USNews.com: Culture: Sundown towns: No blacks after dark (10/1/05)

USNews.com: Culture: Sundown towns: No blacks after dark (10/1/05): "After uncovering all the Lies My Teacher Told Me as well as Lies Across America, James Loewen, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont, takes on another whopper: that racism is a southern problem. Many towns throughout the nation, and mostly outside of the South, adopted the shameful practice of banning African-Americans at night. In Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism ($30), he explains the roots of the practice in the late 1800s, the violent and cruel ways these towns upheld their 'law,' and the effects today. Loewen, who is white, also explores the similar laws and covenants that kept out Chinese-Americans, Jews, American Indians, and Mexican-Americans.

You'd never heard of a sundown town?

When I was growing up I never heard of them. I was aware that some towns had few if any black folks, but they were often boring towns that I didn't want to live in, and I didn't see why black people would want to live there. I figured it was by choice, but it wasn't.

So you didn't think there were so many of them around?

When I started, I thought I'd have 10 in Illinois because I was focusing my research there and 50 in the whole country, but I found 472 in Illinois and 10,000 across the country.

Whoa.

I would get depressed. It wasn't happy research. I heard that some towns sounded a siren at 6 p.m. each night, and the origin was to tell blacks to get out of town. When I first heard that story, I thought it was an urban legend. But I found enough proof that now I'm suspicious of any town that has a 6 p.m. whistle. Some of them just tell people it's 6 p.m., but originally [some] had a racial connotation."