In conclusion to this week’s open thread topic on Sundown towns, I will highlight some more back history and sundown towns that existed in California.
The fictional character Tarzan may have lived in the “darkest Africa”, but his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in one Sundown town, Oak Park and used his funding to create another sundown town; Tarzana, California. one of the highest grossing films of all time (in constant dollars), Gone With The Wind was made in a sundown town, Culver City, California. Spam was invented in a sundown town(Austin, Minnesota). KFC (Corbin, Kentucky), Krispy Kreme Doughnuts(Effingham, Illinois) and Tootsie Rolls(West Lawn, Chicago) came from sundown communities.
Why dwell on the existence of sundown communities/towns now?
First, because it happened, our country did do that. Since 1890, thousands of towns across the United States across the United States kept out African Americans, while others excluded Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Native and Mexican Americans is worth knowing. By pointing out this information, James Loewen wants folks to question and investigate further all white communities or towns that have been overwhelmingly white for decades. Since across the nation most all-white towns were that way intentionally.
All planned suburbs and unplanned suburbs were intentionally created all-white. Elite suburbs were built by a single developer were specially likely to begin life as all-white on purpose. Tuxedo Park, New York is the richest of them all. Affluent white founded it as “a club community and maintained that discipline for nearly 50 years”. You had to be a member of the club to buy property there.
As the 20th Century wore on, Americans continued to build planned communities. Every planned town or community in America founded after 1890 and before 1960 by a single developer or owner, kept African-Americans from its beginnings. Highland Park, Dallas, Texas; Mariemont, near Cincinnati, Ohio;Shaker Heights, near Cleveland was designed to be a utopia and excluded blacks, Jews, and Catholics from its inception. Near Los Angeles, there were all-white communities developed, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Palos Verdes Estates, and several others. One of the principal purposes of suburban incorporations is to give their populations control of the racial composition of their communities. One of the most straightforwards methods of keeping racial composition under control was to pass a formal ordinance.
In 1960, white city officials in Phoenix, Illinois another suburb of Chicago, pulled off a stunning example of racial politics. Instead of using municipal boundaries to keep African-Americans out, they redrew the city limits to create white flight without ever moving. In the 1950’s, Phoenix was going black, so in 1960 it’s white city officials, “de-annexed” the part of the city where most white lived ceding themselves to Harvey the next suburb west, and leaving Phoenix to blacks. Eventually Harvey also proceeded to go majority black. The degree to which African American were simply shut out of the suburban/urban explosion was astonishing. There was a boom of sundown towns/communities being created after World War II.
The FHA helped create our sundown suburbs. The Federal Housing Administration, set up during the Depression to make it easier for Americans to buy homes, was a large part of the problem. Charles Abrams, an early proponent of integrated housing, saw the FHA a the most important single cause of residential segregation.
In 1938, the FHA held, “If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that its properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. The FHA prided itself on never insuring a housing project of mixed occupancy. Loan guarantees by the FHA and VA were the most important single cause of postwar suburbanization and more than 98% of the millions of home loans given after WWII were only available to whites.
When the government did spend money on black housing it funded the opposite of suburbia: huge federally assisted high rise(projects) concentrated in the inner city.
For more of an inclusive list of all the sundown towns/communities that have existed past and present, check James Loewen’s website: http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/sundowntowns.php
***Information contained in this entry is from James Loewen’s book, Sundown Towns- A Hidden Dimension of American Racism***