Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

Fantastic, eyeopening and majestic book!! A must read for anyone who is interested in understanding the mechanics and mechanisms of white supremacy, race, and racism in American society, and how they influence our culture, society and economy and everyday aspects of our lives. Do you believe we are making racial progress, yet work at a job or live in a suburb, town or area where everyone looks like you? Do you wonder why people who don't look like you live clustered together on the "other" side of town or another part of the state? Do you believe this is a naturally occurring phenomenon or just how the demographics have played out? If so, you might be surprised to learn that this seemingly "natural" order of things is largely the result of a long active history of purposeful exclusionary practices against non-whites (mainly black people) in cities, suburban and rural communities all across the country. You might even be more surprised to learn that the country was more diverse and less exclusionary in the 1870-1880s than it is today! James Loewen does a masterful job of revealing pervasive but "hidden" history of racial exclusion and the ways it works in our segregated society, and opening pathways for understanding many of its negative costs, legacies and consequences to our country, our society and its people. If you are interested in understanding how we can keep our country competitive and viable in the 21st century and leave both a positive situation and legacy for subsequent generations I highly suggest that you read this book.

In 1968, my family moved from Queens to Great Neck, a suburb of NY - one of the only NY suburbs at the time that allowed black people to own houses (as a largely Jewish suburb, it accepted us, because they also had been rejected from most suburbs in NY.) So I knew very personally what happened in the suburban US around redlining, and various other tactics, some quite violent, to keep non-whites from living in them. In 2008, I decided to leave Oakland, and move to Sonoma County, a nice, bucolic rural area, which is not at all diverse. I've lived in other rural areas, also not diverse. I asked myself, why is it that there are so few black or interracial rural or semi-rural communities? I thought perhaps it was because that's not where the jobs are. Or that's just how the demographics played out. What I learned from reading this book made me realize I should have taken the lesson from my youth - there was an active, purposeful purge of non-whites from rural communities all over the country, and policies to keep them away. Did you know there were blacks in every county in Montana at one point? There were significant populations of african-americans in small rural communities all over the US prior to 1900. This book is a great historic overview of what happened to those communities, and how the suburban US was formed to specifically exclude blacks, and often also Jews and others as well. It's extremely well researched, evenhanded, and is a worthy companion to helping to understand the issues that plague us today. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in history and social justice.

Professor James Loewen's Sundown Towns will, I daresay, be the standard, comprehensive book on this subject for a long time. It is an extraordinary account of the assault, killing, removal, and settlement prevention of African-Americans in counties, villages, towns , cities, and suburbs all over the country, primarily not in the South, especially during 1890-1940, but continuing into the present. His discussion of the societal consequences for everyone is illuminating. I have been active in historical venues for many years. My paternal lineage is in Alabama, my maternal in Ohio. I am not naive about the boundless possibilities of racism from whatever sources. Nevertheless, I was shocked by this book, and, I must say, angered about many years of criticism of the South by persons and organizations from elsewhere in this country when atrocities were, and are, rampant there also. Dr. Loewen conducted vast research in the literature, both local and national. This volume is a source book in its footnotes and bibliography. His extensive visitations and interviews greatly strengthen his conclusions. He has also often been careful to indicate when documentation is thin. My principal criticism is that Sundown Towns should be Volume I of a two-volume set. From reading this book one might conclude that racism is only white when actually it knows no bounds. Many of the sundown towns had no legitimate gripe which renders their racism especially shocking. Racism aside, people do have legitimate concerns about crime, education, government operations, and other public issues, none of which, however, justify exclusion by race. Until these issues are dealt with as well and honestly as Loewen has done with sundown towns, his book will not have the impact that it should. People respond better when all their concerns are treated fairly, honestly, comprehensively, and not with political correctness. As a proud resident of an inner city neighborhood in the South, I can assure you that we live daily with all sides of these issues.

Not only is this a book about the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that minority groups (African-Americans, and to a lesser degree Asian- and Hispanic-Americans) have been kept segregated, it is a book about possible remedies that are practical in nature. There are many surprising facts, both to those who thought certain states were immune to the virus of racism that created segregated communities ("sundown rules in sundown towns") but also to those who felt some areas of the country had to be more frequently guilty of the practice of warning minorities to get out of town by sundown. The author takes a sociologist's view of census reports about residential patterns. Some towns that might not appear to be "sundown towns" turn out in fact to be because the accidents of having a large minority population do not exempt a town from scrutiny (the presence of a prison system within city or county limits might skew the numbers, for example). This skewing effect might give one a false impression about the history and present practices of a particular community. Reading this book is a real challenge to the assumption that housing and residential patterns in the U. S. are/were created through voluntary choices made by consenting adults. Some of the unlikeliest of places were sundown towns. Many readers may be surprised to find their own communities listed (I won't give away the real surprises). This is must reading for those who care about equality of treatment for all minorities.

