When Signs Said 'Get Out'

In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, banning discrimination in housing, and the Supreme Court ruled in Jones v. Mayer that housing discrimination was unconstitutional. Since then, Loewen says, "sundown towns have been in retreat."

But, he's quick to add, "there are still hundreds of towns where blacks would risk their mental well-being as well as their physical well-being by living in them."

Loewen's book has been favorably reviewed in several newspapers, including this one, but some historians say that he has taken his argument beyond the scope of his evidence.

"Those who are skeptical of Loewen's argument will find plenty of gaps in his research," Thomas J. Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania professor of history and sociology, writes in the liberal magazine the Nation. "Some of his most provocative assertions rest on tiny shards of evidence; in particular, he relies on oral histories and e-mails from residents of sundown towns, making it difficult to differentiate rumor from fact."

Another skeptic is Andrew Wiese, a history professor at San Diego State University whose book on blacks in suburbia, "Places of Their Own," was cited in "Sundown Towns."

"One thing that concerns me is the definition of sundown town, which is a little slippery and shifty," says Wiese. "It conflates places that practiced housing discrimination with places that forcibly kept blacks out after dark.

"What is a sundown town? It's a place that forcibly kept blacks out after dark. But that's different than a place like Scarsdale, New York, where black people could not buy a house but where many lived as gardeners and domestics and were not forced out after dark."

Loewen responds: "I don't think there's a big difference. I think many places where blacks could not buy a house were also places where blacks wouldn't be safe after dark. . . . I think suburbs tended to have a little more finesse [in their racism] but I'm not going to back off."

Unwritten Laws

Loewen searched the United States for sundown signs but found only one. It's in the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Ga. Once posted in an unidentified Connecticut town, its wording is pretty genteel as these things go: "Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark."

Loewen had no better luck finding photographs of sundown signs. They're not the kind of pictures local librarians and historical societies tend to collect.

"I would ask a librarian, 'Do you have any photos of the sundown sign?' " he recalls. "And a typical reply would be, 'Why on earth would we keep that ?' "

But Loewen found abundant evidence of sundown signs in old newspaper stories.