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| Many signs outside of 'sundown towns' were less tactful. |
Projection, I have observed more than once, is more than a mere trait of the American right wing, it's
a conscious strategy designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses.
One of the more revealing instances of this projection is the sudden rise of claims from various right-wing elements that radical Muslim immigrants in both Europe and the United State have created "no go zones" where "Sharia Law" is enforced and where white non-Muslims are unwelcome and unsafe. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has made something of
a national ass of himself touting these claims, which of course
originate deep in the fetid cesspools of the far right.
And it is telling that all this talk about "no go zones" is arising even
as
anti-Muslim hate crimes are spiking (
with the help of the gung-ho war
film
American Sniper). The even broader context is that this talk is occurring even as more people are
opening discussions about the ongoing influence of white privilege in both our discourse and our polity, spurring
angry denials from the right that such privilege even exists.
So perhaps it is not surprising to see the
persistence of these beliefs on the right, thanks in no small part to the ongoing disinformation spewing out of our TVs on Fox News on a daily basis.
That alone tells us these ideas emanate from the ugly, pestilent id of right-wing American politics, the lizard-brain component of the electorate that denies the toxic presence of racism and bigotry in our social fabric even as it spreads it. It is innately irrational, morally corrupt, and projects all of its own worst tendencies onto its enemies at the drop of a hat.
In other words, from the same dark underbelly of white American culture that
invented the "no go zones."
In their day, we called them "sundown towns." That meant that the life of any nonwhite person found within the town limits after sundown was forfeit. It was typically enforced by lynching.
All this has been thoroughly documented in James Loewen's remarkable work
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, which, as longtime readers here know, is an important informative study for my work on eliminationism.
Just so current readers understand the significance of this phenomenon -- and why it reveals a stunning hypocrisy among the same people on the right who pooh-pooh the possibility that white privilege even exists, let alone is a problem -- I'm replaying for you all the bulk of
a post I wrote in 2007, as part of my series on eliminationism, exploring the history of "sundown towns" -- beginning with the observation that Loewen's book was criminally ignored in the press:
---
The media (and general public) reception for
Sundown Towns
stands in somewhat stark contrast to the fawning reaction that followed
the publication, a decade earlier, of the two books for which it is
possibly the most effective antidote:
The Bell Curve (which attempted to put nice respectable statistical clothing on age-old eugenicist nonsense) and
America in Black and White,
the Thernstroms'
enormously self-congratulatory (for white people) tome on the state of
modern race relations. Both were national bestsellers that happened to
find big audiences with suburban readers.
Sundown Towns is
an effective antidote to both because, unlike the Thernstrom book,
which glosses over such matters, it reveals one of the real continuing
racial fault lines in America and explains how we got to where we are;
and in stark contrast to
The Bell Curve, it explodes much of the
mythology of race in America, particularly long-held stereotypes about
why we live where we do and why blacks have difficulty succeeding in
America.
The American landscape it reveals is not the one we have
created in our own minds, one in which the bulk of racial bigotry
resides south of the Mason-Dixon line, while the enlightened northern
states have, comparatively speaking at least, provided both a racial
refuge and social justice. Rather, it reveals that racism is not only
woven throughout the nation's social fabric, but that the brand of
bigotry practiced throughout much of the North was even more noxious in
nature than that in the South.
Specifically, while the South
actively oppressed its nonwhite population, Americans in most of the
rest of the country chose not to even tolerate their presence, and
actively engaged in an ongoing campaign of eliminationist violence to
drive them out, forcing them to cluster in large urban areas for their
own self-protection and survival. The benign, polite white face of
suburban and rural America outside the South is revealed as both deeply
deceptive and ultimately lethal.
What exactly is a "sundown town"? Loewen defines the term [pp. 28-30] thus:
- A
sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept
African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus "all
white" on purpose.
... Beginning in about 1890 and continuing
until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the
United States for whites only. Many towns drove out their black
populations, then posted sundown signs. ... Other towns passed
ordinances barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from
owning or renting property; still others established such policies by
informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule.
Some sundown towns similarly kept out Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, Native
Americans, or other groups.
Independent sundown towns range from
tiny hamlets such as DeLand, Illinois (population 500) to substantial
cities such as Appleton, Wisconsin (57,000 in 1970). Sometimes entire
counties went sundown, usually when their county seat did. Independent
sundown towns were soon joined by "sundown suburbs," which could be even
larger: Levittown, on Long Island, had 82,000 residents in 1970, while
Livonia, Michigan, and Parma, Ohio, had more than 100,000. Warren, a
suburb of Detroit, had a population of 180,000 including just 28
minority families, most of whom lived on a U.S. Army facility.
Outside the traditional South ... probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans.
Moreover, as he details, the appearance of sundown towns occurred in every region, every state:
- There
is reason to believed that more than half of all towns in Oregon,
Indiana, Ohio, the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and diverse other areas were
also all-white on purpose. Sundown suburbs are found from Darien,
Connecticut, to La Jolla, California, and are even more prevalent;
indeed, most suburbs began life as sundown towns.
