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Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism Paperback – October 3, 2006
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In this groundbreaking work, bestselling sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of “sundown towns”—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks could not live there—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. These towns used everything from legal formalities to violence to create homogenous Caucasian communities—and their existence has gone unexamined until now. For the first time, Loewen takes a long, hard look at the history, sociology, and continued existence of these towns, contributing an essential new chapter to the study of American race relations.
Sundown Towns combines personal narrative, history, and analysis to create a readable picture of this previously unknown American institution all written with Loewen’s trademark honesty and thoroughness.
- Print length576 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTouchstone
- Publication dateOctober 3, 2006
- Dimensions6.13 x 1.4 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100743294483
- ISBN-13978-0743294485
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Review
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Just when you thought you'd learned everything there was to know about the sordid history of racism in the United States and its lingering impact on the nation, along comes this amazing volume, which reminds us all of just how deep the well of racial exclusion and white supremacy runs."
-- Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
"Powerful and important...deserves to become an instant classic."
-- The Washington Post Book World
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Touchstone; unknown edition (October 3, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 576 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0743294483
- ISBN-13 : 978-0743294485
- Item Weight : 1.5 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.13 x 1.4 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #871,357 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #189 in Demography Studies
- #3,040 in Discrimination & Racism
- #29,101 in United States History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

James W. Loewen is the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America. He is a regular contributor to the History Channel's History magazine and is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont. He resides in Washington, D.C.
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Top reviews from the United States
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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
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
Top reviews from other countries
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.







