Join us for Sundown Towns water cooler

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July 21, 2008 | |

We're pleased to announce the summer selection for our Everyday Democracy Book Club - Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. The author of the book, James W. Loewen, will join us to discuss the book at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, July 23, right here at DemocracySpace.org.

Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about Sundown Towns in its starred review:

According to bestselling sociologist Loewen: "something significant has been left out of the broad history of race in America as it is usually taught," namely the establishment between 1890 and 1968 of thousands of "sundown towns" that systematically excluded African-Americans from living within their borders. Located mostly outside the traditional South, these towns employed legal formalities, race riots, policemen, bricks, fires and guns to produce homogeneously Caucasian communities—and some of them continue such unsavory practices to this day.

Loewen's eye-opening history traces the sundown town's development and delineates the extent to which state governments and the federal government, "openly favor[ed] white supremacy" from the 1930s through the 1960s, "helped to create and maintain all-white communities" through their lending and insuring policies. "While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North... they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county," Loewen points out. The expulsion forced African-Americans into urban ghettoes and continues to have ramifications on the lives of whites, blacks and the social system at large.

You can order Sundown Towns from your local bookseller, find it in many libraries, or buy it online here, here, or here.  Read the book, then be here at Democracy Space.org at 1 p.m. Eastern on July 23 as we join author James  W. Loewen for a discussion of Sundown Towns.