These
towns formed neither naturally nor accidentally, but emerged well after
the Civil War as the embodiment of emerging white supremacist beliefs,
particularly eugenicist notions about the evils of "race mixing" and the
innate inferiority of nonwhite races.
As Loewen explains, in
the first quarter-century after the Civil War, African Americans
actually fanned out across the country to resettle and start new lives
with their newly won freedom. Outside the South, they lived in rural
areas and small towns as well as big cities, filling all kinds of
occupations:
- [I]n Republican communities, in the period
1865-90, letting in African Americans was seen to be the appropriate,
even patriotic thing to do. It was in tune with the times. Many
Americans really were trying to give our nation a "new birth of freedom"
-- freedom for African Americans -- for which, as Lincoln had
suggested, Union soldiers had died at Gettysburg. Opening one's
community to black families after the Civil War seemed right -- like
opening one's college campus to black families after the Civil Rights
Movement a century later. Congress said so: the 1866 Civil Rights Act
declared that "citizens of every race and color ... shall have the same
right ... to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and
personal property." Presidents said so -- James A. Garfield at his
inauguration in 1881 ... clearly stated that the nation had granted
equal rights to African Americans and that this was fitting and proper.
Quakers in particular, abolitionists before the war, now made it their
business to welcome African Americans to their communities, hire them as
farmworkers, blacksmiths, or domestics, and help them get a start. So
did Unitarians, Congregationalists, and some Methodists and
Presbyterians. We can see the results in census figures [...]: African
Americans went everywhere after the Civil War. By 1890, all across the
North -- in northeast Pennsylvania river valleys, in every Indiana
county save one, deep in the north woods of Wisconsin, in every county
of Montana and California -- African Americans were living and working.
...
Northern communities, especially where Republicans were in the
majority, enjoyed something of a "springtime of race relations" between
1865 and 1890. During those years, African Americans voted, served in
Congress, received some spoils from the Republican Party, worked as
barbers, railroad firemen, midwives, mail carriers, and landowning
farmers, and played other fully human roles in American society. Their
new rights made African Americans optimistic, even buoyant. "Tell them
we is risin'!" one ex-slave said to a northern writer, come to see for
himself how the races were getting along in the postwar South. The same
confidence fueled the black dispersal throughout the postwar North.
But
this heyday was short-lived, and by 1890, the beginning of what is
known as "the Nadir of race relations" -- which was to last another
forty years, until 1930 -- set in. It was the period "when African
Americans were forced back into noncitizenship," as Loewen puts it, and
it produced what he calls the "Great Retreat" -- the forcible
elimination of blacks from rural and suburban communities,from which
they fled to larger black communities within a handful of urban centers
[pp. 30-31]:
- Unfortunately, "the new order of things" was
destined to last only six more years. In 1890, trying to get the federal
government to intervene against violence and fraud in southern
elections, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge,
introduced his Federal Elections Bill. It lost by just one vote in the
Senate. After its defeat, when Democrats again tarred Republicans [as
they had before the Civil War, and since] as "nigger lovers," now the
Republicans replied in a new way. Instead of assailing Democrats for
denying equal rights to African Americans, they backed away from the
subject. The Democrats had worn them down. Thus the springtime of race
relations during Reconstruction was short, and it was followed not by
summer blooms but by the Nadir winter, and not just in the South but
throughout the country. ...
The Republicans' capitulation
on race marked the beginning of a long era of overt racial oppression in
America, not just in the South but nationally -- though of course Dixie
politics played a special role [pp. 33-34]:
- We have seen
that the Republicans removed themselves as an effective anti-racist
force after about 1891. The Democrats already called themselves "the
white man's party." It followed that African Americans played no
significant role in either political party from 1892 on. Now regardless
of which party controlled it, the federal government stood by idly as
white southerners used terror, fraud, and "legal" means to eliminate
African American voters. Mississippi pioneered the "legal" means in 1890
when it passed a new state constitution that made it impossible for
most black Mississippians to vote or hold public office. All other
southern and border states emulated Mississippi by 1907.
In 1894,
Democrats in Congress repealed the remaining federal election statutes.
Now the Fifteenth Amendment was lifeless, for it had no extant laws to
enforce it. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States
Supreme Court declared de jure (by law) racial segregation legal, which
caused it to spread in at least twelve northern states. In 1898,
Democrats rioted in Wilmington, North Carolina, driving out the mayor
and all other Republican officeholders and killing at least twelve
African Americans. The McKinley administration did nothing, allowing the
coup d'etat to stand. Congress became resegregated in 1901 when
Congressman George H. White of North Carolina failed to win re-election
owing to the disenfranchisement of black voters in his state. No African
American served in Congress again until 1929, and none from the South
until 1972.
The deterioration of the status of African Americans was widespread throughout every aspect of society [pp. 36-37]:
- Occupationally,
blacks fared even worse. Before the Nadir, African Americans worked as
carpenters, masons, foundry and factory workers, postal carriers, and so
on. After 1890, in both the North and the South, whites expelled them
from these occupations. ...
