notes on sundown towns

I remember noticing, with some friends, the infelicitous wording of a sign on a tennis court that read,"On weekends, only whites are allowed," or words to that effect. In context, it was, or looked, innocent: it came under a heading called"Dress code" or something like that. Also, it was in Canada -- which had its own history of Jim Crow, of course, though perhaps not quite like the place where I grew up, where in the 1980s I heard young black people my age refer to certain towns, not far away from where we were, as places you didn't want to let the sun set on you.

Via Gary Farber, I find something that has already sparked discussion around HNN, this Washington Post article on"sundown towns" and the reseach of James Loewen.

Loewen says, he found evidence of more than 150 sundown signs in 31 states. But he wasn't researching the sundown signs. They were just symbols. He was researching sundown towns, which he defines as"towns that were all white on purpose." He found lots of them -- far more than he expected when he began his research in his home state of Illinois about five years ago.

"I thought I was going to discover maybe 10 such towns in Illinois and maybe 50 across the country," he says."And I've confirmed 204 in Illinois and, in the country, thousands."

The article quotes some historians, including Thomas Sugrue, noting that the evidence is at best fragmentary and retrospective in a lot of cases. In The Nation, Sugrue writes,

In his most dubious historical argument--one that goes against the grain of the last generation of African-American historians, who have emphasized black agency--Loewen argues that the great migration of blacks to major Northern cities was"driven by white opposition." While it is incontestable that some black migrants were refugees from racial violence, they had many good economic and cultural reasons to move to places like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and New York. Moreover, by focusing so relentlessly on anti-black sentiment, he overlooks the fact that grassroots black activists--even during the early twentieth-century"nadir" of race relations--protested, litigated and resisted segregation throughout the North, even in sundown towns.

While it would be hard to talk about the Great Migration without talking about both push and pull factors, we would also want to talk about how patterns changed during this period even within cities. Specifically, it's at least a tested argument that

1. Racial segregation increased within U.S. cities in the decades after 1890
2. The patterns of price and place of residence"suggest that at midcentury [i.e., mid-c20], segregation was enforced by collective actions on the part of whites to limit the access of blacks to white neighborhoods."
3. But those patterns afterward changed; in the latter half of the c20, patterns of price and place suggest that voluntary segregation, or"decentralized racism", replaced collective action.¹

Now, this is a long way from"sundown town" by the usual definition, and Loewen does appear to stretch that definition for his purposes. But the point is, if it's plausible -- and I think it is plausible -- that white actions of various public and quasi-public kinds enforced segregation in the early c20, then Loewen's observation about the prevalence of sundownism, by his expanded definition, needs to be seriously considered. And it's not inconsistent with the idea that black agency also shaped living patterns; it just suggests that black agency may have had different scope to function at different times and places in U.S. history.

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¹David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Jacob L. Vigdor,"The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto," Journal of Political Economy 107, no. 3 (1999): 455-506; 457.