Discrimination

The Lasting History of Sundown Towns

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ Leave a comment

Sundown Town SignDuring a recent interview I mentioned that the scene that launches my novel takes place in a sundown town. While the interviewer knew what a sundown town was, she asked me to explain the term for listeners who might never have heard of them. The short answer is that it is a community that required people of color to leave town before the sun went down. They could work there from dawn until dusk but after dark, they became prey. I was well into adulthood before I ever heard the term sundown town. I assumed the reason for my ignorance was because I had grown up in New York City and not the south where I believed only sundown towns existed.

For my novel, Provenance, I created the fictional city of Llewellyn, a sundown town in southern Virginia. As I researched this abhorrent social practice I learned that there were many very real “sundown towns” throughout the United States – they were not unique to the south or to African-Americans. Communities from Connecticut to California placed signs at their borders warning African-American and other ethnicities—including the Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Native Americans and Mexicans—that they had better leave town by sundown. If they were caught inside city limits they were subject to harassment or worse by the police or vigilantes. The book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen was a great resource.

black-man-dont signSundown towns were a form of racial apartheid throughout America but not the only tactic used to segregate communities. Restrictive covenants ensured that homes in a community could not be rented or purchased by people of color and the Federal Housing Authority only offered mortgages to non–mixed housing developments. As dramatized in Lorraine Hansberry’s ground-breaking  and award-winning 1959 play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” some white homeowners sought to buy out black families when they purchased homes in their communities. There were communities that burned crosses in the front yards of black homes to scare them away and some white neighbors went farther and burned down the house of a black family just to maintain the racial status quo.

I knew racial discrimination existed north of the Mason-Dixon Line. My father, Kenneth Drew, was a New York City Human Rights Commissioner and he and my mother, Corien Davies Drew, founded a community based newspaper that was very active in the civil rights movement in New York and beyond. However, in doing the research for my book, I was surprised to find that one of the most egregious sundown towns was Levittown, New York. In Martha Biondi’s book, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City, the author notes that Levittown, regarded as the model for postwar suburbs across the country, held the distinction in 1953 “of being the largest community in America with no black population.” Just as remarkable, though the developers, Abraham, William and Alfred Levitt were Jewish, they would not sell homes in Levittown to Jews.

Until the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sundown towns, restrictive covenants and government aided and financed housing discrimination were legal practices in the United States. A sundown town informs the story of a family in my novel and is now considered a relic of the past. However, there are still segregated communities throughout the United States; be they white or black, they remain a critical factor in dictating the social, economic and racial climate in America.

Is Passing a Thing of the Past or Has It Just Evolved?

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ Leave a comment

A Chosen Exile Cover A recent story on NPR’s All Things Considered about a new non-fiction book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in America, by author Allyson Hobbs, discussed the practice of light-skinned blacks passing for white to circumvent entrenched racial discrimination. Hobbs focused her research for the book on personal stories from the past –  before integration, Black Power and multiculturalism. Reporter Karen Grigsby Bates’ summary suggested that racial progress prompted by those movements had effectively made the act of passing irrelevant. I beg to differ – I believe these movements caused the evolution of passing but did not erase it or make it irrelevant.

Anyone of color who has ever worked within a majority environment such as corporate America, or in my case the cultural arts, knows that though your skin color may be evident – you are still required to negotiate the majority culture by not revealing too much of who you are. When your aspirations are constrained by how “acceptable” you are to the majority culture then you are effectively passing. If you subjugate or neglect your own culture to assume that of the predominate culture – it may not have the skin-deep appearance of passing but it has the same effect – isolation, loss of self and community. Passing in the 21st century has the added burden of the assumptions some people make because they can see your skin color; that can lead to further complications and indignities. For example, when I was a museum director, during an exhibition opening, an art patron, upon seeing my brown face near the entrance, walked up to me and handed me her coat, assuming I was the valet. She even offered me a tip.

I used these post civil rights movement experiences as well as the history of passing to inform the characters and their actions in my novel, Provenance. The main protagonist is a man who, like the people in Allyson Hobbs’ book, passes as white in the early 20th Century in order to access opportunities not available to a black man. Another character, a 21st Century millennial and a curatorial rising star at a major art museum, is passing culturally. Her expertise is in 20th Century Impressionist art belies the assumption that her discipline must be African or African-American art and, as she moves further up the professional ladder in the art world, she is distanced from her family’s cultural experience.

At its essence, similar to my novel, passing is about identity – who we are, and how others see us. The way my characters pass – racially and culturally – compares and contrasts what passing was then and is now.

Are People Still Passing?

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ Leave a comment
The film is about a light-skinned African-American nursing student, played by Crain, passing for white.
Pinky is a 1949 American drama, directed by Elia Kazan, about a light-skinned African-American nursing student, played by Jeanne Crain, passing for white. The film also starred Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters. All three actresses were nominated for Academy Awards.

“Racial passing refers to a person classified as a member of one racial group also accepted as a member of a different racial group. The term was used especially in the U.S. to describe a person of mixed-race heritage assimilating into the white majority during times when legal and social conventions of hypodescent classified the person as a minority, subject to racial segregation and discrimination.” – Wikipedia

When some people learn that characters in my novel, Provenance,  are “passing” they ask, “Do people still do that?” Sometimes I want to respond, “Is there still racial discrimination against people of color?” or “Do you think people with white skin color have a social, professional and economic advantage over people who are black, brown or Asian?” If the answer to either question is yes, and it is; then yes, people still pass.

In the 21st century, passing is not the past. Examples: Filmmaker Lacy Schwartz, recently profiled in an article in the New York Times, shares her remarkable story of passing in her 2014 film, Little White Lie; Bliss Broyard’s 2007 best seller, One Drop, was about the revelation that her father, former New York Times literary critic Anatole Broyard, was passing; Stanford professor Allyson Hobbs’ new book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life was just released today. I did a  Google search on the word “Passing” and the first two terms that came up were “passing racial identity,” 588,000 results and,  “passing for white,” 86,300,000 results. In 1929, Nela Larson published her novel, Passing; it is still in print today and available through all major book retailers and as Kindle and audio editions. As of 2007, Passing is the subject of more than two hundred scholarly articles and more than fifty dissertations.

Yes, passing is still something people do and just like race, it is something we still talk about.

Throughout Provenance my characters pass in the traditional way, pretending to be white; but they also pass by rejecting their history and heritage, though they are clearly identified as a person of color. As I wrote and researched the book, I learned what it was like to pass in the early 20th Century, when the novel begins, and into the 21st Century as race relations in America evolved. I realized that passing is as much about how you see yourself as it is about how others see you. Yet, is it okay to embrace an identity that enables you to live out the dreams you have for yourself – regardless of the skin you’re in? I can’t answer that. However, I suspect that until we rid ourselves of the construct of race, people continue to pass in one way or another.

Seems Like Old Times

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ Leave a comment

bigotry and tolerance“There’s something wrong when a person can go to work, be subject to intolerance or abuse and have it be ignored and accepted by colleagues as part of the job.”
Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA

Provenance, my novel, deals the effects of race and racism on three generations of a family. Provenance moves between the early part of the 20th Century when segregation and overt discrimination were the rule rather than the exception and  present day where my characters still face racism as a raw fact of life in America. Seems like old times when a recent article in the New York Times about the abuse of bigotry and intolerance is as relevant today as it was 200 years ago. Today the targets of discrimination today may be more varied but racial intolerance has the same impact.