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Book Reviews
Exclusion and Execution: Controlling America's Black Population
LOEWEN, JAMES W. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. New York: New Press, 2005. x + 562 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-56584-887-X.
PFEIFER, MICHAEL J. Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. x + 245 pp. Introduction, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-252-02917-8.
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Whether it is collective amnesia or collective ignorance, there is little question that only a small percentage of the U.S. population is aware of the full arsenal of strategies that has been used throughout the nation's history to terrorize and subjugate its black population. In contrast, a firm belief in the national myth of freedom, justice, and equal opportunity is widely celebrated. As a result of this disturbing situation, we should not be surprised that a sophisticated understanding of current racial tensions and inequalities in America is difficult to achieve. Sundown Towns by James W. Loewen and Rough Justice by Michael J. Pfeifer1 lay bare two very different forms of racial oppression that have been used to maintain white supremacy in the U.S. and thereby help us to understand the roots of our continuing racial divide. |
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James W. Loewen is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Vermont. He has written extensively on matters concerning race and social history, including his well-known book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. In Sundown Towns, Loewen pulls a skeleton out of our national closet, and those bones are downright frightening. He tells a troubling story of the extensive practice of whites expelling and excluding blacks from America's counties, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. He refers to these racially cleansed locations as "sundown" areas because of the common practice of placing a sign at the city limits that warned blacks to leave before nightfall. Loewen claims that such sundown areas were found more frequently outside of the South, that they were quite common through at least the 1960s, and that they still exist, although the strategies for creating and maintaining them have changed. |
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Most American probably associate ethnic cleansing with the brutal practice employed by Serbs during the Balkan War or more recently by Iraqi Shiites against Iraqi Sunnis. Yet the attempted extermination and forced relocation of Native Americans, as well as the imprisonment of West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, demonstrate all too well that the concept is not foreign to the U.S. Loewen's thorough and careful documentation of the strategies used by American whites to completely prevent American blacks from residing in certain areas illuminates yet another embarrassing example of domestic ethnic cleansing. Reference to instances in which entire black populations were driven from towns or counties are sprinkled throughout the literature on the history of U.S. race relations. But the complete story had not been told before the publication of Sundown Towns. |
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