... Indeed, in some ways the North proceeded to treat African Americans worse
than the South did. Ironically, segregation, which grew more entrenched
in the South than in the North after the end of Reconstruction in 1877,
created some limited opportunities for African American workers in
Dixie. If the job was clearly defined as inferior, southern whites were
happy to hire African Americans to cook their food, drive their coaches
and later their cars, be their "yard boy," even nurse their babies. (The
term boy, applied to adult male African Americans, itself
implies less than a man.) Thus traditional white southerners rarely
drove all African Americans out of their communities. Who would then do
the dirty work? During and after slavery, this pattern spread to the
North, but only to a limited degree. Around 1900, many white Americans,
especially outside the traditional South, grew so racist that they came
to abhor contact with African Americans even when that contact expressed
white supremacy. If African Americans were inferior, they reasoned,
then why employ them? Why tolerate them at all?
The models
for driving out the "unwanted" blacks from their communities, like the
core attitudes themselves, probably originated in the South, where
Indian massacres had eventually given way to lynching as the main
expression of the eliminationist impulse.
Often the violence was
merely a matter of harsh threats and demands that blacks leave, which
were usually complied with fully. An illustrative example was the "race
riot" that occurred Sept. 30, 1905, in Harrison, Arkansas:
- A
white mob stormed the building and took these Negroes from jail along
with several others, to the country, where they were whipped and ordered
to leave. The rioters swept through Harrison's black neighborhood with
terrible intent. The mob of 20 or 30 men, armed with guns and clubs,
reportedly tied men to trees and whipped them, tied men and women
together and threw them in a 4-foot hole in Crooked Creek, burned
several homes, and warned all Negroes to leave town that night, which
most of them did without taking any of their belongings. ... From house
to house in the colored section they went, sometimes threatening,
sometimes using the lash, always issuing the order that hereafter, 'no
Nigger had better let the sun go down on 'em.'
These
attitudes came to prevail not just in the South but throughout the
country. As Loewen explains [pp. 37-38], it was clear that by the 1890s,
most white Americans had convinced themselves that blacks themselves
were "the problem":
- How were northern whites to explain to
themselves their acquiescence in the white South's obliteration of the
political and civil rights of African Americans in places such as
Harrison? How could they defend their own increasing occupational and
social discrimination against African Americans?
The easiest way
would be to declare that African Americans had never deserved equal
rights in the first place. After all, went this line of thought,
conditions had significantly improved for African Americans. Slavery was
over. Now a new generation of African Americans had come of age, never
tainted by the "peculiar institution." Why were they still at the
bottom? African Americans themselves must be the problem. They
must not work hard enough, think as well, or have as much drive,
compared to whites. The Reconstruction amendments (Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) provided African Americans with a roughly
equal footing in America, most whites felt. If they were still at the
bottom, it must be their own fault.
Ironically, the worse the
Nadir got, the more whites blamed blacks for it. The increasing
segregation and exclusion led whites to demonize African Americans and
their segregated enclaves. African Americans earned less money than
whites, had lower standing in society, and no longer held public office
pr even voted in much of the nation. Again, no longer could this obvious
inequality be laid at slavery's doorstep, for slavery had ended around
1865. Now "white Northerners came to view blacks as disaffected, lazy,
and dangerous rabble," according to Heather Richardson. "By the 1890s,
white Americans in the North concurred that not only was
disfranchisement justified for the 'Un-American Negro,' but that he was
by nature confined to a state of 'permanent semi-barbarism.'"
These
events were recorded piecemeal at the time, and were rationalized in
the press under a number of different theories, the majority of which
reflected similar rationalizations regarding lynching: that is, they
were only "natural" community responses to the "problem" of African
Americans. A
New York Times story of July 14, 1902, captures the attitudes fairly well:
- Negro Driven Away
The Last One Leaves Decatur, Ind., Owing to Threats Made
The
last Negro has left Decatur, Ind. His departure was caused by the
anti-Negro feeling. About a month ago a mob of 50 men drove out all the
Negroes who were then making that city their home. Since that time the
feeling against the Negro has been intense, so much so that an
Anti-Negro Society was organized.
The colored man who has just
left came about three weeks, and since that time received many
threatening letters. When he appeared on the streets he was insulted and
jeered at. An attack was threatened ...
The anti-negroites
declare that as Decatur is now cleared of Negroes they will keep it so,
and the importation of any more will undoubtedly result in serious
trouble.
The chief means of driving out nonwhites was what
Donald Horowitz calls "the deadly ethnic riot," wherein one racial or
ethnic group takes up arms en masse and attacks another group
systematically and thoroughly with the intent of eliminating their
presence. As Loewen puts it [p. 92]:
- Often white residents
achieved their goals abruptly, even in the middle of the night. In town
after town in the United States, especially between 1890 and the 1930s,
whites forced out their African American neighbors violently, as they
had the Chinese in the West.
