the most accurate assessment of the state of sundown towns at present would be to leave it up in the air. Everywhere I went in sundown towns and suburbs, I met some people who would like their community to move beyond its restrictive policy. On the other hand, a gap between attitudes and behavior remains. Many whites endorse the principle of desegregation while living in white areas and are privately uncomfortable with the thought of African Americans moving in. Therefore they do not act on their principles, which allows those who do—the excluders—to carry the day.
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Living in a place where not everyone looks alike and not everyone votes alike is surely good for the mind as well as the children. Also, since people usually defend their choice of place to live, living where not everyone looks alike pushes residents to defend living where not everyone looks alike, thus making them less racist in their attitudes. Scenes like the interracial friendship I witnessed in Du Quoin do take place all across the country, and if they don’t in your neighborhood, the next chapter suggests possible steps to take. Indeed, the question before us now is: What can we do to end sundown towns and suburbs in our lifetime? What can we get our institutions to do, and what can we do ourselves?
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The Remedy: Integrated Neighborhoods and Towns
And now a child
Can understand,
This is the law
Of all the land,
All the land.
—Three Dog Night, “Black and White,” 1972 song about school integration
W
E HAVE SEEN that sundown towns and neighborhoods have bad effects on whites, blacks, and our social system as a whole. Surely we want to stop all this. So how do we get there? How do we desegregate sundown towns and suburbs, racially and maybe even economically?
This final chapter is a call to action on four fronts: investigation, litigation, institutional policy changes, and personal choice. At the end, I add my plea for a Residents’ Rights Act that could be passed by state or federal governments to make it in the interest of sundown towns to change their policies immediately. I must add that I submit these remedies humbly.
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I am sure that lawyers, community activists, and other experts will find them wanting.
Bringing the History of Sundown Towns into the Open Is a First Step
To end our segregated neighborhoods and towns requires a leap of the imagination: Americans have to understand that white racism is still a problem in the United States. This isn’t always easy. Most white Americans do not see racism as a problem in their neighborhood. We need to know about sundown towns to know what to
do
about them.
During the Nadir, and even to the 1960s in most places, sundown towns were not at all shy about their policies. Nothing could be more blatant, after all, than a sign stating “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in __,” or a brochure advertising “No Negroes” as a selling point of a suburban neighborhood. So it is encouraging that few sundown towns and suburbs today, even those whose sundown policies remain in force, admit that they keep out African Americans. Hypocrisy is to be encouraged as a first step toward humane behavior. When residents claim that their community is all-white by accident or blame African Americans for not moving in, at least they no longer openly brag that the town is anti-black. No longer do whites feel it is OK to advertise their racism. Since 1968, when overt discrimination became illegal, they know to keep it hidden.
On the other hand, this secrecy helps racism endure. “The truth will make us free,” goes an important verse of the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, “We Shall Overcome.” Surely it is right: surely one reason we are not free of sundown towns is that the causes of residential segregation have been obscured. In 2002, the Pew Research Center surveyed attitudes about housing and race. Surprisingly, they found that only 50% of Americans “had heard that ‘neighborhoods are still mostly racially segregated.’ ”
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And as late as November of that year, a professor could routinely e-mail a web discussion list in history, in an attempt to begin a discussion of what he called “the problems of mandating desegregation,” this assumption: “Residential segregation is the result of individual, rather than government actions.” Had he known about the violent expulsions that gave rise to so many independent sundown towns, condoned by local governments, or the blatant acts of public policy (and also violent resistance) that led to sundown suburbs, he simply could not have written such a sentence.
3
Awareness of unfairness undercuts unfairness. People who perceive that the social system discriminates against racial minorities are more likely to support policies to reduce that discrimination. Racists know this. That’s why denial of racism is a time-honored tactic. During the lawsuit to integrate the University of Mississippi, the State of Mississippi actually claimed in 1962 that Ole Miss was not segregated; no African Americans “happened” to go there. Therefore the school had not rejected African American James Meredith owing to race! Amazingly, the trial judge bought this claim, but John Minor Wisdom, speaking for the Federal Court of Appeals, held it to be “nevernever land” and proclaimed, “What everybody knows the court must know.” Similarly, if we wish to mobilize lawyers, judges, local institutions, and families to do something about sundown towns, we must make them realize what the residents of these towns already understand. If everyone in Anna knows that the letters of the town’s name stand for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” then “the court must know,” and so must we all. These policies need to be exposed, “hidden in plain view” no longer.