This book chronicles the rise and existence of American “sundown towns” – towns and suburbs where African-Americans (and often other non-white, non-Christian minorities) were not allowed to live, or even stay after dark. The book covers a lot of ground, providing a capsule history of the Nadir of racism that enabled sundown towns, how they came to be, and their effects on both whites and blacks. The two biggest surprises for me were: (1) sundown towns are not really a Southern thing – in fact, you’re more likely to find them outside of the South, and (2) some of them are still sundown towns today (though not obviously so), while others that no longer are only dropped such practices as recently as the 1990s. Which brings up one problem with the book (albeit one that Louwen frequently admits) – the US Census makes it easy to identify all-white towns and suburbs, but not all of them are that way intentionally, and determining which ones are requires a lot of on-the-scene legwork and interviews. While Loewen estimates there are thousands of such towns, only a fraction had been verified when the book was published in 2005. So it’s best to approach it as a starting point rather than a complete history. (For the record, Loewen’s research is ongoing, and he has a website that invites people to help with more research identifying and confirming sundown towns.) Anyway, I highly recommend this to anyone who wants/needs valuable perspective on the scope of the racism problem in America, especially in light of current events

Sundown Towns goes a long way towards explaining the US' pervasive racial problems by examining a phenomenon many white people had thought dead and gone: sundown towns (cities or neighborhoods where racial minorities were not allowed to live or even be present after dark). It would be tempting to dismiss Loewen's research as merely anecdotal, but obviously more concrete evidence can rarely be found: even the most racist townships took care to mask their anti-black and minority rules through sleight of hand and legal double speak, and city limit signs that used to warn minorities not to linger after dark have now mostly vanished, but there is simply too much material here to ignore. And the honest reader will have to admit that much of what Loewen writes about sounds familiar. We've all heard excuses for why blacks and whites tend to live separately: the blacks like it that way, they don't care about good schools and nice houses, etc, etc. We've also heard plenty of "blame the victim" stories indicating that it is black laziness and racial inferiority that prevents them from moving to the suburbs. And we've all heard other whites making disparaging comments about minorities and not protested, thus becoming tacitly complicit. Reading some of Loewen's stories about the race riots and lynchings that helped create the sundown towns, reminded me of some of the histories of the Nazi rise to power in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. So many of the methods for dealing with despised groups, whether whites against blacks or Nazis against Jews, are terrifyingly similar: economic boycotts, terror bombings, sabotage, etc. And the language used by so called "white patriots" warning of the threat posed by black migration to an area reminded me of nothing so much as the screams of Osama bin Laden and his followers for the annihilation of the West to defend Islam. (Yet another reminder that we humans are all indeed "brothers under the skin!") I already knew I lived near one of the more infamous sundown counties, but as I read this book I began to suspect that some other communities and neighborhoods I'm familiar with may be sundown as well, and that's something I intend to investigate for myself. As a Southerner with long ancestral roots in the former slave owning regions, I have always been aware of the dark history of race relations there. It was with some surprise (and I hope a forgiveable amount of satisfaction at seeing such hypocrisy revealed at long last) that I read that sundown towns were and are far more pervasive in the North and West, and that the Southern states, far from being exceptions to a rule of general tolerance, were merely the most prominent examples of nationwide intolerance. Loewen provides some excellent reasons for why sundown towns are bad for their residents as well as the people they keep out: the cultural aridity, the fostering of racial stereotyping, the unwillingness to try new ideas or customs. And he ably restates what the Supreme Court said in the Brown decision back in 1954: segregation has a degrading, scarring emotional and physical toll that makes it completely unacceptable. Lowewen suggests some interesting methods for confronting and hopefully putting an end to the sundown phenomenon, including a call for a Residents' Rights Act that I fear will take a seismic shift in national politics to ever have a chance of becoming law. (To start with we'd need a President and Vice-President who don't live in sundown towns themselves!) More realistic suggestions emphasize action by concerned volunteers willing to research and ask the difficult questions needed to shock the many out of their complacency. This isn't a comfortable book to read, but it may come to be considered as important as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma in helping Americans deal with the quandaries of creating a truly equal multi-racial society

