Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimesion of American Racism; by James W. Loewen.

Anna, IL; Darien, CT; Cedar Key, FL ..... These are some of the names of Sundown Towns, where rule has been that no blacks (or other races for that matter) are allowed after sundown, especially after dark.

Whether the rules were laws or simply unwritten and acted on punctiliously nevertheless is rather unimportant, since the methods of execution included any and every means possible including fraud, lies, and use of legal and law enforcement authorities. Not without their fully willing cooperation, of course. No compunction about using harassment, race riots, even murder, to keep "other" people out.

So obviously a good many white neighborhoods and suburbs are the result not of accidental choices or even real estate prices, but instead it is due to deliberate practices of decades, centuries of racism and segregation, with thousands of all-white towns coming to be between 1890 and 1968, and the years mentioned are notable as in shortly after the end of post civil war occupation of the south when southern states regained their autonomy back to the sixties when civil rights movements took strength and Kennedy brothers were murdered amongs many others who died in fighting for the anti racist movements.

Many of these towns still continue to exist today - the last I heard of one was within less than a decade ago, a really posh suburb of southern California on the seashore that "sees to it" that blacks are kept out, whether as residents or casual passing by cars.

The other time I could have had a clue about this was when a few decades ago - again - in southern California, in a backwater university town, a student openly declared she would never live in Los Angeles, and it was only when she repeated it that I desultorily asked why, which is when she quite candidly said, without any thought to how it sounds, that it was because LA was full of blacks.

I remember distancing myself - and losing a relatively better paid job in a very short while, perhaps due to her reporting to those in authority of such matters in exchange for ensuring a better career for herself (the university was downright discriminatory when it came to women, and she could not get a professor to ask her a question when everyone was aware that she knew most answers better than her male classmates) that all in all I was clearly unsympathetic to the southern Cause (southern California is often more South than west, at that) and hence the authorities deciding I was undesirable after all, pretty much as my predecessor had been. Looks are not the all of it, one needs the right attitude as well to prosper in these places. If one can stand living there that is.

Sundown Towns tells the story of how these towns came to be, what (who?) maintains them, and so forth, about US social tapestry.