It’s not that I was surprised by his account of widespread racism in the North. The only thing unusual about the history of Sand Mountain is its location: The overwhelming majority of sundown towns were in the North.Īlthough census numbers document the dispersion of black Americans into the North through the 1880s and their subsequent disappearance from hundreds of small communities over the next half-century, I reacted skeptically as I began reading Sundown Towns. But in his richly documented account of the hidden history of America’s sundown towns, James Loewen shows that Sand Mountain was one of as many as 3,000 communities where whites expelled African Americans between 18. Living in downtown Atlanta, I considered the isolated communities on Sand Mountain a world apart: Deliverance country, the land of hillbillies, snake-handlers, and inbred family trees.

I wasn’t surprised when my wife recounted the conversation. When she mentioned that she noticed there were no black people in the facility or the nearby communities, one of the older residents told her of a sign that had been posted for years on the main highway at the foot of the mountain: “Nigger don’t let the sun set on you on Sand Mountain.” Although the sign had been removed, she acknowledged, Sand Mountain remained a place where no black people were allowed after dark: a “sundown town.” In the 1980s my wife, a social worker, visited a nursing home on Sand Mountain, a large mountainous plateau in north Georgia that stretches westward into northeastern Alabama.

Mountain town the long dark