SUNDOWN TOWNS

Racism still rears it's ugly head.......................PEACE..................Scott


SUNDOWN TOWNS

PETER CARLSON WASHINGTON POST - The signs are gone now but once they
were a part of America's roadside culture, posted along the highway at
the town or county line, a blunt reminder of brutal racism. "Most read
'Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set on You in . . . ,' " says James Loewen,
the Washington-based author of a controversial new book called "Sundown
Towns." . . . Most of the signs were posted in the first half of the
20th century, Loewen says, but some lingered on long afterward. They
were not a Southern phenomenon, he stresses. They were found all over
the United States with local variations: In Colorado: "No Mexicans After
Night.". . . In Connecticut: "Whites Only Within City Limits After
Dark.". . . In Nevada, the ban was expanded to include those the
sign-writers term "Japs."

All told, Loewen says, he found evidence of more than 150 sundown signs
in 31 states. But he wasn't researching the sundown signs. They were
just symbols. He was researching sundown towns, which he defines as
"towns that were all white on purpose." He found lots of them -- far
more than he expected when he began his research in his home state of
Illinois about five years ago. "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."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/20/
AR2006022001590.htm