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Concealment has been especially vital in the suburbs. The system of racial status that sundown suburbs embody needs mystification to work. Remember the paradox of exclusivity: living in an exclusive area is good, connoting positive things about one’s family, but participating in exclusion is bad, connoting “lower-class” prejudices. Therefore white families achieve status by living in elite sundown suburbs only so long as the racial policy of those suburbs remains hidden. Exposing the unsavory historical roots of sundown towns and suburbs can help to decrease the status that most Americans confer upon elite white communities and undercut the policies that still keep them that way. Elite suburban racism is particularly vulnerable, because no one can defend a suburb’s all-white racial composition as right without appearing “lower-class.” Thus the paradox of exclusivity provides a point of leverage for opening suburban communities to African American residents.
In many communities, then, more research is the first order of the day. Indeed, in some towns, time is running out. Doing oral history on the period 1890 to 1940, the peak years for creating sundown towns, is becoming difficult, because people who came of age even toward the end of it are now nearing their 90s. Children may not learn the local history that their parents and grandparents know. At my web site are suggestions as to how to proceed. Professional historians and sociologists can do much of this research, but so can local historians, “mere” residents, even middle-school students.
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My hope is that this beginning will inspire researchers in each state to identify more of these towns, tell how they came to be sundown, how they preserved their racial exclusivity, and hopefully how they are changing.
6
The race relations history of any neighborhood or town deserves to be investigated if its population has long been overwhelmingly white. Of course it is possible that no African Americans ever happened to go there, but it is more likely that formal or informal policies of exclusion maintained the whiteness of the place.
Most states have historical marker programs that now incorporate advisory committees, including professional historians, that must approve the text of any new marker for accuracy before it goes up. After completing the research required to convince such a panel, the next step, with the assistance of church groups, civic organizations, or the local historical society, is to propose an accurate marker telling your town’s history of exclusion and offering to fund and erect it.
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Even if opposition mobilizes to block the marker, the resulting uproar itself will end the secrecy.
Truth and Reconciliation
Once we know what happened, we can start to reconcile. Publicizing a town’s racist actions can bring shame upon the community, but recalling and admitting them is the first step in redressing them. In every sundown town live potential allies—people who care about justice and welcome the truth. As a white man said in Corbin, Kentucky, on camera in 1990, “Forgetting just continues the wrong.” “Recovering sundown towns” (or wider metropolitan areas or states) might set up truth and reconciliation commissions modeled after South Africa’s to reveal the important historical facts that underlie their continuing whiteness, reconcile with African Americans in nearby communities, and thus set in motion a new more welcoming atmosphere.
8
The next step after learning and publicizing the truth is an apology, preferably by an official of the sundown town itself. In 2003, Bob Reynolds, mayor of Harrison, Arkansas, which has been all-white ever since it drove out its African Americans in race riots in 1905 and 1909, met with other community leaders to draw up a collective statement addressing the problem. It says in part, “The perception that hangs over our city is the result of two factors: one, unique evils resulting from past events, and two, the silence of the general population toward those events of 1905 and 1909.” The group, “United Christian Leaders,” is trying to change Harrison, and it knows that truth is the starting place. “98 years is long enough to be silent,” said Wayne Kelly, one of the group’s members. George Holcomb, a retiree who is also a reporter for the
Harrison Daily Times,
supports a grand jury investigation into the race riots: “Get the records, study them, give the people an account of what happened. Who lost property, what they owned, who had it stolen from them and who ended up with it.”
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In some towns, as Holcomb’s comment implies, truth and reconciliation logically leads to reparations. This book has mentioned many towns and counties whose African American residents were driven out at gunpoint between 1890 and 1954. I spent a morning walking around the former black neighborhood in Pinckneyville, Illinois, for instance. It was a haunting experience. I photographed houses, including one that formerly was the black school (Portfolio 4), and talked with residents, all of them white, of course. Today whites call the area “the Black Hills,” by which they do
not
imply a similarity to a Sioux sacred site in South Dakota. In about 1928, whites drove African Americans from Pinckneyville. “They strung one black up, at the square,” a cemetery worker told me as he showed me around the black section of the town cemetery, which has only two stones but perhaps twenty graves, he said.
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What about the home pictured in Portfolio 3, burned by whites as they drove African Americans from Pierce City, Missouri? All 200 African Americans in Pierce City ran for their lives at 2 a.m. on August 19,1901. Almost certainly the family that owned this house got no compensation for its destruction and probably never even felt safe enough to return to try to sell the burned-out hulk and the land. Do their heirs have a claim? Virginia Yearwood grew up in one of the houses that was not destroyed. She wrote, “As a result [of the riot], a number of very nice homes with views had been standing empty for a very long time. My Uncle Emil bought one of these nice homes (nice for that time) which had been formerly occupied by blacks.... It must have been really tragic as all the houses were abandoned for a long time, some with belongings still in them.” Did Uncle Emil pay for the home? Surely he did not pay the owners.
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