Sundown Towns

A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

By: James Loewen

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Sundown Towns examines thousands of all-white American towns that were - and still are, in some instances - racially exclusive by design.

Professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, James W. Loewen won the National Book Award for his New York Times best seller Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

©2005 James W. Loewen (P)2008 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Deserves to become an instant classic in the fields of American race relations, urban studies and cultural geography." ( Washington Post Book World)
"Sure to become a landmark in several fields and a sure bet among Loewen's many fans." ( Publishers Weekly)

An unsettling, heartbeakng, very important work

that ends, thankfully, on hopeful notes with thoughtful ideas for action. I heard things about neighborhoods near my home town that were painful, but I also heard things that help me look at the diversity in my current neighborhood with hope for the future.

Explains why people sometimes live where they do

What other book might you compare Sundown Towns to and why?

Lies My Teacher told Me

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

This book changed the way I thought about American towns and the geography of race. Loewen's work is phenomenal and a compelling read. Eye-opening and something every American should read.

A required audiobook.

This book was a meticulous study into how blacks were treated in the north after about the 1890's when much of the gains made after emancipation began to reverse themselves and blacks, although free, found themselves in encreasinly hostile territory as a result of white backlash. Primary documents along with first hand accounts of whites living during the time solidify the authors claims. It would be better to listen to this along with the actual book inorder that one may refer to the extensive notes that are not in the audio version.

This book is inportant in that it helps us remember exactly how racist we were and may still be. Many people have a cartoonish view of what racism is, that it must be overt and blatant to qualify. However, although racism was quite overt in the period covered in this book, one can see how racism became more covert and subtle in recent times and how it hides in the structural and institutional realities today.

A book not for the faint of heart.

Enlightening and Powerful

This book taught me more about growing up in a sundown town than anything else I have read. As children, we had no idea that our town was White by design, except that our fifth grade teacher, a nun, told us that an unwritten law in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, kept Black people from being allowed to stay overnight. She had read that in the New York Times. My mother told me, when I asked, that she remembered a law against Asians, which was on the books into the 1930s, according to Loewen. Everyone in the US needs to learn this history, meticulously documented by Loewen.

If they only knew their own history

… the country would function so much differently! It’s no wonder based on this analysis that Africsn Americans are t far worse off than they are… how do we create some 250+ years of race based policy and then want to say a rising tide…