Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbam here. Before the nineteen seventies in America, before
Speaker 1: the Civil Rights movement made national legal footholds and abolishing
Speaker 1: racial segregation and discrimination, if you happened to be not white,
Speaker 1: many places around the country implicitly or explicitly stated that
Speaker 1: it was best for you to not hang around after nightfall,
Speaker 1: that it would be dangerous for you or sometimes deadly.
Speaker 1: These places also strongly discouraged black people from living there,
Speaker 1: and sometimes other people of color or of otherwise differing
Speaker 1: backgrounds too, such as Jewish Americans or Chinese Americans. These
Speaker 1: places got the name sundown towns because they made it
Speaker 1: clear that not all were welcome after sunset, often with
Speaker 1: a sign posted at the city limit saying something to
Speaker 1: the extent of don't let the sun go down on
Speaker 1: you here, perhaps accompanied by a slur of choice. And now,
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies are not ancient history by any means,
Speaker 1: and some places like this are still operating as such today.
Speaker 1: They may not be as blatant about their bigotry as
Speaker 1: they once were with literal signs, but they're still there.
Speaker 1: From small towns to swank neighborhoods to huge suburbs. For
Speaker 1: the article, this episode is based on How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: Spoke with sociologist James Loewen back in twenty twenty. He
Speaker 1: literally wrote the book on the subject. It's called Sundown Towns,
Speaker 1: a Hidden dimension of American Racism. He said, our history
Speaker 1: textbooks give us a picture of the United States where
Speaker 1: we started out great, and we've been getting better, but
Speaker 1: kind of automatically ever since. It isn't true. Sometimes we've
Speaker 1: gotten worse, and race relations is one of the areas
Speaker 1: where we got worse. After the Civil War and reconstruction,
Speaker 1: African Americans and other Black Americans who had been forced
Speaker 1: or born into slavery were freed and given some rights
Speaker 1: under the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution.
Speaker 1: But then progress stalled, and around eighteen ninety things started
Speaker 1: getting worse for at least the next fifty years. Llewen
Speaker 1: explained that the slide began with three seemingly disparate events
Speaker 1: in December of eighteen ninety, all of which deserved their
Speaker 1: own episodes, but in brief, there was the massacre at
Speaker 1: Wounded Knee in South Dakota, in which US Army forces,
Speaker 1: who were there to quash an upswell of Lakota culture
Speaker 1: killed as many as three hundred Lakota men, women, and children,
Speaker 1: a signal that Native Americans were not to be full
Speaker 1: participants in America's future. Then, in Mississippi, in response to
Speaker 1: those new amendments to the US Constitution, the state legislature
Speaker 1: drafted a new state constitution that essentially stripped voting rights
Speaker 1: from black citizens. And back at the national level, the
Speaker 1: US Senate failed to pass the Lodge Bill, which would
Speaker 1: have restored voting rights by explicitly protecting Black Americans from
Speaker 1: being disenfranchised of their votes. It had previously passed in
Speaker 1: the House, but was filibustered by conservatives in the Senate
Speaker 1: and was dead in the water by eighteen ninety one.
Speaker 1: Llewen said, even in the North, it became impossible to
Speaker 1: claim that we were trying to be an unracist society,
Speaker 1: and so we went in the opposite direction. In the South,
Speaker 1: Jim Crow laws were being passed, and you can see
Speaker 1: our whole episode about that. But they codified segregation and
Speaker 1: made life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness harder for
Speaker 1: black Americans. Partially in response to that, what's called the
Speaker 1: Great Migration kicked off in the nineteen teens, in which
Speaker 1: millions of black people left the rural South for basically
Speaker 1: anywhere else but mostly the Northeast, the Midwest, and the
Speaker 1: West coast. Not everyone there was welcoming. More states took
Speaker 1: voting rights away from black residents. Both history and contemporary
Speaker 1: politics encouraged or emboldened white communities across the country to
Speaker 1: view black people as non citizens, as undesirables. They pushed
Speaker 1: black migrants and residents out of small towns and into
Speaker 1: big cities, and often into specific neighborhoods in big cities.
Speaker 1: In response, some white city residents with the means to
Speaker 1: do so, fled to developing suburbs. Llewen in his book
Speaker 1: defines sundown towns as any unorganized jurisdiction that for decades
Speaker 1: kept African Americans or other groups from living in it,
Speaker 1: and was thus all white on purpose. All white didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean one hundred percent, but these places reduced people
Speaker 1: of other backgrounds and skins in tones to a tiny
Speaker 1: fraction of their population. Exceptions might have included a singular
Speaker 1: family or live in domestic workers, in white households, people
Speaker 1: living in hospitals, prisons, or colleges, or children of color
Speaker 1: living with white families. Some communities literally physically forced black
Speaker 1: people from their homes and neighborhoods. Some erected signs warning
Speaker 1: them away. Some passed ordinances prohibiting black people from living there,
Speaker 1: owning homes there, or going to school there. Some used
Speaker 1: threats of violence or actual violence to keep them out.