... Towns with successful riots
wound up all-white, of course, or almost so, and therefore had an
ideological interest in suppressing any memory of a black population in
the first place, let alone of an unseemly riot that drove them out.
Whites
also tried to "cleanse" at least fifteen larger cities of their more
substantial nonwhite populations: Denver (of Chinese) in 1880; Seattle
(of Chinese) in 1886; Akron in1900; Evansville, Indiana, and Joplin,
Missouri, in 1903; Springfield, Ohio, in 1904, 1906, and again in 1908;
Springfield, Missouri, in 1906; Springfield, Illinois, in 1908;
Youngstown, Ohio, and East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917; Omaha and
Knoxville in 1919; Tulsa in 1921; Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1923; and
Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1929.
Perhaps the most symbolic of
these "race riots" was one that occurred in 1908 in the home and final
resting place of Abraham Lincoln -- Springfield, Ill. Philip Dray, in
his text
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
[pp. 167-169], notes that "when rioting broke out in August 1908,
Springfield was in the midst of preparing for the February 1909
centenary celebration of the birth of the Great Emancipator." By then,
evidently, Lincoln's legacy was viewed dimly by his hometown:
- The
riot's underlying cause was white anxiety over an influx of Southern
blacks into two Springfield neighborhoods, Badlands and the Levee. The
violence began on August 14, when a lynch mob surrounded the city jail
and demanded two black men -- one accused of assaulting a married white
woman, the other of murdering a white man who'd tried to stop him from
outraging his daughter. The sheriff asked the fire department to race
its trucks up and down the street to distract the crowd while he
spirited the two out of town in an automobile owned by Harry Loper,
proprietor of Springfield's best-known restaurant. When the mob realized
it had been fooled, it surged toward Loper's restaurant and inflicted
considerable damage. Cursing the town's most famous son and his
Emancipation Proclamation, and uttering such oaths as "Lincoln brought
them to Springfield and we will run them out!," the crowd then moved on
to the Levee and Badlands and began setting homes and stores on fire.
They also burned shops run by Jews and other known "nigger lovers."
The
state militia, summoned from Decatur, thirty-nine miles away, did not
arrive until the middle of the night, and so for several hours the crowd
roamed virtually unrestrained -- smashing windows, looting and burning
black-owned homes and businesses to their foundations. After much
destruction of property, the mob targeted the home of a black barber
named Scott Burton, who, fearing for his life, fired on the rioters with
a shotgun. Whites tackled Burton when he tried to slip out a side door,
grabbed a clothesline from an adjacent backyard, and strung him up in a
tree. With flames illuminating the scene the mob filled Burton's
suspended body with bullets before perpetrating "fiendish cruelties"
upon it with pocketknives and shards of glass.
While the lynchers
were preoccupied with fighting over the souvenirs from the Burton
lynching, a line of militia approached. When an order to leave the area
was ignored, the soldiers fired into the crowd, wounding several people.
Only after this confrontation did the crowd disperse.
The chaos
resumed the next morning, when bands of rioters stormed those black
residential areas that had been left unprotected by the militia. ...
Once again, the militia restored order, although by the morning of the
sixteenth, after two consecutive nights of street violence and arson,
Springfield was a smoking shambles. Whole blocks had been leveled.
Citizens who'd lost their homes wandered the streets like refugees in a
time of war, along with curiosity seekers from Chicago and St. Louis
who'd come to view the damage. Many of the visitors went first to the
spot where Burton had been lynched, and by noon the tree on which he'd
died had disappeared, torn apart by souvenir hunters. Postcard views of
the damaged buildings and a photograph of one of the alleged rape
victims were selling briskly. Meanwhile, the city's newspapers reminded
readers that the trouble had been ignited by the "hellish assault" that
had been perpetrated by a "Negro fiend," thus arousing a feeling of
righteous indignation among the people of the city. The articles
defended the necessity of the riot's violence and praised the "good
citizens" who, due to the conditions present in the city, "could find no
other remedy" in dealing with black "misconduct, general inferiority
[and] unfitness for free institutions."
In addition to the two
blacks lynched, four whites had been killed and hundreds of people of
both races had been injured, and the costs of the damage were
staggering. Much of the worst violence had taken place close to
Lincoln's home and his tomb. And although the riot was over, feelings of
racial animosity had hardly cooled. A white boycott of black businesses
was under way, and black people had been threatened with violence if
they dared retaliate for the riot. In a neighboring hamlet, a sign
posted at an interurban stop read: ALL NIGGERS ARE WARNED OUT OF TOWN BY
MONDAY, 12 PM SHARP. (SIGNED) BUFFALO SHARP SHOOTERS.
Sundown
towns were unusually popular in Illinois; Loewen reports that he was
able to identify 475 of them. They also enjoyed great popularity in
states like Indiana and Oklahoma.
These "race riots" often
occurred whenever any black community tried to stand up to lynching
violence. When this happened, the "race riot" actually comprised
wholesale lethal assaults on black communities by whites. They became
particularly prevalent during the "Red Summer" of 1919, when such riots
broke out in some 26 American cities.
