Sundown nation

I came across James Loewen's Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (Touchstone, 2005) in the gift shop of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. At the checkout counter the clerk--in that winning way some clerks have--and who was herself African-American--examined the cover and indicated by her look that, you know, this looked like a subject worth reading about.

I had just spent a whole day at the museum, where I was overwhelmed by the national shame of racism but also made thankful for the enormous and long-suffering contributions of African-Americans not just to the country but the world.

In the moment of the clerk's assessment, I thought about Erwin, TN, the only for-sure sundown town I knew of. Most people only know it as the town that hung the elephant. But I know it as the town that--immediately after lynching and burning a black man, Tom Devert, for accosting a white girl--ran out its African-American population (some 200 people) and told them never to return. All a matter of public record with its own Master's thesis at East Tennessee State University and a blognovel with music--Banshee 3:33 (start at Tuesday, January 02)--somewhere over the domain name on the Wayback Machine. This year will be the centenary of the event. I wonder if the town will observe it.

Now, though, having read Sundown Towns and more or less absorbed its worthwhileness, I now understand not only that the pure Erwin phenomenon--the lynching followed by a racial pogrom followed by an abolition, either nocturnal or absolute--was a practice widespread in the United States especially between 1890 and 1968 that profoundly scarred the social imagination of the country.

A truly and depressingly fascinating aspect of the phenomenon is that it is not found in the traditional South--cotton country, as it were. Its deepest imprint is found in exactly those places where, at the time of the Civil War, slaves had not been in any great quantity: the upland South (like Erwin, in Appalachia; Cumberland Plateau; the Ozarks), the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, but especially the Midwest, California, and Oregon.

Perhaps the most tragically ironic example is Springfield, Illinois--Abraham Lincoln's town and the capital of the Union State of Illinois--which tried to "go sundown" in roughly the Erwin manner in 1908, when a white woman claimed to have been raped by a black man, which set off an attempted lynching and two days of rioting, along with the attempted expulsion of 3,000 black residents. The city's business district was destroyed, homes were burned, and two innocent black men were lynched. It was only the "belated" appearance of the state militia in what was after all the state capital that spared the African-American residents of an Erwin-style result. The femme fatale later admitted to fabricating the rape story in order to cover up an affair. There were, of course, no consequences for the reign of terror.

One of the strengths of the book is the use of census data to show towns and counties, across the areas mentioned above, with African-American populations beginning and growing after the Civil War, and then dramatically diminishing and in some cases disappearing from one census to the other.

The exodus was not always accompanied by a riot, as in the Erwin example. In fact, the larger story told in the book is the story of the more subtle means by which whites and African-Americans have been residentially kept apart--in cities, suburbs, and towns nationwide--by real estate and banking practices as well as by civic policy, all the way from the uncodified sundown ordinance to the private suburb with race-based residential covenants required by the Federal Housing Authority.

This is a story that continues up to the present, since--as has always been way, ever since Reconstruction--the correcting law or court decision was not always followed up with enough enforcement to make a difference.

And it goes further, into the national psyche: the carryover effect by which a general and enforced pattern of by-hook-or-by-crook racial residential segregation set in place 1. the template for how Americans understand people should live and 2. the naive idea that the template-casting happened benignly, or maybe willy-nilly, as a consequence of millions of freely-made personal or family-level decisions about where to live.

That whites and blacks in America are segregated by residential community is at least in part because--for a considerable, residential-infrastructure-building portion of recent American history--blacks were not given a choice.

Why did this happen? In general, Loewen's analysis is that the Southern attitude toward blacks-as-a-problem-to-be-dealt-with was exported to the rest of the country after the non-South's war-fueled flush of racial equality idealism wore off. But outside the South, the "answer" to the "problem" was not the Southern-style total control that required rigid servility as the price for limited mingling (you better know your place). Instead, it was a different form of enforced, residential apartheid that later went on, ironically, to determine the approach to racial separation that prevailed in the burgeoning suburbs of the post-slavery ("New") South.

