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    Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
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    Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
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    Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
    Ebook1,083 pages21 hours

    Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

    By James W. Loewen

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Don’t let the sun go down on you in this town.” We equate these words with the Jim Crow South but, in a sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, award-winning and bestselling author James W. Loewen demonstrates that strict racial exclusion was the norm in American towns and villages from sea to shining sea for much of the twentieth century.

    Weaving history, personal narrative, and hard-nosed analysis, Loewen shows that the sundown town wasand isan American institution with a powerful and disturbing history of its own, told here for the first time. In Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, sundown towns were created in waves of violence in the early decades of the twentieth century, and then maintained well into the contemporary era.

    Sundown Towns redraws the map of race relations, extending the lines of racial oppression through the backyard of millions of Americansand lobbing an intellectual hand grenade into the debates over race and racism today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe New Press
    Release dateSep 29, 2005
    ISBN9781595586742
    Author

    James W. Loewen

    James W. Loewen (1942–2021) was author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, and Mississippi: Conflict and Change. He was also professor emeritus at the University of Vermont.

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    Reviews for Sundown Towns

    4.5/5

    60 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book tells an appalling story: how, in towns and counties across America, blacks (and members of some other minorities) were forced to flee; and how many of communities have used intimidation or social shunning to keep themselves all white to the present day (or at least until very recently). Loewen makes it clear that the "great retreat", between 1890 and 1940, was a form of ethnic cleansing. He documents 'sundown towns' all over the nation, though mostly not in the heart of the South, where racism was institutionalized not through cleansing but through Jim Crow laws. He also examines 'sundown suburbs', outlining federal policies and business behaviors that kept blacks and Jews out of the new post World War II suburbs. The most important illusion the book dispels is the notion that many all white communities -- rural or suburban -- just happen to be that way as an accident of history. It's no accident; oppression has made and kept them that way. The strongest aspects of the book are its staggering accumulation of research documenting the history and social mechanics of sundown towns, and Loewen's sociological analysis of the continuing effects on whites, blacks, and the fabric of society. The style is readable; I found its informality disconcerting, but other readers may like it. Loewen's assertions are well-sourced. Overall, it's a book that should leave American readers feeling heartsick or angry, but it's well worth the read.
    • 4/5
      This book is a fairly large and educational work on the widespread nature of "sundown towns" as recently as 1970 with many still in existence today. Basically a sundown town (or neighborhood, suburb, county, state) is a place that excludes black people from being able to live there usually by posting signs that say "Nigger Don't Let the Sun Go Down on You in ___." Blacks may be allowed to shop there or drive through during the day, but if they were found within city limits after dark, the results have often been fatal. This book also serves to eliminate the myth that the South is the main antagonist towards blacks, because the vast majority of sundown towns were actually in the North and West. This book was written primarily because it's a part of history that most Americans know nothing about...it's something that towns have tried to keep secret and are perhaps ashamed of today. However, it's an important topic to research because the persistence of many of these sundown areas help to explain why many blacks still do not live in certain parts of the country while pretty much every other minority group is fairly evenly spread out. Since blacks were often kept out of suburbs, this added an even bigger element of racism because they were then denied access to better schools. I liked this book because I'm already interested in this subject. It reads like an interesting textbook, but parts can be fairly statistics-heavy or just show example after example of instances...which I think is important to emphasize what a big problem this has been in our country, but doesn't always make for the smoothest read.
    • 5/5
      Racism in America