You're listening to All the Backlist, a week we show about books that are not new.

I'm your host Kelly Jensen, and this is the June 10th, 2022 edition, and today I'm

going to tell you about two very different nonfiction titles that, despite being different,

have a lot of really interesting, similar themes to one another.

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So, first is Sundown Towns by James Lohan. I am really fascinated by small town history,

and last year went down a rabbit hole about Cairo, Illinois. It's a really depressed town

at the bottom of the state, and it has a really terrible racial history.

This is stuff that I knew, but reading about it and thinking about Isabel Wilkerson's the

warmth of other sons, she specifically wrote about Cairo, and she wrote about

Cicero, Illinois, too, which is a town not far from where I am. And these things came together in my

head, and finally pushed me to pick up a book that both had referenced at some point, and that book

is Sundown Towns. So, Sundown Towns, if the term is new to you, are places where black people

couldn't theory live and work during the day, but if they did not leave town before the sunset,

it was possible, and in a lot of cases likely, they would not come out alive. These towns

emerged in an era when black families began to migrate north from southern states, and for the

most part, these towns existed in northern states. They were everywhere, but the bulk of them

were in the north, not in what Lohan calls a traditional south. Illinois was one of the worst,

and one of the most prolific where these towns were, including the notorious town of Anna,

Lohan offers a look at that town in depth, as well as several other Illinois towns as he himself

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