The
most notable of these race riots occurred in 1921 in Tulsa, where a
prosperous black population was literally bombed out of existence over
two days of complete lawlessness. The rioting was set off by a black
youth's alleged assault on a local white girl that later turned out to
be harmless consensual contact. The youth was promptly arrested without
incident, but the local press played it up with garish headlines that
ignored the real nature of the incident, and one Tulsa newspaper
publicly called for the young man's lynching.
This attempt,
however, met with real resistance from the black community. When a group
of local blacks attempted to ward off a lynch mob by meeting them at
the jailhouse, the fighting broke out. Soon the entire district was
swarmed over by gun-wielding whites who began mowing down black
residents at random, setting fire to homes and businesses, and looting,
raping and maiming. There are reports that an airplane flew over the
black community and dropped incendiary bombs. By the time the violence
had subsided, as many as three hundred black people were believed
killed, many of them buried in a mass grave, and thirty-five city blocks
lay charred. The death toll has never been properly calculated, largely
because of the ways the bodies were disposed of, but some counts reach
as high as 300 or more. And Tulsa's African-American community, at one
time known as the "Negro Wall Street" because of its prosperousness, was
never the same. Most of the survivors simply left.
The
Ku Klux Klan,
which had played a formative role in the lynching phenomenon generally,
was closely connected with the formation of sundown towns, especially
in their second incarnation as a national organization after 1916. As
the
Wikipedia entry on the Klan explains:
- The
second Ku Klux Klan rose to great prominence and spread from the South
into the Midwest and Northern states and even into Canada. At its peak,
most of the membership resided in Midwestern states. Through sympathetic
elected officials, the KKK controlled the governments of Tennessee,
Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon in addition to those of the Southern
Democratic legislatures. It even claimed to have inducted Republican
President Warren Harding at the White House. Klan delegates played a
significant role at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York
City, often called the "Klanbake Convention" as a result. The convention
initially pitted Klan-backed candidate William McAdoo against New York
Governor Al Smith, who drew the opposition of the group because of his
Catholic faith. After days of stalemates and rioting, both candidates
withdrew in favor of a compromise. Klan delegates defeated a Democratic
Party platform plank that would have condemned their organization. On
July 4, 1924 thousands of Klansmen converged on a nearby field in New
Jersey where they participated in cross burnings, burned effigies of
Smith, and celebrated their defeat of the platform plank.
David M. Chalmers describes the Klan's national political aspirations thoroughly in
Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, particularly its brief reign in statehouses scattered across the country [pp. 200-201]:
- In
1922, the Klan helped elect governors in Georgia, Alabama, California,
and Oregon, and came close to knocking Missouri's Jim Reed out of the
U.S. Senate. It was reported that perhaps as many as seventy-five
members of the lower house had received help from Klan votes. An
undetermined, and unguessable, number of congressmen, veterans, and
newcomers, had actually joined the hooded order, and E.Y. Clarke was
asking the local chapters to suggest likely candidates for the future.
The next year, the Klan continued to expand, with its greatest strength
developing in the upper Mississippi Valley and in the Great Lakes
kingdom of D.C. Stephenson.
Eventually, the Klan stumbled
nationally and crumbled apart, in large part due to the chaotic
personalities and paranoiac egos it tended to attract as leaders. But
its continuing appeal in the Midwest and elsewhere is reflected in the
fact that one of its eventual offshoots, the
Independent Klan of America, had its national headquarters in Muncie, Indiana.
It's
worth noting that in many sundown towns, there were "exceptions" to the
rules. Many such towns had one or two black residents, usually servants
of local wealthy landowners, or people in subservient positions (hotel
workers, nurses, janitors, shoeshiners) who had longtime resident
status.
How did they manage it? As Loewen tells it, there were
several survival strategies involved, including an emphasis on their
eccentricity and individuality, which played to the way whites often
responded to the cognitive dissonance of knowing blacks who were fine,
upstanding, individuals, in contrast with prevailing stereotypes
depicting them as lascivious criminals and rapists. That is, they made
exceptions for them. Loewen cites an interview with a woman Klan member
from Indiana:
- "You get several of them together and they become niggers. Individually, they're fine people."
There
was also a tendency to play to white stereotypes about negroes. All of
this was designed to encourage whites to identify them as being on
their side:
- Overt
identification with the white community was another survival tactic.
Such blacks became "Tonto figures" -- taking pains to associate with the
"white side," differentiated from the hordes of blacks outside the city
limits. White workers in Austin, Minnesota, repeatedly expelled African
Americans, and Austin became a sundown town, but like many others, it
allowed one African American to stay -- the shoeshine "boy." Union
member John Winkola tells about him:
- And I'll tell you a
good one: So one time we had Frank -- I forget his last name -- he was
shining shoes in the barbershop and then afterwards he bell-hopped for
the bus in town here, and everybody liked him ... He'd never go in the
packing house because he knew he couldn't, he didn't want to go there.
