Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

Written by James W. Loewen

Narrated by Norman Dietz

Professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, James W. Loewen has taught race relations for over 20 years. He won the National Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship for his New York Times bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Sundown Towns is a thought-provoking survey of American towns with histories of racial exclusion.

From 1999 to 2004, Professor Loewen investigated the records of thousands of towns to identify those that were all white on purpose—some of which remain so to this day. Loewen reveals that, though normally regarded as a Southern phenomenon, these so-called sundown towns were in fact abundant in the North.

In unflinching detail, Loewen traces the rise of these towns across America, chronicling their violent histories.

“James Loewen’s new book will bring shock, then indignation, then wonderment as to what we can do to justify calling ourselves a decent society.”—Howard Zinn, author

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 4, 2008
• ISBN: 9781436117272

James W. Loewen

James W. Loewen (1942–2021) was the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, Sundown Towns, and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition (all from The New Press). He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award.

Reviews for Sundown Towns

[autumnesf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Racism in America

[jmeisen_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This revelatory, well-documented book should be read by every White American. I always considered myself aware of racial issues, but this book made me realize that many things I'd taken for granted as "just the way things are" were the result of racism and eliminationism. I wish I could require everyone protesting the teaching of "Critical Race Theory" to read it.
It's sometimes a little dense and academic, but if you push through those sections, the narrative is vivid and horrifying. I warn you that many of the photos are very difficult to look at.
We will never begin to reconcile the racial issues in the United States until we are willing to confront the past honestly and fully.

[froxgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Scholarly works can be difficult to write in a way that appeals to non-academic readers. This one does a good job of engaging and enraging those who are unaware that locales that banned Black people ("Don't let the sun go down on you in this town") were mostly Midwestern rather than Southern. The good professor starts by going back to the brief progressive period (1865 - 1889), when the Confederacy was reviled and Black people served in legislatures, and the beginning of "The Nadir" and "The Great Retreat" (1890 - 1940), when Black people were forced from integrated small towns into large cities and into non-citizenship. It's a fraught and dangerous period, filled with white riots, murders, lynchings, and burning of homes. It's also when the worship of the Confederacy, "the glorious cause", revived and remains a major dividing line, through Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and Trump's blatant support of white supremacy. Quotes: "After 1890, most whites no longer viewed slavery and racism as the problem. Now Black people themselves were seen as the problem, by white northerners as well as southerners.""Black people increasingly lived in separate neighborhoods, and whites no longer had the benefit of knowing them individually, so whites fell back into stereotypical racist thinking. "From its inception, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) set itself up as the protector of all-white neighborhoods and as the most important single cause of residential segregation. And every town or community planned by a single developer or owner between 1890 - 1960 kept out Black people from its beginnings. ""White racism therefore became first and foremost a rationale for African slavery. Even after it ended, slavery was responsible for the continuing stigmatization of Black Americans.""Living in an all-white community leads many residents to defend living in an all-white community. Residents of elite sundown suburbs are free to infer that Black people are inferior, which explains their absence. Stereotypes imply that as soon as Black people "really apply themselves", our racial problems will be fixed.""White misbehavior, not alleged Black inferiority, is the source of America's racial problem."

[araridan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[kingrat_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

James Loewen is the well-known author of Lies My Teacher Told Me which is an excellent primer on the portions of history that aren’t really covered in school. Sundown Towns is his treatment of the practice of counties, towns, and suburbs that intentionally excluded blacks and other non-whites from living within their boundaries. Such towns popularly had signs at the city limits that stated things like “No n***ers after sundown!”, hence the term.I listened to the audio version of the book. I’ve found that in audio form, repetition in a book is really drilled into my brain. In a work of fiction, repeated story tics become extremely apparent and are distracting. In a book like Sundown Towns the sheer number of examples of sundown practices is a flood in my brain. I didn’t think about much else for the duration.And Loewen’s examples in the book alone become a litany. The conception I, a suburban-educated middle-aged white guy, had was that they were ugly but not particularly common. The best examples Loewen has litter Illinois and Indiana to the point that non-exclusionary towns were in the minority in those states. In addition, descriptions of the practices themselves make me think that the North’s sundown towns were far more racist than the South’s Jim Crow laws. That’s an outside assessment by a white dude after reading this book, so I don’t think it holds a lot of weight. But I think it’s clear that us northerners can’t be smug about the South being the racist part of the country, which I often have been.