Download Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism AudioBook Free
The explosive story of racial exclusion in the north, from the American Book Award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me
As American as apple pie:
• Most suburbs in the United States were actually sundown towns.
• As part of the deepening racism that swept through the United States after 1890, town after town outside the traditional South became intentionally all-white, evicting their black populations with tactics that ranged from intimidation to outright violence.
• From Myakka City, Florida, to Kennewick, Washington, the nation is dotted with a large number of all-white towns that are (or were until recently) all-white on purpose. Sundown towns are available in nearly every state.
"Don't let the sun go down on you in this town." We equate these words with the Jim Crow South but, in a sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, award-winning and bestselling author James W. Loewen demonstrates that strict racial exclusion was typical in American towns and villages from sea to glowing sea for a lot of the twentieth century.
Weaving history, personal narrative, and hard-nosed analysis, Loewen implies that the sundown town was—and is—an American organization with a powerful and disturbing record of its, told here for the very first time. In Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, sundown towns were created in waves of violence in the early decades of the twentieth century, and then maintained well into the modern era.
Sundown Towns redraws the map of race relations, extending the lines of racial oppression through the backyard of millions of Americans—and lobbing an intellectual hands grenade into the debates over race and racism today.