So
one day I was walking along ... and here came a couple of niggers, and
they stood there by the bridge facing the packing house, and ... [Frank]
says, "Y'know, John," he says, "when the damn niggers start comin' into
this town, I'm gonna get the hell outta here." And he was black! He was black! He didn't want them to come into town either ... But we never had no trouble with Frank at all.
Indeed they didn't; Frank knew with which side of the color line he had to identify if he was to remain in Austin.
... Kathleen Blee, author of Women of the Klan,
collected a good example from an Indiana woman in the 1980s: "We didn't
hate the niggers. We had the Wills family that lived right here in
[this] township. And they were like pet coons to us. I went to school
with them." Often they got known by nicknames, such as "Snowball" for
the only African American in West Bend, Wisconsin, or "Nigger Slim" for
the father of the only black family in Salem, Illinois.
... The
Austin, Minnesota, story shows another ideological payoff that allowing
one household to stay when all others are driven out can have for
whites, as they can claim not to be racist: "We're not against all
African Americans after all -- look at Frank!" More accurately, whites
can claim to be appropriately racist. The problem lies with those other African Americans -- "the damn niggers." Even Frank -- "and he was black"
-- agrees. Thus instead of allowing their positive feelings about
George Washington Maddox or Elizabeth Davis to prompt some questioning
of their exclusionary policies, whites in Medford, Oregon, and Casey,
Illinois, merely emphasized how exceptional these individuals were. In
turn, this allowed whites to affirm once more how inferior other African Americans were, in their eyes.
Things,
fortunately, have changed quite a bit since all this was true, though
we continue to deal with the legacy of these times. Today, minorities
who identify with anti-minority interests -- particularly the
anti-multiculturalists of the paleoconservative right -- (and this
certainly includes gay Republicans) no longer are doing so as a survival
technique. Rather, it's a technique that creates all kinds of
opportunities, both financial and otherwise.
Likewise, movement
conservatives have proven skilled at appealing to sundown-town
sensibilities without playing the race card nakedly. The key to the
transformation of the G.O.P. from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of
Lott lay in its adoption, in the early 1970s, of the so-called
"Southern Strategy,"
which used coded appeals to white racists in the South. But these
appeals had a broader effect as well. As Loewen notes [pp. 372-73]:
- As
a result of such leadership, Republicans have carried most sundown
towns since 1968, sometimes achieving startling unaninimity. ... So the
"southern strategy" turned out to be a "southern and sundown town
strategy," especially in sundown suburbs. Macomb County, for example,
the next county north of Detroit, voted overwhelmingly for Wallace in
the 1972 Democratic primary. Wooed by Nixon, many of these voters then
became "Reagan Democrats" and now are plain Republicans. The biggest
single reason, according to housing attorney Alexander Polikoff, was
anxiety about "blacks trapped in ghettos trying to penetrate white
neighborhoods."
Indeed, the epicenter of the "sundown"
mentality shifted over the years from small rural towns to the suburbs,
particularly since the latter were so often specifically designed to
facilitate white flight away from minorities. Loewen explains [pp.
109-110]:
- Suburbs used the largest array of different weapons
for becoming and staying all-white, beginning around 1900, although
ultimately they too relied on violence. It is important to understand
that the whiteness of America's suburbs was no accident. On the
contrary, all-white suburbs were achieved. As Dorothy Newman
wrote in 1978, "Residential separation rests on a system of formal rules
(though no longer worded in racial terms -- the terms are illegal) and
informal but carefully adhered-to practices which no amount of
legislation has been able to penetrate."
... Elite suburbs that
were built by a single developer were especially likely to begin life
all-white on purpose. Tuxedo Park, New York, perhaps the richest of them
all, may have gone sundown first, even before 1890. Affluent whites
founded it "as a club community and maintained that discipline for
nearly 50 years" ...
As the twentieth century wore on, Americans
continued to build planned communities. Every planned town that I know
of -- indeed, every community in America founded after 1890 and
before 1960 by a single developer or owner -- kept out African Americans
from its beginnings. Chronologically, these included Highland Park
near Dallas in 1907-13 and Mariemont near Cincinnati in 1914, both of
which won fame for their innovative shopping centers. Shaker Heights,
east of Cleveland, was designed to be "utopian" and excluded blacks,
Jews, and Catholics from its inception. Near Los Angeles, planned
all-white suburbs set up around this time include Beverly Hills, Culver
City, Palos Verdes Estates, Tarzana (developed by Edgar Rice Burroughs,
from the proceeds of his Tarzan novels), and several others.
Ebenezer Howard's "garden city" concept, imported from England,
influenced at least seven suburbs or exurbs built around World War II;
Radburn, New Jersey, in 1929; Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washington,
D.C., Greenhills, Ohio, near Cincinnati, Greendale, Wisconsin, near
Milwaukee, and Norris, Tennessee, in the 1930s; Richland, Washington, in
1942; and Park Forest, near Chicago, in the 1950s. All these planned
communities were developed as sundown towns.
