Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (Hardcover)

by James W. Loewen (Author)
Key Phrases: sundown suburbs, sundown towns, sundown county, African Americans, United States, World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. According to bestselling sociologist Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me), "something significant has been left out of the broad history of race in America as it is usually taught," namely the establishment between 1890 and 1968 of thousands of "sundown towns" that systematically excluded African-Americans from living within their borders. Located mostly outside the traditional South, these towns employed legal formalities, race riots, policemen, bricks, fires and guns to produce homogeneously Caucasian communities—and some of them continue such unsavory practices to this day. Loewen's eye-opening history traces the sundown town's development and delineates the extent to which state governments and the federal government, "openly favor[ed] white supremacy" from the 1930s through the 1960s, "helped to create and maintain all-white communities" through their lending and insuring policies. "While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North... they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county," Loewen points out. The expulsion forced African-Americans into urban ghettoes and continues to have ramifications on the lives of whites, blacks and the social system at large. Admirably thorough and extensively footnoted, Loewen's investigation may put off some general readers with its density and statistical detail, but the stories he recounts form a compelling corrective to the "textbook archetype of interrupted progress." As the first comprehensive history of sundown towns ever written, this book is sure to become a landmark in several fields and a sure bet among Loewen's many fans. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
In Oct. 2001, James W. Loewen stopped at a convenience store in the small Illinois town of Anna -- a name that, as a store clerk confirmed, stands for "Ain't No Niggers Allowed."

On Nov. 8, 1909, nearly a century before Loewen stepped into the store, a mob of angry white citizens drove out Anna's 40 or so black families following the lynching in a nearby town of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Anna became all-white literally overnight, Loewen reports, and embraced racial exclusiveness for the long haul. According to the 2000 census, just one family with a black member lives among Anna's 7,000 residents.

Anna is far from unique, as Loewen, a sociologist, argues in his powerful and important new book, Sundown Towns. On the contrary, Loewen reports that -- beginning in roughly 1890 with the end of Reconstruction and continuing until the fair-housing legislation of the late 1960s -- whites in America created thousands of whites-only towns, commonly known as "sundown towns" owing to the signs often posted at their city limits that warned, as one did in Hawthorne, Calif., in the 1930s: "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne." In fact, Loewen claims that, during that 70-year period, outside the traditional South, "probably a majority of all incorporated places [in the United States] kept out African Americans."

Such a bold claim would seem to require an exact count of sundown towns to back it up. But Loewen admits that the challenges of uncovering and confirming the existence of each sundown town -- when everything from census figures to local histories proved misleading -- limited his ability to nail down an exact figure. Instead, he writes, "I believe at least 3,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 independent towns went sundown in the United States, mostly between 1890 and about 1930."

This vagueness, along with Loewen's almost evangelical passion for his material, raises questions of credibility -- or at least of potential overstatement. But Loewen expertly dodges those accusations. He devotes almost an entire chapter to explaining his research -- detailing his rationale for defining sundown towns, laying out his statistical methods and revealing how he triangulated oral history, written sources and census data to arrive at a "confirmation." So when he reports that he's personally verified the existence of roughly 1,000 sundown towns between 1890 and 1930, you believe him. And because he pairs that finding with an analysis of the history, causes and patterns of sundown towns that shows that they were, in many ways, as logical -- and often as violent -- an outgrowth of American racism as lynching, he ultimately makes a strong case that sundown towns were a significant feature of the American landscape. As is often the case when the subject is race, the relative lack of hard evidence ultimately becomes part of the story, rather than a hindrance to it.

As in Anna, whites in about 50 towns used mob violence to expel and keep out African Americans, and many more relied on the threat of violence, Loewen reports. Some towns, he writes, passed "legal" ordinances banning hiring blacks or renting or selling them homes; others relied on citizens to pay informal visits to warn visiting African Americans that they "must not remain in the town." In 1960, the press reported that realtors in Grosse Pointe, Mich., had conceived of an altogether more clinical way to insure racial exclusivity: a "point system" used to assess a potential buyer's eligibility that included a rating for swarthiness.

Often, Sundown Towns argues, a community used a variety of methods in order to remain all-white through the years. To demonstrate this, Loewen charts the course of segregation in Wyandotte, Mich.: In the early 1870s, whites there drove out a black barber; in 1881 and 1888, they expelled the town's black hotel workers; in 1907, four white men beat and robbed a black man at the train station; nine years later, a mob of white townspeople "bombarded" a boardinghouse, driving out all the African Americans and killing one. "In the 1940s," Loewen writes, "police arrested or warned African Americans for 'loitering suspiciously in the business district' or being in the park, and white children stoned African American children in front of Roosevelt High School." In the early 1950s, a University of Pennsylvania professor who grew up in Wyandotte told him, all the members of a black family who moved into town ended up dead.

If Loewen's first priority is to unveil what he calls the "hidden history" of sundown towns, his second is to debunk the widely held idea that when the issue is race, the South is always "the scene of the crime," as James Baldwin famously wrote. The incidence of sundown communities in the South, Loewen reports, was actually far lower than it was in a Midwestern state such as Illinois, in which roughly 70 percent of towns were sundown towns in 1970. "This does not make whites in the traditional South less racist than [those] in . . . other regions of the country," he suggests.

