It will ALSO affect how you think of current events. This book will change the way you view your own town, not to mention our country.

There is little more important in life than where you live (it relates to job opportunities, schooling for your children, social status, safety, crime and overall health). Their homogeneity relates to their continued segregation and prejudice. The overall socio-economic disparity of blacks versus whites in this country can be connected to these sundown towns. Secondly, he does not just make a case for the history of these events and he doesn't just examine how they existed and spread throughout mostly the NORTH of our country, he also strongly links this history of racism to effects in our daily lives TODAY. To this day we live in a world shaped by the policies of these Sundown Towns. On top of that, his research is impeccable and the stories of violence, arson, lynchings and non-violent attempts to drive whole groups of people from whole areas of our country is staggering. I never thought of the overwhelmingly white towns and suburbs I have traveled through in my life as having a history of being 'all white on purpose', but I have been to some of the places he discusses.

Loewen uncovers and discusses is staggering. The thousands of towns and whole counties that Mr.

FIrst, I studied history in school and yet I had never heard of this pervasive and systemic history of racism in America. I read a lot (thanks Audible!) and I have many books I have recommended because they were informative and surprising, many because they were simply entertaining, but I have rarely called a book 'important'. 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. Many people have a cartoonish view of what racism is, that it must be overt and blatant to qualify.

This book is inportant in that it helps us remember exactly how racist we were and may still be. 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. Primary documents along with first hand accounts of whites living during the time solidify the authors claims. 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.

Sundown Towns by James W. Loewen