The insularity
of suburban life also allowed the whites living within them to
rationalize away the absence of nonwhites. Loewen notes that they had a
variety of explanations, including climate and the lack of jobs, but
most especially the notion that blacks didn't
want to live in the suburbs [pp. 142-143]:
- Some theories emphasize social isolation: why should
African Americans move into out-of-the-way hamlets distant from centers
of African American populations? In short, the lack of blacks was just
"natural," or resulted from historical coincidence. I began my research
with this hypothesis -- that most all-white towns never happened
to draw any black residents -- but it didn't hold up. ... Before 1890,
however, African Americans moved to counties and towns throughout
America ... -- even isolated places such as northern Maine, northern
Wisconsin, and Idaho north of the Snake River Valley. Then during the
Great Retreat, they withdrew to the larger cities and a mere handful of
smaller towns. ... In other words, because social isolation cannot
explain the increases in black population in northern counties
before 1890, it cannot explain why those increases reversed after that
date. Something different went on after 1890.
Social isolation
has even been used to explain overwhelmingly white suburbs: whites have
imagined that African Americans prefer the excitement of the big city to
such suburban values as home ownership, peace and quiet, tree-lined
streets, and good school systems. This notion is absurd, as historian
Andrew Wiese showed in 2004. Wiese summarized survey research as far
back as the 1940s, finding no support for this stereotype. Among a
sample of six hundred middle-income black families in New York City in
1948, for example, nine out of ten wanted to buy their own homes, and
three in four wanted to move to suburbia. Many African American families
have the same fervent desire for a patch of ground that white
suburbanites manifest.
Other whites seem to think that it's
somehow "natural" for blacks to live in the inner city, whites in the
outer suburbs. This idea is a component of what law professor John Boger
calls "the national sense that [residential segregation] is
inescapable." ...
Indeed, blaming the whiteness of elite sundown
suburbs on their wealth actually reverses the causality of race and
class. It is mostly the other way around: racial and religious exclusion
came first, not class. Suburbs that kept out blacks and Jews became
more prestigious, so they attracted the very rich. The absence of
African Americans itself became a selling point, which in turn helped
these suburbs become so affluent because houses there commanded higher
prices. ...
It would be one thing if, in the wake of the
Civil Rights Era, Americans living in these former communities actively
worked to overcome the segregationist mindset they represent. But
instead, the legacy of sundown towns is one that reinforces,
generationally, the false stereotypes that created them a century ago.
Loewen observes [pp. 320-321]:
- During the past 25 years,
while teaching race relations to thousands of white people and
discussing the subject with thousands more, I have found that white
Americans expound about the alleged character and characteristics of
African Americans in inverse proportion to their contact and experience
with them. Isolation and ignorance aren't the only reasons why residents
of sundown towns and suburbs are so ready to believe and pass on the
worst stereotypes about African Americans, however. They also have a
need for denial.
The idea that living in an all-white community
leads residents to defend living in an all-white community exemplifies
the well-established psychological principle of cognitive dissonance. No
one likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person, argued Leon
Festinger, who established this principle. People who live in sundown
towns believe in the golden rule -- or say they do -- just like people
who live in interracial towns. ...
What could make living in an
all-white town right? The old idea that African Americans constitute the
problem, of course. In 1914, Thomas Bailey, a professor in Mississippi,
told what is wrong with that line of thinking: "The real problem is not
the Negro, but the white man's attitude toward the Negro." Sundown
towns only made the problem worse. Having driven out or kept out African
Americans (or perhaps Chinese Americans or Jewish Americans), their
residents then became more racist and more likely to believe the worst about the excluded groups.
That's
why the talk in sundown towns brims with amazing stereotypes about
African Americans, put forth confidently with nary an African American
in their lives. The ideology intrinsic to sundown towns -- that African
Americans ... are the problem -- prompts their residents to believe and
pass on all kinds of negative generalizations as fact. They are the
problem because they choose segregation -- even though "they"
don't, as we have seen. Or they are the problem owing to their
criminality -- confirmed by the stereotype -- misbehavior that "we"
avoid by excluding or moving away from them.
Of course, such
stereotypes are hardly limited to sundown towns. Summarizing a
nationwide 1991 poll, Lynne Duke found that a majority of whites
believed that "blacks and Hispanics are likely to prefer welfare to hard
work and tend to be lazier than whites, more prone to violence, less
intelligent, and less patriotic." Even worse, in sundown towns and
suburbs, statements such as these usually evoke no open disagreement at
all. Because most listeners in sundown towns have never lived near
African Americans, they have no experiential foundation from which to
question the negative generalities that they hear voiced. So the
stereotypes usually go unchallenged: blacks are less intelligent,
lazier, and lack drive, and that's why they haven't built successful
careers.
