When Signs Said 'Get Out'

"I thought I was going to discover maybe 10 such towns in Illinois and maybe 50 across the country," he says. "And I've confirmed 204 in Illinois and, in the country, thousands."

What he stumbled on, he says, is a little-known history of an American variety of ethnic cleansing. But other experts say Loewen may be overstating his case.

The Great Retreat

"I had an Aha! moment," says Loewen, 63, sitting in his living room in Northeast near Catholic University. "It was October of 2001. I was speaking in my home town in Decatur."

Loewen, a retired sociology professor who taught at Tougaloo College, a historically black school in Mississippi, and at the University of Vermont, traveled to Decatur, Ill., to lecture on the most famous of his six books: "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong," a liberal critique of American history textbooks that has sold more than 800,000 copies since it was published in 1995.

"When I finished [speaking], I said, 'Now I'm working on a new book about sundown towns, and if you know anything about that, would you come down afterwards and talk about it?' " he says.

"To my astonishment, 20 people trooped down and they told me all kinds of stuff about every town around Decatur. Growing up, I knew those towns were all white, but I didn't give it a second thought. But it turns out that almost every one of those towns was all-white on purpose ."

After researching a century of census data, Loewen, who is white, concluded that his home state was part of a national trend that he calls "The Great Retreat."

After the Civil War, he says, newly freed slaves migrated all over America. In 1890, African Americans lived in all but 119 of America's thousands of counties. But by 1930, 235 American counties had no black residents and 694 other counties has fewer than 10 black residents.

What happened?

Starting around 1890, Loewen says, scores of rural towns in the West and Midwest began expelling black people.

Sometimes, the triggering event was violence: In Henryetta, Okla., in 1907, a black man was accused of killing a white man in a dispute. A white mob lynched the suspect, then drove the rest of the town's black residents away.

Sometimes, the triggering event was a labor dispute: When white coal miners in Pana, Ill., went on strike in 1898, the mine owners hired black strikebreakers and the whites rioted, driving all black people out of town.