I remember as a kid playing outside my Mother telling me to come home before it gets dark outside, I never thought about this until I watched the DVD Hidden Colors 3, Tariq Nasheed talks about the origin of this expression and this book Sundown Towns, as a New Yorker I was especially interested in the sundown towns and communities in the tri state area New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, on page 214 "The overwhelming absence in Darien is the absence of black faces. If there ever was a time when a black lived here, no one seems to remember it. No black families at all live in Darien now." Continuing along the tri-state area into Long Island, New York on page 133 "Long Island has the most racially isolated and segregated suburbs in the nation," according to reporter Michael Powell, writing in 2002. About 10% of Long Island's population is African American, but "almost all black residents are bunched into a dozen or so towns, from Roosevelt to Hempstead, Wyandanch, and Uniondale." Meanwhile, two-thirds of Long Island's municipalities remained less than 1% black, and half of those had no black residents at all." Also in Tuxedo Park, New York on page 416 "Tuxedo Park, New York, America's first gated community, had at most one black or interracial family in the 2000 census." As for New Jersey on page 253 "After Ford opened a huge assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, for example, the town refused to let United Auto Workers build subsidized housing there, so thousands of workers, many of them African American, had to commute every day from Newark." The most incredible aspect of these sundown towns is the siren or whistle notice as stated on page 104 "Towns that sounded whistles or sirens to warn blacks to get out of town at 6 PM also implied they were sundown by official action. Historian David Roediger grew up in Columbia, Illinois, a sundown town near St. Louis. Like Villa Grove, Columbia had a 6 PM whistle. Roediger reported that his mother moved to Columbia from Cairo in 1941 to teach elementary school. The police chief "almost immediately took her aside to say that she should feel secure, unlike in Cairo, because Columbia had a 6 PM whistle to warn blacks out of town." Coming from the chief of police, that is official policy." After World War 2 Levittowns welcomed white people only as stated on page 127 "Between 1947 and 1967, more towns were established on a whites-only basis than ever before. Almost every suburb that sprang up or expanded after World War 2 was whites-only. Among the largest were the three Levittowns, in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, begun in the 1950s. In fact, Levitt & Sons was by far the largest home builder in America after World War 2. By one estimate, the firm built 8% of all postwar suburban housing-all of it sundown. As Kenneth Jackson notes, "The Levitt organization.... publicly and officially refused to sell to blacks for two decades after the war. Nor did resellers deal with minorities." The result-"not surprisingly," in Jackson's words-was that "in 1960 not a single one of the Long Island Levittowns 82,000 residents was black." This book confirms the fact that many white people nationwide purposely chose to live in whites-only towns and communities.

This is one of the most important books I've read in my lifetime. James Loewen does a fantastic job of informing a nation of discrimination, white supremacy and racial exclusion that has been right under our noses, and that continues in some parts of the US today. Many who read this book (myself included) go into it with little or no prior knowledge of the existence of Sundown Towns. Yet, here they are, all around us. This novel is surprisingly easy to read and understand, given it's disturbing subject matter. It's filled with accounts from people who have lived (or are currently living) in Sundown communities, and from those who have visited. Loewen fills the text with facts & figures, in his usual style. However, the human element is alive in this book, compared to some of his others, and that difference makes it one of my favorites. I read the book cover to cover, but this would be an excellent book to skim, or read for just the chapters that interest you. Loewen uses recurring themes and examples that carry throughout, but that are explained in the context of each chapter. I highly recommend this book to each and every citizen of the United States, as a powerful reminder of discrimination that still occurs throughout the nation, and that desperately needs to cease.

This is one of the most inspiring books I have read. It represents what social sciences in the US should be doing more of- analysing and unpacking the horrors of racism, capitalism and the past in the present. Having grown up and been raised in a sundown town, this book does much more than to outline a conceptual and historical approach but also invites readers to join and participate in this movement of social justice historiography.

I can't say that much of this surprises me...

As far as content and subject matter, this book deserves a '5'. It is well researched and covers the phenomenons of sundown towns, northern rascism, the creation of the black inner cities as a reaction to white prejudice, the nadir of black racism, and a guideline to inch ourselves out of this morass. It was a frightening look in the mirror for someone who grew up in an all white town, attended an all white high school and college and wondered why so many black people choose to live in the inner city. While these life areas are somewhat better in my world than they were in the past, there is still a great deal of distance to go before we fully act on the concept that ...."all men are created equal." This is a 'must read' for anyone wants this statement to apply to everyone. We all must soon realize that white supremacy is a concept that has long outlived its religious roots and its poorly formed and primal definition. As far as organizational writing style and redundancy, this book deserves a '3'. Far greater effort should have been put into the editing portion of this publication before it was released. While still a good book, it would have been more powerful by eliminating all of the repetitions, was written in a chronological sequence and the size of the text was cut to about 300 pages.