It’s hard to believe that today’s Dolton was once an all white “Sundown Town”, but it was.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153283
“Across the United States, diverse suburbs are in trouble. In 1990, Dolton (pronounced "DAWL-ton"), for example, southeast of Chicago, was nicely diverse: 58 percent white, 38 percent black, and 5.5 percent Hispanic. (1) By 2010, however, Dolton was 97 percent black.”
“While African Americans per se are not the problem, when suburbs go overwhelmingly black, they lose prestige, even within the black community. Then they lose the ability to attract buyers, so housing prices slide. Then property taxes slide, as do municipal services, and a downward spiral ensues.
The residents of diverse suburbs want them to stay diverse. Some have, most famously Oak Park, just west of Chicago.”
“The main problem that diverse suburbs face as they try to stay diverse is not located within the diverse suburbs themselves,”
“but in former sundown suburbs. Sundown suburbs are communities that for decades were "all-white" on purpose.”
Around Chicago, sundown suburbs included predominantly working-class towns like Cicero, middle-class towns like Oak Park, and upper-class towns like Kenilworth.”
“Some of Chicago's diverse suburbs, such as Oak Park, now famously diverse, started as all-white sundown suburbs. So did some suburbs that are now majority black, such as Dolton. Sundown suburbs are often racially unstable. After all, part of their community ideology had been, blacks hurt property values, are often criminal, etc., so we must keep them out. "Naturally," then, as soon as more than a handful of black households move in, whites flee.”
“Of course, when sociologists say "naturally," we mean that the causes are historical, indeed are so buried in our past that most of us just assume it must be that way. For suburbs to be white while inner-city neighborhoods were black was hardly “natural.” On the contrary, between about 1905 and 1968, about 80 percent of all suburbs of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and other northern cities went sundown. Various mechanisms, from restrictive covenants to blatant violence, achieved this result.”
“Many sundown suburbs remain overwhelmingly white today. For example, Joseph Sears founded Kenilworth, just beyond Evanston on Chicago's North Shore, with four guiding restrictions:
1. Large lots....
2. High standards of construction ...
3. No alleys.
4. Sales to Caucasians only (meant to exclude Jews too). (3)
Today, Kenilworth still has not a single African American household. One black family did live there for twelve years, even after whites burned a cross on their lawn.
Unfortunately, Kenilworth is the richest and most prestigious suburb of Chicago. "Unfortunately," because many white families do not move to Kenilworth because it is a sundown town. They move there to share in its prestige. In the process, however, they undermine the efforts by interracial towns to stay interracial. Subtly, "interracial" comes to connote "working class" or even "struggling," while "white" connotes prestige, of course.”
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country - or at least recorded history. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it was even better.”
Fair compensation should not require a lawsuit.
How about that, J.K. Simmons?
