Black History Month, day 28
I’ve tried to make many of these entries positive, so as not to suggest that African-American history has been nothing but sorrow. The genius of black poets, leaders, artists, composers, dancers, writers, and organizers is the heritage of African-Americans and other Americans–for that matter, of all of humanity.
Still, there are tragic passages of history I have wanted to include. First, they’re part of our history and think we can learn who we are by learning our country’s history, just as we learn it by knowing our family’s story and our own. Second, they also tell us about the tremendous courage, creativity, and perseverance of African-Americans. It gives me hope for the human spirit even as it makes me feel sick at how cruel and ignorant we can be. And third, they counteract the racism, and internalized racism, that says African-Americans must be near the bottom of the social structure because of some fault within themselves or their culture.
One of the phenomena I didn’t know about until a few years ago is the sundown town: a town where black people were prevented by official policy, enforcement by police or unchecked vigilantes, restrictive covenants, and the like from “allowing the sun to set on them”–in other words, they could pass through, spend money, even work (usually as laborers or domestics) there, but not live there. (There have also been towns that were “sundown” to Jews, Chinese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and others. San Jose, California, now home to more people of Vietnamese descent than anywhere outside of Vietnam, used to exclude Asians.) I touched on this a bit early in the month in my entry about the Green Book. The national expert on it is James Loewen, whose book, Sundown Towns, is a fascinating read; you can also read about sundown towns on his website, and look up towns you know.
Surprise: they will mostly be outside the South. He began his research in his home state of Illinois, and eventually confirmed 456 sundown towns there; in Mississippi he has confirmed only a handful. The phenomenon of white Americans creating white-only towns (sometimes by violently expelling the towns’ black residents) took hold around the end of Reconstruction and was most widespread from 1890-1940. It declined, but didn’t end, then; at the time of his research a few years ago, some towns were still effectively closed to certain groups, usually black people. At its peak, Loewen surmises that “probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African-Americans” (2).
Headline from Appleton, WI, a town whose historian has done some constructive work to acknowledge its past. I guess when your most famous son is Joe McCarthy, you'd be pretty foolish to hide your head in the sand.
Levittown, the famous planned community that began in New York and was also established in three other states, is widely credited with establishing suburbia and the American middle class. It made home ownership available to blue-collar families. Which blue-collar families? White ones. Black people were not allowed to buy houses there. Repeat this pattern all over suburbia and you start to understand why African-Americans have found it so hard to gain a foothold in the middle class.
For the ambitious and history-minded, Loewen provides a guide to determining whether a given town is, or used to be, sundown. If you enjoy researching genealogy or local history, this is a great project, and Loewen will post your results.
Why bother, especially if the town’s status changed two generations ago? Because the reputation lives on, if not among the people who have always been allowed to live there, then among the excluded populations, with the result that they continue to feel excluded. Without ever being told straight out that people like me (Jews) used to be forbidden to live in Darien, CT, I knew it was a town I didn’t want to drive through, much less live in. I would feel very different about it if the town formally acknowledged its history and apologized for the injustices of the past; until it does so, the impression it gives is that it is content to continue to ride the coattails of ancestral anti-Semitism. Likewise, if a town I live in used to exclude African-Americans, I’d want it to explicitly declare that those days were over and all were welcome, so that it didn’t continue to maintain a de facto exclusion by its reputation.
Sermons in Stones 
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February 29, 2012 at 6:39 am
Erp
So do we start with parts of Palo Alto?
I believe Southgate (the area between Paly and Pine Rd) was covenanted to exclude non-whites though Palo Alto never passed any laws (though some were proposed).
http://www.paloaltohistory.com/discrimination-in-palo-alto.php
I note the AME Zion church has a long history in Palo Alto and some of the members probably have stories.
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February 29, 2012 at 7:20 am
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
“So do we start with parts of Palo Alto?”
Oh yes! We start with the places we know best. Excellent article–thank you for the link, and thank you to the local historians who decline to whitewash the past (pun intended). They are out of date on one point: the African-American population of Palo Alto was 2% in the 2000 census, but in the 2010 census, it had fallen to one-tenth of that: 0.2%. One hundred and twenty-one residents.
Sundown towns often had a couple of white-approved black residence, such as the barber or a local character whose presence helped “prove” the town wasn’t racist. While 121 may put Palo Alto technically beyond sundown status, it is telling.
There’s no question in my mind that an attitude prevails that black people in Palo Alto ought to just work there and live somewhere else. Driving While Black (Unless Wearing a Work Uniform) can still get you pulled over. Four years ago, tenants were charging discrimination in housing (http://tenantstogether.org/article.php?id=483 ; as far as I can tell from hunting in the confusing-to-this-non-attorney web record, Terman Apartments have not been found guilty of any discrimination). The article you link to cites studies showing that apartments “no longer available” when black tenants applied suddenly came back on the market when white tenants applied. I have certainly had the experience, as a white person, of a realtor steering me away from East Palo Alto because it’s heavily black and Latino (“You don’t want to live there. They play their music loudly outside . . . “), so what is the chance that when a black or Latino client approaches that realtor, they’re offered a look at Palo Alto neighborhoods? I wouldn’t place that bet.
Over to my own city, anyone know more about San Francisco’s racial history than I’ve been able to find on the web? It has definitely had racist laws on the books in the past, and granted a tremendous amount of authority to the city council to shut down laundries, which, judging from how the authority was used, was intended to drive Chinese owners out of business while turning the industry over to whites. And housing discrimination against African-Americans has been thoroughly documented. I’m not sure if it has ever been technically sundown to anyone, but if doing sundown research illuminated patterns of other forms of discrimination, that would be good.
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