whites-only towns

Suburbanization stemmed from many forces, as Loewen demonstrates, but it was almost always interwoven with the struggle to create racially and culturally homogenous communities that might aptly be called “sundown suburbs.”

As Loewen shrewdly notes, “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.”

Everywhere we look, we see the long shadow of our racist past in the re-segregation of our public schools and the growing isolation of the poorest African Americans in impoverished inner cities, in the continuing wealth and income gap between black and white, and in the unconscionable explosion of a “prison-industrial complex” that incarcerates millions of black men, consigning them to a lifetime in the shadows of our society.

Today, most of these purges are forgotten except in the occasional garbled recollections of locals who describe them as regrettable but necessary responses to black provocation.

Today, most of these purges are forgotten except in the occasional garbled recollections of locals who describe them as regrettable but necessary responses to black provocation.

By training Loewen is a sociologist (he is also a Unitarian Universalist), but he deftly addresses racial tensions in the changing historical context of the Civil War and post–Civil War years.

Touchstone, 2006.

I recalled encountering scattered references to “sundown towns” in state and regional histories and in reminiscences and oral histories, but their existence seemed an aberration.

By the 1880s, white support for black rights faded even as new and more virulent forms of racism emerged across the nation.

Similar documents were ubiquitous in communities across the nation.

Combining violence and economic coercion, these self-styled “redeemers” overthrew the biracial Reconstruction governments and went on to create a new post-slavery racial hierarchy founded upon the disenfranchisement of black men, legal segregation in all aspects of public and civic life, and a fierce insistence upon white supremacy in every private interaction between black and white.

One attorney said dismissively that the provision wasn’t “legally enforceable”—as though its continued existence was not a tacit endorsement of the community’s all-white status.

James Loewen certainly makes that case with remarkable tenacity and a mountain of statistical and documentary evidence.

But restrictive covenants were the keystone to establishing this new suburban apartheid.

In the view of northern whites, freedmen and freedwomen were transformed from the hapless and innocent victims of slavery to a “lazy and dangerous rabble,” innately inferior and a threat to racial purity.

Often, however, some precipitating event—usually the accusation that a black person had assaulted a white man or raped a white woman—sent the white community into a frenzy.

Combining violence and economic coercion, these self-styled “redeemers” overthrew the biracial Reconstruction governments and went on to create a new post-slavery racial hierarchy founded upon the disenfranchisement of black men, legal segregation in all aspects of public and civic life, and a fierce insistence upon white supremacy in every private interaction between black and white.

Everywhere we look, we see the long shadow of our racist past in the re-segregation of our public schools and the growing isolation of the poorest African Americans in impoverished inner cities, in the continuing wealth and income gap between black and white, and in the unconscionable explosion of a “prison-industrial complex” that incarcerates millions of black men, consigning them to a lifetime in the shadows of our society.

After seventy-five years of silence, the citizens of Oklahoma staged a series of events acknowledging the 1921 Tulsa race riot in which white mobs systematically torched that city’s black district and killed as many as 300 African Americans, destroying thirty-five square blocks and forcing thousands of men, women, and children into barbed-wire holding pens for eight days before a national outcry forced their release.

I can see how readers of Sundown Towns might well try to distance themselves from these sordid stories.

“Every nation,” wrote the nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernest Renan, “is a community both of shared memory and of shared forgetting,” what British statesman William Gladstone called “a blessed act of oblivion” that allows old adversaries to put aside past grievances and live together in peace.

By David W. Blight.

I recalled encountering scattered references to “sundown towns” in state and regional histories and in reminiscences and oral histories, but their existence seemed an aberration.

Home / Ideas / Forgotten story of America's whites-only towns

James Loewen documents the rise of 'sundown towns' and their enduring legacy.

In Where These Memories Grow , thirteen historians of the American South described the ways whites in the region created a mythological past in which white-on-black violence disappeared (or was justified) and benevolent whites struggled to help the troublesome blacks who surrounded them.

Combining violence and economic coercion, these self-styled “redeemers” overthrew the biracial Reconstruction governments and went on to create a new post-slavery racial hierarchy founded upon the disenfranchisement of black men, legal segregation in all aspects of public and civic life, and a fierce insistence upon white supremacy in every private interaction between black and white.

Although census numbers document the dispersion of black Americans into the North through the 1880s and their subsequent disappearance from hundreds of small communities over the next half-century, I reacted skeptically as I began reading Sundown Towns .

Suburbanization stemmed from many forces, as Loewen demonstrates, but it was almost always interwoven with the struggle to create racially and culturally homogenous communities that might aptly be called “sundown suburbs.”

There is no doubt that the overt discriminatory practices of an earlier era have declined significantly, so much so that most white Americans reject the notion that racial discrimination lies at the heart of the hyper-segregation of today’s suburbs.