Darkness on the Edge of Town
A bold book argues that thousands of American towns were deliberately kept
whites-only.

 Reviewed by Laura Wexler
The Washington Post
Sunday, October 23, 2005;


SUNDOWN TOWNS:
A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

By James W. Loewen
New Press. 562 pp. $29.95

In Oct. 2001, James W. Loewen stopped at a convenience store in the small
Illinois town of Anna -- a name that, as a store clerk confirmed, stands for
"Ain't No Niggers Allowed."

On Nov. 8, 1909, nearly a century before Loewen stepped into the store, a
mob of angry white citizens drove out Anna's 40 or so black families
following the lynching in a nearby town of a black man accused of raping a
white woman. Anna became all-white literally overnight, Loewen reports, and
embraced racial exclusiveness for the long haul. According to the 2000
census, just one family with a black member lives among Anna's 7,000
residents.

Anna is far from unique, as Loewen, a sociologist, argues in his powerful
and important new book, Sundown Towns . On the contrary, Loewen reports that
-- beginning in roughly 1890 with the end of Reconstruction and continuing
until the fair-housing legislation of the late 1960s -- whites in America
created thousands of whites-only towns, commonly known as "sundown towns"
owing to the signs often posted at their city limits that warned, as one did
in Hawthorne, Calif., in the 1930s: "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In
Hawthorne." In fact, Loewen claims that, during that 70-year period, outside
the traditional South, "probably a majority of all incorporated places [in
the United States] kept out African Americans."

Such a bold claim would seem to require an exact count of sundown towns to
back it up. But Loewen admits that the challenges of uncovering and
confirming the existence of each sundown town -- when everything from census
figures to local histories proved misleading -- limited his ability to nail
down an exact figure. Instead, he writes, "I believe at least 3,000 and
perhaps as many as 15,000 independent towns went sundown in the United
States, mostly between 1890 and about 1930."

This vagueness, along with Loewen's almost evangelical passion for his
material, raises questions of credibility -- or at least of potential
overstatement. But Loewen expertly dodges those accusations. He devotes
almost an entire chapter to explaining his research -- detailing his
rationale for defining sundown towns, laying out his statistical methods and
revealing how he triangulated oral history, written sources and census data
to arrive at a "confirmation." So when he reports that he's personally
verified the existence of roughly 1,000 sundown towns between 1890 and 1930,
you believe him. And because he pairs that finding with an analysis of the
history, causes and patterns of sundown towns that shows that they were, in
many ways, as logical -- and often as violent -- an outgrowth of American
racism as lynching, he ultimately makes a strong case that sundown towns
were a significant feature of the American landscape. As is often the case
when the subject is race, the relative lack of hard evidence ultimately
becomes part of the story, rather than a hindrance to it.

As in Anna, whites in about 50 towns used mob violence to expel and keep out
African Americans, and many more relied on the threat of violence, Loewen
reports. Some towns, he writes, passed "legal" ordinances banning hiring
blacks or renting or selling them homes; others relied on citizens to pay
informal visits to warn visiting African Americans that they "must not
remain in the town." In 1960, the press reported that realtors in Grosse
Pointe, Mich., had conceived of an altogether more clinical way to insure
racial exclusivity: a "point system" used to assess a potential buyer's
eligibility that included a rating for swarthiness.

Often, Sundown Towns argues, a community used a variety of methods in order
to remain all-white through the years. To demonstrate this, Loewen charts
the course of segregation in Wyandotte, Mich.: In the early 1870s, whites
there drove out a black barber; in 1881 and 1888, they expelled the town's
black hotel workers; in 1907, four white men beat and robbed a black man at
the train station; nine years later, a mob of white townspeople "bombarded"
a boardinghouse, driving out all the African Americans and killing one. "In
the 1940s," Loewen writes, "police arrested or warned African Americans for
'loitering suspiciously in the business district' or being in the park, and
white children stoned African American children in front of Roosevelt High
School." In the early 1950s, a University of Pennsylvania professor who grew
up in Wyandotte told him, all the members of a black family who moved into
town ended up dead.

If Loewen's first priority is to unveil what he calls the "hidden history"
of sundown towns, his second is to debunk the widely held idea that when the
issue is race, the South is always "the scene of the crime," as James
Baldwin famously wrote. The incidence of sundown communities in the South,
Loewen reports, was actually far lower than it was in a Midwestern state
such as Illinois, in which roughly 70 percent of towns were sundown towns in
1970. "This does not make whites in the traditional South less racist than
[those] in . . . other regions of the country," he suggests.

With the rise of the automobile, among other things, came the birth of
sundown suburbs. In 1909, Loewen reports, Chevy Chase, Md., became one of
the nation's first after the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company sued a
developer to whom it had sold a parcel of land because of rumors that he
planned to build affordable housing for African American workers. The
company ultimately prevented the development, and the land sat vacant for
decades before becoming home to Saks Fifth Avenue, its current resident. No
doubt, the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company would approve of the
suburb's current racial makeup; in 2000, Loewen writes, "its 6,183 residents
included just 18 people living in families with at least one African
American householder." But even that isn't white enough anymore, Loewen
charges: Whites are increasingly fleeing nearly all-white suburbs for
lily-white exurbs, adding sprawl to the already numerous economic,
psychological and sociological tolls of residential segregation.

Much has been written about the history of segregation within American
cities, but this is the first full-length study of places that sought to
exclude African Americans entirely. Loewen's desire to be exhaustive is
therefore understandable. But in this case, exhaustive sometimes means
exhausting. The book would have been more enjoyable to read had Loewen
focused in depth on a few representative sundown towns, teasing out the
history and sociology of the phenomenon in a more narrative, less
textbook-like form.

That said, for its meticulous research and passionate chronicling of the
complex and often shocking history of whites-only communities, Sundown Towns
deserves to become an instant classic in the fields of American race
relations, urban studies and cultural geography. After reading it, you'll
view your own community, and the whole of the American landscape, more
suspiciously -- and rightly so.

Laura Wexler is the author of "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching
in America."

C 2005 The Washington Post Company