Sundown towns and their continuing legacy have
also had a profound psychological impact on blacks, including the
internalization of low expectations, and the exclusion of blacks from
cultural capital [pp. 353-355]:
- Confining most African
Americans to the opposite of sundown suburbs -- majority black,
inner-city neighborhoods -- also restricts their access to what
Patterson calls cultural capital: "those learned patterns of mutual
trust, insider knowledge about how things really work, encounter
rituals, and social sensibilities that constitute the language of power
and success." ...
Making the suburbs unreachable for
nonwhites similarly restricts them from making the social connections
that are critical to forming networks that help us find work and move
ahead in the workforce. Loewen notes that "the trouble is, these
networks are segregated, so important information never reaches black
America. ... Sundown suburbanites know only whites, by definition,
except perhaps a few work contacts. Thus sundown suburbs contribute to
economic inequality by race."
Loewen also notes [pp. 369-370]:
- In his famous book An American Dilemma,
written as World War II wound down, Gunnar Myrdal noted that
residential segregation has been a key factor accounting for the
subordinate status of African Americans. Separating people
geographically makes it much easier to provide better city services to
some than to others, and indeed to label some people as better than
others.
The myths and attitudes engendered by the "sundown
towns" and their legacy is constantly reinforced by
conservative-movement propaganda that argues against such attempts to
break up the entrenched segregation they created as affirmative action.
It's easy to find pundits like
Thomas Sowell
-- whose arguments sound like those proferred by the "exceptions" --
offering commentary that obliviates the real history of black Americans:
- Blacks only a generation or two out of slavery also had higher rates of employment and lower rates of crime than today.
What
critics like Sowell neglect to mention, of course, is that there are
real historical reasons for that -- namely, black Americans were given
more
opportunities to succeed in the first generation after the end of
slavery than they were given for most of the succeeding century.
Fortunately,
at least, there are some historians who recognize that addressing the
legacy of "sundown town" eliminationism in America is critical to
resolving the continuing racial divide in the country, especially since
so much of it is a product of those practices and our failure to even
acknowledge them, let alone atone for them.
Here in Seattle,
University of Washington history professor James Gregory
has begun digging through the records, and we at least are beginning to
get a little better glimpse of our true historical selves:
- Seattle
thinks of itself as a liberal city, one that has a reasonable record of
racial integration. But we are also a city with a short memory. One of
the things we have been forgetting is that only a few decades ago,
Seattle was a sharply segregated city. It was a city that kept
non-whites out of most jobs and most neighborhoods, even out of stores,
restaurants, hotels and hospitals.
... Until the late 1960s,
Seattle north of the ship canal was a "sundown" zone. That meant that
virtually no people of color lived there and it also meant that African
Americans were expected to be out of the area when the workday ended.
After dark, a black man in particular was likely to be stopped by the
police, questioned about his business and informed that he had better
not be seen in the neighborhood again.
North Seattle was not
alone. Queen Anne, Magnolia and West Seattle also were sundown zones.
The suburbs were even worse. Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Bothell,
Bellevue, Burien, even White Center, vigorously and explicitly excluded
people of color. But the ship canal was a special kind of boundary, an
unmistakable dividing line between the part of Seattle where anyone
might live and the part of Seattle that was off-limits to those whose
skin was not white.
Until the early 1950s, North Seattle was also
home to Coon Chicken Inn, which for almost 20 years stood as a beacon
of bigotry on Lake City Way Northeast. Whites of a certain disposition
made it a hugely popular restaurant and no one could drive along Lake
City Way without noticing the massive grotesque "coon" head and the
big-lipped mouth that served as the restaurant's front door.
Of
course, eliminationism never settles down even after it is sated. In
America, the impulse proved so thoroughly ingrained that, even as
lynching began to decline, whites began finding new "threats" from other
races and other peoples.
---
As I then explored further, the concept of demographic exclusion
soon extended to Asian Americans as well, which had a similar effect on the shape of American suburbs.
Moreover, all of this created
a structural legacy from which we have not escaped, one that extends to other minorities, including LGBT people and Latinos. And there is
a human legacy as well:
Confronting the legacy of eliminationism is necessary for our well-being
as a nation because its course through our past has directly shaped our
present. Its thread runs directly through the critical fault lines --
racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and cultural -- that continue to
divide the nation today. Healing those fault lines take work.
Doing
so, utlimately, entails overcoming the Lie -- not simply standing up to
the outrageous falsehoods and the cold inhumanity its purveyors spew,
but creating a culture in which engaging our common humannness informs
our choices, our behavior, our beliefs, our politics.
It also
entails looking honestly at our history and understanding how we came to
be where we are today -- seeing that the virus of eliminationism has
coursed through our history and shaped what we are today, and though its
presence is far more hidden, it remains buried in our cultural soil,
and infects us when we look the other way.
Brennan
explains that he calls his group a “militia” in order to avoid being
designated as mercenaries, who he says have no protections under the
Geneva Conventions. “We’re not a militia like the militia groups you
guys have experience with. We’re not antigovernment,” he says. “I’m not a
conspiracy theorist. I’m just a guy that has been around the block and
has a lot of connections. We just couldn’t see doing nothing about the
Islamic State.”
