Sundown towns: No blacks after dark

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Sundown towns: No blacks after dark
Posted 10/1/05

After uncovering all the Lies My Teacher Told Me as well as Lies Across America, James Loewen, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont, takes on another whopper: that racism is a southern problem. Many towns throughout the nation, and mostly outside of the South, adopted the shameful practice of banning African-Americans at night. In Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism ($30), he explains the roots of the practice in the late 1800s, the violent and cruel ways these towns upheld their "law," and the effects today. Loewen, who is white, also explores the similar laws and covenants that kept out Chinese-Americans, Jews, American Indians, and Mexican-Americans.

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When I started, I thought I'd have 10 in Illinois because I was focusing my research there and 50 in the whole country, but I found 472 in Illinois and 10,000 across the country.

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I would get depressed. It wasn't happy research. I heard that some towns sounded a siren at 6 p.m. each night, and the origin was to tell blacks to get out of town. When I first heard that story, I thought it was an urban legend. But I found enough proof that now I'm suspicious of any town that has a 6 p.m. whistle. Some of them just tell people it's 6 p.m., but originally had a racial connotation.

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People I talk with often think I'm doing my research in the South. But very few people in the South ever did this. In Mississippi, I only found six sundown towns. Compare that to Illinois. The South was certainly racist but in a different way. Why would you make your maid leave? Southern whites moving to sundown towns in Indiana or other places were astonished that they couldn't bring along servants.

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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/051001/1sundown.htm