Speaker 1: These were the places that Victor Hugo Green warned black
Speaker 1: motorists and families away from in The Green Book. You
Speaker 1: can see our episode about that, But basically, the Green
Speaker 1: Book was a pamphlet updated annually from nineteen thirty six
Speaker 1: through nineteen sixty four that listed safe businesses and places
Speaker 1: to stay if you were traveling while black. At the
Speaker 1: height of Sundown Towns nineteen seventy, that's six years after
Speaker 1: the Civil Rights Act passed, researchers think that there were
Speaker 1: around ten thousand such places across the United States. Loewen's
Speaker 1: original research, based on census numbers and oral and written histories,
Speaker 1: shows that, for example, of the six hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: one towns in Illinois with more than a thousand residents,
Speaker 1: seventy one percent were all white, and almost all of
Speaker 1: those were all white on purpose. Loewen wrote, there's reason
Speaker 1: to believe that more than half of all towns in Oregon, Indiana, Ohio,
Speaker 1: the Cumberland, the Ozarks, and diverse other areas were also
Speaker 1: all white on purpose. Sundown suburbs are found from Darien, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: to La Jolla, California, and are even more prevalent. Indeed,
Speaker 1: most suburbs began life as sundown towns. Loewen kept a
Speaker 1: database of confirmed and possible sundown town He passed away
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one, but it's still being maintained. It's
Speaker 1: a long list, covering every state in the lower forty eight.
Speaker 1: It shows that the vast majority of sundown towns were
Speaker 1: clustered in the northeast, the Midwest, the central plains, and
Speaker 1: the west coast. In other words, outside of the Deep South.
Speaker 1: Some places may simply have had black communities that were
Speaker 1: too large to drive off. Just for example, a Mississippi
Speaker 1: had only six possible sundown towns that we know of,
Speaker 1: compared with Illinois four hundred and fifty six. Places that
Speaker 1: are white on purpose proliferate less now from overt means
Speaker 1: and more through the inertia of the past and methods
Speaker 1: that are quieter and perhaps more sinister, by community leaders
Speaker 1: suggesting that black people may be more comfortable elsewhere, by
Speaker 1: whispers and cold shoulders by majority white police forces and
Speaker 1: public school educators, and by politicians who stoke fear with
Speaker 1: claims that people with a different skin color or whose
Speaker 1: family immigrated here recently, bring crime and other problems. Allewen
Speaker 1: first published his book on sundowntowns in two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: and a lot has happened since then, including some of
Speaker 1: these places having faced up to their racist past, albeit
Speaker 1: often with resistance. Loewen said, what people will say is
Speaker 1: that was the old days. Why bring it up now?
Speaker 1: I tell them two things. First, the reputation of the
Speaker 1: town lives on and makes it stay overtly white, if
Speaker 1: not all white, until you do something, until you make
Speaker 1: it unstay. And two, you are still legitimizing those people
Speaker 1: in the town who think it was okay the way
Speaker 1: it was. It's encouraging that during the height of the
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter movement in twenty twenty, dozens of recovering
Speaker 1: sundowntowns held blmllys, one of them for example was Glendale, California.
Speaker 1: At one time in the early nineteen hundreds, the city
Speaker 1: had a black population of less than zero point two percent.
Speaker 1: The city now has about two hundred and fifty thousand people,
Speaker 1: and the black population is still only two percent. In
Speaker 1: September of twenty twenty, the city passed resolution acknowledging its
Speaker 1: racist past, apologizing for it, and condemning it, becoming the
Speaker 1: first city in the state to do so at the time.
Speaker 1: The founder of the organization Black in Glendale, one Tanita
Speaker 1: Harris Ligans, told the city council. I'm grateful that there
Speaker 1: are community members who understand this is not just a
Speaker 1: piece of paper, but that it comes with the energy
Speaker 1: of atonement. And now do the work required behind it,
Speaker 1: honor the contributions of the Diverse Community Coalition, and act
Speaker 1: on meaningful policies and programs that improve Black representation in
Speaker 1: Glendale on all fronts. The work is continuing in many ways.
Speaker 1: Other cities have come forward to recognize and renounce their
Speaker 1: past practices, but even the identification of former sundown towns
Speaker 1: is still a work in progress. It is an unpleasant
Speaker 1: reckoning to make, but this means that we don't know
Speaker 1: the true extent of the problem, which means we're not
Speaker 1: fully equipped to discuss it and move forward in more
Speaker 1: equitable ways. Researchers are on it, though, and Loewen's database
Speaker 1: is still collecting information. To see if your town or
Speaker 1: county has a history as a sundown town, or to
Speaker 1: add local information. You can check out the database for yourself.
Speaker 1: It's hosted by Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: at Justice dot Tugalu dot edu. That's Justice dot tu
Speaker 1: g a l Oo dot edu. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article Sundown Towns Hiding Racism right in the
Speaker 1: Open on how Stuffworks dot com, written by John Donovan.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
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