Sundown Towns Quotes

“These exuberant proclamations of equalitarianism in sundown towns exemplify not only base hypocrisy but also what sociologists call "herrenvolk democracy" -- democracy for the master race. White Americans' verbal commitment to nondiscrimination forms one horn of what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal famously called "The American Dilemma." Blatant racism forms the other horn. In elite sundown suburbs, this dilemma underlies what we shall later term the "paradox of exclusivity.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Since “healthy communities are able to recognize past mistakes,” they went on to “pledge to work toward the common good in building a community where people of all races and cultural backgrounds are welcome to live and prosper.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“By 1970, exclusion was so complete that fewer than 500 black families lived in white suburban neighborhoods in the entire Chicago metropolitan area, and most of those were in just five or six suburbs.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“What You Can Do About Sundown Towns: The Three-Step Program in Action To help sundown towns transcend their pasts and end second-generation sundown town issues, I suggest a “Three-Step Program”: •​Admit it: “We did this.” •​Apologize: “It was wrong, and we apologize.” •​Renounce: “And we don’t do it anymore.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Between 1950 and 1970, the suburban population doubled from 36 million to 74 million as 83% of the nation's population growth took place in the suburbs.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Our culture teaches us to locate overt racism long ago (in the nineteenth century) or far away (in the South) or to marginalize it as the work of a few crazed deviants who carried out their violent works under cover of darkness.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“In 1920, Warren G. Harding ran his famous “front porch campaign” from his family home in Marion, Ohio; a few months before, Marion was the scene of an ethnic cleansing as whites drove out virtually every African American. According to Harding scholar Phillip Payne, “As a consequence, Marion is an overwhelming[ly] white town to this date [2002].”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Many sundown towns had not a single black household as late as the 2000 census, and some still openly exclude to this day.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“loan guarantees by the FHA and Veterans Administration (VA) were the most important single cause of postwar suburbanization, and more than 98% of the millions of home loans guaranteed by the FHA and VA after World War II were available only to whites.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“To end our segregated neighborhoods and towns requires a leap of the imagination: Americans have to understand that white racism is still a problem in the United States. This isn't always easy. Most white Americans do not see racism as a problem in their neighborhood. We need to know about sundown towns to know what to do about them.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Glendale, California, is a suburb of Los Angeles, but it lies "about an hour's drive" from Watts, according to a woman who attended high school in Glendale in the mid-1960s. One day, playing tennis after school, she was "shocked to see what appeared to be an incredibly large contingen[t] of National Reserve soldiers! There were tanks, tents, trucks and a lot of soldiers." City officials of this sundown suburb had called out the National Guard to protect Glendale during the Watts riot -- from what, they never specified.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“The U.S. Supreme Court found openly anti-black ordinances unconstitutional in 1917 in Buchanan v. Warley, but sundown towns and suburbs nevertheless acted as if they had the power to be formally all-white until at least 1960; informally, some communities have never given up this idea. The federal government was hardly likely to enforce Buchanan v. Warley until after World War II; on the contrary, it was busily creating all-white suburbs itself until then. After 1917, most sundown suburbs resorted to restrictive covenants. Covenants were usually private, part of the deed one signed when buying from the developer. Like the Great Retreat, restrictive covenants first targeted Chinese Americans in the West, originating in California in the 1890s, and then spread to the East, where Jews and blacks were targeted for exclusion.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“From Myakka City, Florida, to Kennewick, Washington, the nation is dotted with thousands of all-white towns that are (or were until recently) all white on purpose.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Whites forced out African Americans from major league baseball not because they couldn't play well, but because they could. Whites expelled black jockeys from the Kentucky Derby not because they were incompetent, but because they won 15 of the first 28 derbies. They drove blacks our of the job of postal carrier so they could do it themselves, not because blacks couldn't do it. The foregoing seems obvious, but when it comes to housing, even today, deep inside white culture as a legacy from the Nadir is the sneaking suspicion that African Americans are a problem, so it is best to keep them out.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court declared de jure (by law) racial segregation legal, which caused it to spread in at least twelve northern states. In 1898, Democrats rioted in Wilmington, North Carolina, driving out the mayor and all the other Republican officeholders and killing at least twelve African Americans. The McKinley administration did nothing, allowing this coup d'etat to stand. Congress became desegregated in 1901 when Congressman George H. White of North Carolina failed to win reelection owing to the disfranchisement of black voters in his state. No African American served in Congress again until 1929, and none from the South until 1973.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“In Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama, interracial coalitions briefly won statewide and would have won more often had elections been fair. African Americans still had the rights of citizenship -- at least formally -- until the 1890s.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Sundown town police forces, in addition to being all-white, may still be viewed by themselves and other residents as a city’s first line of defense against black interlopers. As a result, they engage in DWB (“Driving While Black”) policing, targeting black motorists for minor infractions like failing to signal turns.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“African Americans helped build Hoover Dam but had to commute from Las Vegas to do it, while white workers and their families lived in Boulder City, a sundown town built just for them. African Americans helped build Kentucky Dam, but after they finished, their housing—“Negro Village”—was razed, they were booted out, and Marshall County, Kentucky, resumed being a sundown county.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Sundown suburbs are the key reason why geographer Jeff Crump was able to maintain that "cities in the United States are the most racially segregated urban areas in the world.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“In June 1906, the city council of Santa Ana, California, passed a resolution that called for "the fire department to burn each and every one of the said buildings known as Chinatown"; on June 26 a crowd of more than a thousand watched it burn.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United States between about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in their wake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, would openly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns and suburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“our governments openly favored white supremacy and helped to create and maintain all-white communities. So did most of our banks, realtors, and police chiefs. If public relations offices, Chambers of Commerce, and local historical societies don’t want us to know something, perhaps that something is worth learning. After all, how can we deal with something if we cannot even face it?”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“the 27 candidates for whom I could readily distinguish the racial policies of their hometowns, one-third were identified with sundown towns. Starting at the beginning of the century, these include Republican William McKinley, who grew up in Niles, Ohio, where “a sign near the Erie Depot,” according to historian William Jenkins, “warned ‘niggers’ that they had better not ‘let the sun set on their heads.’” McKinley defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who grew up in Salem, Illinois, which for decades “had signs on each main road going into town, telling the blacks, that they were not allowed in town after sundown,”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Even some suburbs now famous for their racial tolerance were all-white by policy at first. Oak Park, which abuts the western edge of Chicago, is now nationally renowned as an integrated community, but it was a sundown suburb in 1950,”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“The next successful Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, deliberately chose a citadel of white supremacy -- the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi -- as the kickoff site for his presidential campaign, where he declared his support for "states rights," code words signaling that the federal government should leave local jurisdictions to handle the "race problem" as they see fit.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“As Ellis Cose famously raged: "I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have stayed out of trouble with the law, gone to the right schools, and worked myself nearly to death. What more do they want? Why in God's name won't they accept me as a full human being?”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Mrs. Berch, who witnessed the shooting, said she thought she recognized the man who killed her husband, but authorities Tuesday said they had no clews as to the identify of the members of the mob. They were not masked.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“Garrett County is hardly colder than Detroit -- hardly colder in 2002, for that matter, when I had the conversation, than it had been in 1890, when it had 185 African Americans. The fact that the very next county to the east had more than 1,000 African Americans, while Garrett County had at most one black household, is a dead giveaway. Such abrupt disparities can only result from different racial policies, not from factors such as climate.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism