Many Americans growing up in all-white or nearly all-white communities assume the local racial makeup “just happened.” Black persons just never made it there or didn’t find it attractive, preferring instead to live in the crowded, impoverished county next door
What we don’t realize, Dr. Loewen argues, is that Census data show that after the Civil War, blacks moved just about everywhere in the country. “There were Republican towns in the North that actually recruited former slaves to live there,” he says.
Consequently, we can track black Americans’ subsequent exile out of many areas. Under Reconstruction, racial equality improved vastly after the Civil War, but when the backlash set in, it was nationwide, and it was harsh. Dr. Loewen dubs this the Great Retreat, as rural blacks were forced to cluster for safety in some two dozen Northern ghettos where many remain.
There is certainly evidence for the retreat, says Nicholas Lehmann, Columbia University’s dean of journalism and author of The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. When black Americans left Mississippi for Chicago, they didn’t move to Chicago. They moved to specific communities in the area, he says, the few that would let them live there.
This was another surprise for Dr. Loewen. Sundown towns are actually rare in the traditional South (this doesn’t include Texas or Arkansas because those states were highly contested between Union and Confederate). In the belt from Louisiana through the Carolinas, whites saw no reason to drive away their cheap labor. So contrary to the popular notion of Northern enlightenment, Dr. Loewen says, most sundown towns are actually in the Midwest and North – and in “disputed” areas like Texas. According to Census data, the most segregated city in the country today is Milwaukee.
To illustrate the prevalence of such communities, Sundown Towns recounts how in the mid-20th century, published guidebooks, such as Travelguide: Vacation and Recreation Without Humiliation, helped black motorists pick their way past them. Some sundown towns even had sirens to blow a daily warning.
“I couldn’t believe that when I heard about it,” Dr. Loewen says. “But it wasn’t just a single place.”
In other words, all of this was not caused by a small number of wild-eyed racists. When these towns were set up, most white residents “either approved of the policy of exclusion or said nothing to stop its enforcement.”
It is hard to see how anything this common wouldn’t be better known. But Dr. Loewen points to the Tulsa riot in 1921, when many of the town’s whites tried to destroy an entire black community. It didn’t become widely known until the early ’90s, when it first received media attention. And in 1923, there was similar mob violence in Rosewood, Fla., the subject of the 1997 film, Rosewood. Sundown Towns cites dozens of other towns where black residents were attacked by bombings and burnings: Slocum, Texas; Okemah, Okla.; Sheridan, Ark.; Decatur, Ind.
And Dallas. In 1950-51, during a severe housing shortage, a dozen bombings in South Dallas were aimed at terrorizing blacks moving into what was then a white neighborhood. Two half brothers were arrested but not convicted.
Yet no single history, Dr. Loewen says, has been written about all of these events.
But haven’t race relations in this country gotten better? A special report from the 2000 U. S. Census did find that residential segregation in metropolitan areas declined between 1980 and 2000.
“We had slavery once, and now we don’t,” says Dr. Loewen. And discrimination in home sales, public housing, hiring and education is unconstitutional.
But this popular notion of America’s march of progress, he says, ignores the complete lack of progress we made in desegregating housing until the 1960s. For decades, it was federal policy to exclude blacks from the loans that let whites afford suburban homes. In effect, whites benefited from a vastly larger federal housing program than any inner-city project.(source: Dallas Morning News)
To me, this history isn’t invisible. I live within spitting distance of two separate communities where there are still no black people and where it is well known that this isn’t an accident. The last black family that attempted to move in to the one closest to my hometown (the father was a school teacher) had a brick put through their front window and left within a matter of days. This has been in the last 10 years. The fact that in my hometown, there are still hardly any black people living in the city limits—but many black families living in the one or two “black” communities 5-10 miles outside of town—isn’t lost on me, either. While I know my community isn’t still running people out of town, I know that the older black folks remember when they were and are more than happy to stay outside the city limits, and in many cases, their kids and grandkids do, too.
I also know things like the old white man who runs the volunteer fire department won’t let young black men from the community—no matter how pristine their reputation, how well-liked they are in the community, or who from the community recommends them—work as firefighters, and they aren’t shy about telling other white people it’s because of their race. That the KKK is still alive and well around here and that upstanding members of the community are quietly members.
My community is not all that unusual, either. I’ve seen very similar racist attitudes pretty much everywhere I’ve lived (and I’ve lived everywhere but the East Coast) and come from people from all walks of life. So.