I remember traveling with my family when I was very young. My mother always packed lunches for us. My father would sometimes get perrturbed when my sisters or I would not go to the restroom when he stopped for gas. Little did I know then that there were only certain places he would stop (after consu ...more

What I learned

The Democratic party was the white man’s party and didn’t become everybody’s party until 1964

Nadir 1890-1940 Incubator of Sundown Towns

Anna: Ain’t No Niggers Allowed

NDLTSGDOY: Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You

Boy: adult male African Americans who are less than a man

NMNMNN: N ...more

In 1968, my family moved from Queens to Great Neck, a suburb of NY - one of the only NY suburbs at the time that allowed black people to own houses (as a largely Jewish suburb, it accepted us, because they also had been rejected from most suburbs in NY.) So I knew very personally what happened in th ...more

Ever wonder why all the poor white people live in tiny towns, while poor black people tend to live in the inner city? This book explains that phenomenon-- apparently many poor black people used to live in tiny towns as well, but they were systematically driven out by lynch mobs, housing ordinances, ...more

I picked this up for research towards an article, and haven't been able to put it down.

A few pages into the book I was shocked by the revelation that so many northern cities (hundreds or thousands) prohibited blacks not only from traveling through after dark but from living in them at all.


James Loew ...more

An interesting dimension of racism, and American racism in particular, is that when whites are confronted with it, their reaction is often to blame the victims of its injustice for creating racism in the first place. To them, blacks create the racism merely by protesting or highlighting that racism. ...more

This is an enormously important subject as it rids the reader of any illusions that American racism was & is primarily concentrated in the South. It's clear that Loewen did extensive amounts of research and is to be applauded for even having the courage to tackle this topic. However, as others revie ...more

Here are some highlights from the book thus far (first two chapters)>> very important book:

Sundown Towns
By James Loewen

Sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus “all-white on purpose.” (p4)

Between 1890- 1968 whit ...more

I had never heard of sundown towns until recently. Chalk it up to poor education. Maybe white privilege. Historical amnesia. Whatever it is, I am certainly not alone. Sundown towns are surprisingly not well known, which is why James Loewen wrote this book.

Up front, this book is thorough. Loewen did ...more

I’m sure I’m not the only Millennial historian who owes a lot to James W. Loewen; reading his Lies My Teacher Told Me as a teenager helped me learn how to critically assess the teaching and writing of history. His magnum opus, however, might be his 2005 tome Sundown Towns. Loewen provides a damning, ...more

Like many other Americans, I learned very little about Black history in school. Years were spent on slavery and a few lessons on the Civil Rights Movement and we were led to believe that nothing else happened to Black people beyond that. As an adult I'm making it a point to teach myself about the hi ...more