Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism Paperback – Illustrated, July 17, 2018

Always loved this author! This one is worth the buy!

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.

A Father’s Day gift for my husband , that loves to read about historical things

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