Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism“Don't let the sun go down on you in this town.” We equate these words with the Jim Crow South but, in a sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, award-winning and bestselling author James W. Loewen demonstrates that strict racial exclusion was the norm in American towns and villages from sea to shining sea for much of the twentieth century. Weaving history, personal narrative, and hard-nosed analysis, Loewen shows that the sundown town was—and is—an American institution with a powerful and disturbing history of its own, told here for the first time. In Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, sundown towns were created in waves of violence in the early decades of the twentieth century, and then maintained well into the contemporary era. Sundown Towns redraws the map of race relations, extending the lines of racial oppression through the backyard of millions of Americans—and lobbing an intellectual hand grenade into the debates over race and racism today. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - KingRat - LibraryThingJames 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 ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - Cheryl_in_CC_NV - LibraryThingContext - I'm white, and I grew up in a small town in the North. Well, I for one am not surprised to learn how many sundown towns there were, and that many still exist. I do believe it gets easier ... Read full review
Contents
45 | |
26008 Part 3 | 135 |
26008 Part 4 | 227 |
26008 Part 5 | 297 |
26008 Part 6 | 377 |
26008 Backmatter | 453 |
26008 Photo credits | 525 |
527 | |
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