Sundown Towns - Racism In The North

[Thank God my generation -- reaching maturity in the '60s -- didn't experience the dark, vile racism of earlier years. (Growing up in an all-white Canada -- except for Natives, which is another ugly story for another time -- I don't think I ever saw a black-skinned person until a black family moved in next door to us in about 1960.) I also knew few Americans; an American family lived across the street from us when I was about 10, and there were a few Americans I knew in high school whose parents had moved to Canada to protect the kids from the draft. Ron Thorsen, Mike Caldwell, Frank Cain ...

My first real experience of Americans was my U.S. immersion when Jeff Clifford and I hitch-hiked to California in 1968. The racism was apparent, north and south. I caught a ride with a guy in Washington who was indignant that a law had just been passed that if you offered your house for sale, you had to sell it at that price, even if the buyer was black! Damn it, that lowers property values in the whole neighbourhood! A man shouldn't be forced to sell to a buyer he didn't like!

According to the review, this book reveals the ugly fact of racism in the North, which in some ways was worse than it was in the South: a novel and interesting position.]


Darkness on the Edge of Town

A bold book argues that thousands of American towns were deliberately kept whites-only.

SUNDOWN TOWNS

A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

By James W. Loewen

In Oct. 2001, James W. Loewen stopped at a convenience store in the small Illinois town of Anna -- a name that, as a store clerk confirmed, stands for "Ain't No Niggers Allowed."