Among these suburbs was the one I grew up in: Signal Mountain, Tennessee, a bedroom community of Chattanooga. There were never any African-Americans in any of my public school classes, nor were there any, anywhere, on the mountain--except for the maids, who every weekday morning came up from downtown on city buses and went back the same way late every afternoon. There were no blacks up on the mountain after sundown, but as far as I know Signal Mtn. was never a sundown town in the classic sense. However, without knowing for sure but having read this book, I'm willing to make an educated bet that the house that my parents bought in 1956--as soon as my father landed his first permanent, full-time, modestly-salaried job--would not have been available to a similarly-situated black buyer, under any circumstances, for reasons having to do with a combination of sub rosa, substantial, and subversive municipal, real estate, bank, and even Federal chicanery.

And this happened all across the United States.

Going back a little further in time, the area where I went to junior high and high school gets a mention in Loewen's book as an example of the high tide of overt residential segregation. In 1915 North Chattanooga (across the Tennessee River from Chattanooga) was at the time its own suburban city. It passed an ordinance saying that no "colored person" could "occupy" an "abode" in a block where white people preponderated, and vice-versa, in true "separate but equal" style. The kicker was that at the time there were only two black families living in North Chattanooga. Even though the two families were expressly allowed to remain, as the Chattanooga Daily Times stated, the ordinance "will consequently make the town practically of an exclusively white population." The newspaper went on to report that the city's mayor "received many compliments on his segregation ordinance."

Such ordinances became unconstitutional in 1917 with Buchanan v. Warley. However, it went largely unenforced, and cities and towns continued passing or maintaining such ordinances despite their unconstitutionality, to the extent that Loewen uses the case to bolster the "scholarly tradition in American legal history that questions whether the U.S. Supreme Court can cause or has ever caused significant social change."

Thus we see in just the last few days a brand-new, fresh look at the 50-year-old Kerner Report that shows the leading indicators of racial inequality in the U.S.--poverty, school segregation, homeownership, and incarceration--getting worse, not better, in spite of legislation and court decisions that should have laid the groundwork for improvement.

There are glimmers of hope in Sundown Towns. Its last chapter, "The Remedy," recounts changes that have occurred, many of them the result of personal factors writ large, as when white families have biracial grandchildren either naturally or through adoption, or when a single African-American school child leads the way to a change in attitudes. In some suburbs, African-Americans followed once Asians or Mexicans--less problematic in general to white sensibilities--broke the mold without triggering white flight, with durable multi-ethnicity as a result.

Still, to read this book is to be awakened to an untold national scandal that is the very definition of "eyes wide shut." Before I read it, I knew of one sundown town. Now I know that the phenomenon in its pure form darkens the entire horizon of my Appalachian vicinage from Grundy Co., TN, to Grundy, VA, and in its attenuated form has likely determined the racial makeup of every suburban neighborhood I've ever lived in.

Furthermore, to read this book is to be overwhelmed by the same kinds of emotions produced by a visit to the African American Museum in Washington: what kind of monstrosity holds up universal ideals only to deny them to an entire set of people?

And as to the modus operandi of that denial, here is a makeshift poem constructed from the words of a 1905 newspaper account--quoted as one of a sickening and infuriating number of examples in Loewen's chapter "Enforcement"--of "the process by which residents maintained Syracuse, Ohio, as a sundown community."

American Heroes

So long as he keeps up a good gait, the crowd, which follows just at his
Heels
And which keeps growing until it sometimes numbers 75 to 100
Boys,
Is good-natured and contents itself with yelling, laughing, and hurling gibes at its
Victim.

But let him stop his "trot" for one moment, from any cause whatever, and the
Stones
Immediately take effect as their chief
Persuader.

Thus they follow him to the farthest reaches of the
Town,
Where they send him on while they return to the city with
Triumph
and tell their fathers all about the
Function:

how fast the victim ran
how scared he was
how he pleaded and promised he would go and never return if they would only leave him
Alone.

Then the fathers tell how they used to do the same
Thing,
and thus the
Heroes
of two wars, recounting their several campaigns, spend the rest of the evening by the old
Campfire.