With the rise of the automobile, among other things, came the birth of sundown suburbs. In 1909, Loewen reports, Chevy Chase, Md., became one of the nation's first after the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company sued a developer to whom it had sold a parcel of land because of rumors that he planned to build affordable housing for African American workers. The company ultimately prevented the development, and the land sat vacant for decades before becoming home to Saks Fifth Avenue, its current resident. No doubt, the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company would approve of the suburb's current racial makeup; in 2000, Loewen writes, "its 6,183 residents included just 18 people living in families with at least one African American householder." But even that isn't white enough anymore, Loewen charges: Whites are increasingly fleeing nearly all-white suburbs for lily-white exurbs, adding sprawl to the already numerous economic, psychological and sociological tolls of residential segregation.

Much has been written about the history of segregation within American cities, but this is the first full-length study of places that sought to exclude African Americans entirely. Loewen's desire to be exhaustive is therefore understandable. But in this case, exhaustive sometimes means exhausting. The book would have been more enjoyable to read had Loewen focused in depth on a few representative sundown towns, teasing out the history and sociology of the phenomenon in a more narrative, less textbook-like form.

That said, for its meticulous research and passionate chronicling of the complex and often shocking history of whites-only communities, Sundown Towns deserves to become an instant classic in the fields of American race relations, urban studies and cultural geography. After reading it, you'll view your own community, and the whole of the American landscape, more suspiciously -- and rightly so.

Reviewed by Laura Wexler
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: New Press (October 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156584887X
• ISBN-13: 978-1565848870
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #404,704 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the American history book of 2005. Next question., December 17, 2005

By	J. K. Kelley "penslinger and long-term book j... (Eastern WA, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

So many American historians tell us what we want to hear. Prof. Loewen tells us what we very much *need* to hear. A sundown town, good reader, is a town that will allow a given race to pass through provided it gets out by sunset. _Sundown Towns_ is the story of how much of small-town America came to be all-white, or so nearly all-white as to make mock of diversity.

Growing up a white Westerner in mostly white towns, I always had the question about race relations: "Why the hell would such a high percentage of black people choose to live in nasty big cities? Why don't they move here? I won't hurt 'em. Their kids would get better educations and they'd do fine." It sounds so easy. Did any of you ever wonder that?

As Prof. Loewen documents with the greatest of care, after the Civil War that's what happened. And then, town by town, said black people were driven out and told never to return. The census figures combined with eyewitness accounts will admit of no other conclusion. Black people ended up concentrated in the only areas that were relatively safe to be black in. The American landscape was an immense minefield for them after 1890: can't stop here for gas, can't even pass through here, can't spend the night here. At some point you just go to Detroit, or wherever, and try and make do.

I live in Kennewick, Washington, which along with Richland (its sister city) was a sundown town until at least the mid-1960s. Every approach I make to delve into the topic is met with cold silence and deep disapproval. People don't return my phone calls, and I see fear in people's eyes. It is obvious that what I am seeing is a shame reaction, the hope that the last witnesses will die off before anyone records the truth. For many of us, _Sundown Towns_ is a family story.

Thank all the gods it's such a well-told one. Prof. Loewen is thorough and meticulous, but never dull. His style is interesting and accessible, never pretentious. He incorporates his own recollections but they do not dominate the narrative. But all the other great qualities of this essential book pale before that greatest one for the historian: it's convincing. This is an addition to our history. It has spurred me to discuss the matter with many people, of all races, and has helped me to understand that parts of the 'sundown town' concept are alive and well today. The moment you read it, your understanding will change--not in a namby-pamby do-gooder way, but in the way that comes from honest comprehension. In the same way _Guns, Germs and Steel_ provoked good dialogue and thought, so will _Sundown Towns_--the difference being that Prof. Loewen need not speculate. He has enough facts to state rather than surmise.

If this country gave out knighthoods, I'd raise hell until James Loewen got one. As it is, I can merely thank him for loving his country enough to tell it the truth.

52 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Overview of Sundown Towns, October 3, 2005

By	John Brown (Los Angeles, Ca USA) - See all my reviews

The author did an outstanding job in chronicling the attitudes of the various towns across America, and why they are the way they are. Many of these attitudes still exist, and what surprised me was that a town within minutes from where I live, was mentioned, as a Sundown Town. The surprise came not about the town, but that the author had not missed it in his review of Sundown Towns in America. This book is a good read for all Americans, and reflects that a lot of work still needs to be accomplished if it is to truly be the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely fascinating book!, December 30, 2005

By	L.E. Page (Chicago) - See all my reviews

Wow! This book does a great job of explaining how our villages and towns became so segregated. And until reading it I hadn't really realized how segregated we are.

Loewen starts the book by recapping how our country changed after the Civil War. I had heard of the migration north, but I didn't know that many of the newly-freed slaves actually had their own farms in the midwest. Racism slowly drove them off these farms and into groups in larger cities.

Loewen also explains how whites then responded by moving to suburbs and instituting measures to keep their new communities white. Some 80% of the Chicago suburbs had some type of codes that restricted certain races from settling there.

Loewen also made it clear that the sundown town practice was mainly a northern one. He did a lot of investigation of Illinois towns and found quite a few towns that had taken measures to prevent African Americans from settling or buying property within the town. He did also include examples of the practice existing on the East Coast to restrict Jewish people from WASP areas and on the West Coast to restrict Chinese or Asian immigrants from living outside their neighborhoods.

This book tells a fascinating story of our country and how segregation took hold. Read it!