Powerful and important . . . an instant classic.
--The Washington Post Book World
The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the
bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new
preface by the author
In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the
classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of
hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis
of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of
sundown towns--almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken
rule that blacks weren't welcome--that cropped up throughout the
twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.
Written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown
Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred
reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide
online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America.
In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current
controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter
movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but
with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as
Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household.
And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often
face second-generation sundown town issues, such as in Ferguson,
Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a
majority-white police force.
