Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension Of American Racism by James W. Loewen Read Free Book Online Page B

on January 1, 1964.
    —Typical restrictive covenant for property in Edina, Minnesota, sundown suburb of Minneapolis 1
     
     
     
     
    A CROSS AMERICA, most suburbs, and in some metropolitan areas almost all of them, excluded African Americans (and often Jews). This pattern of suburban exclusion became so thorough, even in the traditional South, and especially in the older metropolitan areas of the Northeast and Midwest, that Americans today express no surprise when inner cities are mostly black while suburbs are overwhelmingly white.
    After 1900, precisely as the suburbs unfolded, African Americans were moving to northern metropolitan areas as part of the Great Retreat and, beginning around 1915, as part of the Great Migration. But the suburbs kept them out. Detroit, for example, slowly became overwhelmingly black, even though it touches at least four sundown suburbs—Dearborn, Grosse Pointe, Melvindale, and Warren. Map 4 shows these contiguous sundown suburbs and many others. Some black families from Detroit would have moved to these suburbs the way whites did, had they been allowed. Indeed, Inkster, a majority-black suburb founded in 1921, lies just beyond Dearborn, farther from Detroit. Yet while Inkster to the west and Detroit to the north and east grew in black population, Dearborn, between them, grew even whiter. Many of its residents took pride in the saying, “The sun never set on a Negro in Dearborn,” according to historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick. Dear born’s longtime mayor Orville Hubbard, who held office from 1942 to 1978, told a reporter that “as far as he was concerned, it was against the law for Negroes to live in his suburb.” Dearborn was an extraordinary case because Hubbard was so outspoken, but David Good, Hubbard’s biographer, cautions us not to see him as unique: “In a sense, Orville Hubbard’s view was no different from that in any of a dozen or more other segregated suburbs that ringed the city of Detroit—or in hundreds of other such communities scattered across the country.” 2
     

    Map 4. Detroit Suburbs
     
    At least 47 of 59 suburbs outside Detroit were overwhelmingly white, decade after decade. Eleven were interracial and one requires more census study. I have confirmed only 15 of the 47 as sundown suburbs, but further research would surely confirm most of the rest. In 1960, for example, Garden City, which abuts interracial Inkster, had just two African Americans, both women, probably both live-in maids, among its nearly 40,000 residents. Twenty years later, large suburbs like Berkley, Clawson, Farmington, and Harper Woods had not one black inhabitant. Such numbers imply exclusion.
    Moreover, of the 11 interracial suburbs, several were not meaningfully integrated; the black/white border merely happened to run through the suburb. In 1940, for example, 1,800 African Americans lived in Ecorse, but not one east of the tracks, where the whites lived. In 1970, whites in River Rouge could recall only one black family, “the first in 50 years,” that lived on the east side, and they were intimidated into leaving. a

The Good Life
     
    Why did this happen? The American rush to the suburbs wasn’t just to avoid African Americans. Indeed, it wasn’t primarily to avoid African Americans. It took place in metropolitan areas with few African Americans as well as areas such as Detroit whose core cities became majority-black. Families moved to the suburbs for two principal reasons: first, it seemed the proper way to bring up children, and second, it both showed and secured social status. That is, Americans saw suburbs as the solution to two problems: having a family and having prestige. Suburban dwellers wanted to raise their children to be safe, happy, and well educated in metropolitan areas. They also wanted to be upwardly mobile and to display their upward mobility.
    The two functions were closely related, since “living well” begets status. As the twentieth century wore on,