James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005) x, 562 , 16 of plates, ISBN 9780743294485.
From 1890 until the late 1960s, U.S. society expelled African-American families from thousands of towns and suburbs. Loewen calls them "sundown towns" because they often sported signs that warned, "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On You In [wherever]."
It may seem odd--but makes sense when you think about it--that there were few such towns in the South. After all, much of the South's domestic help and menial labor during this period was performed by its proportionately large Black population. Elsewhere however, where Blacks were not obviously essential to the economy, sundown towns were the rule rather than the exception. Loewen shows that from 1890 to 1970, "probably a majority of all incorporated places [in the United States] kept out African Americans."
Also, it may surprise those unfamiliar with history that Black residential exclusion was virtually unknown before about 1890. Before the Civil War and for a generation afterwards, towns across America were more diversified than they ever would be again, as measured by the segregation index. The 80-year period of Jim Crow terror changed this. African-American families were driven from their rural and suburban homes and forced into urban ghettoes that plague the nation to his day.
Loewen's account is important and courageous because his choice of topic defies the accepted historical canon. He does not focus on lynchings and he does not focus on the South. Many historians have studied the 1890-1970 Jim Crow event, when African-Americans were disfranchised and deprived of their civil rights in defiance of the Constitution. But most have focused on the lynchings that terrorized the African-American community (5000 documented extralegal lynchings according to Tuskeegee files plus another 15,000 lynchings under the veneer of law, according to Ida B. Wells.)
Also, almost all scholars of the Jim Crow phenomenon have focused on the South (the former slave states). But, as I have shown from intermarriage rates [see Frank W. Sweet,
Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule (Palm Coast FL: Backintyme, 2005), p. 456-57], Jim Crowism was nationwide. Loewen's latest book examines yet a third phenomenon (residential segregation via sundown towns). He shows that, like the lynchings and the crash in intermarriage rates, it was a nationwide symptom of the Jim Crow wave of terror.
The mechanisms of Black expulsion ranged from the most violent (public murder), through beatings, arson and vandalism, refusal to sell, to the most lenient (police escort to city or county limits with instructions never to return). As recently as the 1990s some suburbs openly told home buyers that municipal ordinances or private covenants forbade Black residents. Today, refusal to sell or rent is more surreptitious, and almost all of the old "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you" signs have come down.
Loewen's strategy for persuading the reader is to pile chapter upon chapter, case upon case, of documented expulsion events, ordinances, riots, and killings. These tales make his extensive tabulations come to life, as we witness hundreds of ordinary families being terrorized by the very society in which they live.
In short, the book is powerful, persuasive, courageous, and important for all Americans. It helps explain how we painted ourselves into a corner--how we created the strange "racial" predicament in which we now find the nation regarding urban ghettoes (their self-destructive culture as well as their Black-White test score gap).
It is hard to find nits to pick in such an outstanding work, but here are three:
On page 33, Loewen attributes the Jim Crow wave of terror to slavery. Slavery may be a necessary explanation but it is not sufficient. It ignores the fact that most other nations in this hemisphere started slavery a hundred years earlier than the U.S., ended slavery later than the U.S., were crueler to their slaves than the U.S. (in the sense of working them to death so that their slave populations could not demographically self-reproduce), and had numbers of slaves, both absolute numbers and as population percentages, far in excess of the United States. And yet they never had lynchings, sundown towns, nor endogamous color lines. They do not have two-caste systems nor "racially" delineated urban ghettoes today. [They have cruelly hereditary class divisions, but this is something else again.]
On page 147, Loewen criticizes Stephan Thernstrom's thesis that, ever since the Black Pride movement of 1965-75, a growing fraction of the African-American community advocates residential non-assimilation. Loewen's criticism is unwarranted because Loewen and Thernstrom are looking at different periods (1890-1960 and 1975-2006, respectively). The African-American integration/separation zeitgeist pendulum has swung back and forth several times since Paul Cuffee advocated colonization to Africa only to have the next generation's Frederick Douglass oppose it. A particularly instructive episode in the ideological struggle between separatism and assimilation within the African-American community is the court case
Roberts v. City of Boston, 1849. Sixty-two years after Prince Hall persuaded Boston’s city fathers to open segregated schools for Black children so that they could be taught their cultural heritage, the parents of Sarah C. Roberts sued the city for not allowing the child to attend a White school. The African-American community split on the topic and heated Black-on-Black debates erupted over the desirability of segregated schools for Boston’s Black children [see Frank W. Sweet,
Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule (Palm Coast FL: Backintyme, 2005), p. 250]. The trend pointed out by Thernstrom and others is ongoing even now in political rhetoric, if not in actual residential choice.
Finally, on page 319, Loewen discusses the Black-White test score gap solely in the context of
The Bell Curve (one of those idiot books that comes out every 40 years or so claiming that people of African descent are genetically inferior). He thereby dismisses this puzzling phenomenon, which has been thoroughly replicated and shown without doubt to be unrelated to genetic ancestry. (The gap does not appear in other countries nor in the children of Hispanics or West Indians of African descent, nor in immigrants from subSaharan Africa, nor even in African-descended children raised by Euro-American parents.) It is a shame that Loewen did not read the survey of recent serious research, Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips,
The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1998) before writing about this issue. Along the same lines, on page 352 Loewen advocates addressing the gap in elementary school. He is apparently unaware that the deficit has been shown to appear by age three and is intractable after that age.
Again, these are merely the findings of a compulsive nitpicker. All in all, the book is a tremendously important work, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Buy this book. If nothing else, you will come to understand why so many historians oppose reparations for slavery but favor reparations for Jim Crow.
[From the back cover]James E. 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.
Members might also want to read the
Washing Post Review of
Sundown Towns by Laura Wexler.
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