Sundown towns, also known as sunset towns, gray towns, or sundowner towns, are all-
white municipalities or neighborhoods in the
United States and
Canada that were most prevalent before the mid-20th century, which practiced a form of
racial segregation by excluding non-whites via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation or violence. The term came into use because of signs that directed "
colored people" to leave town by
sundown.[1][2]
Entire sundown counties[3] and sundown suburbs were created as well. While the number of sundown towns decreased following the civil rights movement[clarification needed], some commentators hold that certain 21st-century practices perpetuate a modified version of the sundown town.[4][5]
Discriminatory policies and actions distinguish sundown towns from towns that have no black residents for demographic reasons. Historically, towns have been confirmed as sundown towns by newspaper articles, county histories, and
Works Progress Administration files; this information has been corroborated by tax or
U.S. census records showing an absence of black people or a sharp drop in the black population between two censuses.[6][3][7]
History
The earliest legal restrictions on the nighttime activities and movements of
African Americans and other racial minorities date back to the
colonial era. The
general court and legislative assembly of
New Hampshire passed "An Act To Prevent Disorders In The Night" in 1714:[8][9]
Whereas great disorders, insolencies and burglaries are oft times raised and committed in the night time by Indian, Negro, and Molatto Servants and Slaves to the Disquiet and hurt of her Majesty's subjects, No Indian, Negro, or Molatto is to be from Home after 9 o'clock.
Notices emphasizing and re-affirming the curfew were published in The New Hampshire Gazette in 1764 and 1771.[8] Following the
American Revolution,
Virginia was the first state to prohibit the entry of all
Free Negros.[10] According to historian Kate Masur, American laws restricting where Black people could live drew inspiration from the
English Poor Laws, which were implemented in the
Kingdom of England during the
Tudor period to restrict the movements of England's poor. These laws, which were implemented to ensure that municipal authorities were under no legal obligation to care for
vagrants, proved to be a source of inspiration for American officials who aimed to prevent Black Americans from settling in their communities.[10]
Following the end of the
Reconstruction era, thousands of towns and counties across the United States became sundown localities, as part of the imposition of
Jim Crow laws and other segregationist practices. In most cases, the exclusion was official town policy or was promulgated by the community's real estate agents via
exclusionary covenants governing who could buy or rent property. In others, the policy was enforced through intimidation. This intimidation could occur in several ways, including harassment by law enforcement officers.[11] Though widely believed to be a thing of the past—racially restrictive covenants were struck down by the
Supreme Court in its 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer decision—many hundreds of towns continue to effectively exclude black people and other minorities in the 21st century.[5]
In 1844,
Oregon, which had banned slavery,
banned African Americans from the territory altogether. Those who failed to leave could expect to receive lashings under a law known as the "Peter Burnett Lash Law", named for Provisional Supreme Judge
Peter Burnett. No persons were ever lashed under the law; it was quickly amended to replace lashing with forced labor, and eventually repealed the following year after a change in the makeup of the legislature.[12][13] However, additional laws aimed at African Americans entering Oregon were ratified in 1849 and 1857, the last of which was not repealed until 1926.[14][15][16] This law in Oregon was the foreshadowing of future laws restricting where minorities could live, not only in Oregon but in other jurisdictions.
Outside Oregon, other places looked to laws and legislation to restrict black people from residing within cities, towns and states.[17] In 1853, new black residents were banned from moving to the state of Illinois. Those new residents who remained more than ten days, were caught in the state, and were unable to pay the fine were to be punished by being sold at auction and in effect enslaved for a temporary period to work off the fine. Although this law faced significant resistance, especially in Illinois' small black community, it was not repealed until the end of the Civil War in 1865.[18] Similar bans on all black migration were passed in Michigan, Ohio and Iowa.[19]
New laws were enacted in the 20th century. One example is
Louisville, Kentucky, whose mayor proposed a law in 1911 that would restrict black people from owning property in certain parts of the city.[20] This city ordinance reached public attention when it was challenged in the
U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Buchanan v. Warley in 1917. Ultimately, the court decided that the laws passed in Louisville were unconstitutional, thus setting the legal precedent that similar laws could not exist or be passed in the future.[20] However, this one legal victory did not stop towns from developing into sundown towns. City planners and real estate companies used their power and authority to ensure that white communities remained white, and black communities remained black. These were private individuals making decisions to personally benefit themselves, their companies' profits, or their cities' alleged safety, so their methods in creating sundown towns were often ignored by the courts.[21] In addition to unfair housing rules, citizens turned to violence and harassment in making sure that black people would not remain in their cities after sundown.[22] Whites in the North felt that their way of life was threatened by the increased minority populations moving into their neighborhoods, and racial tensions started to build. This often boiled over into violence, sometimes extreme, such as the
1943 Detroit race riot.[23]
Since the
civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and especially since the
Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibition of
racial discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of housing, the number of sundown towns has decreased. However, as sociologist
James W. Loewen wrote in his 2005 book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, it is impossible to count precisely the number of sundown towns at any given time because most towns have not kept records of the ordinances or signs that marked the town's sundown status. He further noted that hundreds of cities across America have been sundown towns at some point in their history.[24]
Additionally, Loewen wrote that sundown status meant more than just African Americans being unable to live in those towns. Any black people who entered or were found in sundown towns after sunset were subject to harassment, threats and violence, including
lynching.[24]
The U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education declared
segregation of schools unconstitutional in 1954. Loewen argued that the case caused some municipalities in the South to become sundown towns:
Missouri,
Tennessee and
Kentucky saw drastic drops in African-American populations living in those states following the decision.[3]
In 2019, sociologist Heather O'Connell wrote that sundown towns are "(primarily) a thing of the past",[25] but writer
Morgan Jerkins disagreed, saying: "Sundown towns have never gone away."[4] Historian
James W. Loewen notes persisting effects of sundown towns' violently enforced segregation even after they may have been integrated to a small degree, a phenomenon he called "second-generation sundown towns."[4]
Function
Ethnic exclusions
African Americans were not the only minority group not allowed to live in white towns. One example, according to Loewen, is that, in 1870, Chinese people made up one-third of
Idaho's population. Following a wave of violence and an 1886 anti-Chinese convention in
Boise, almost none remained by 1910.[24]: 51
The towns of
Minden and
Gardnerville in Nevada had an ordinance from 1917 to 1974 that required
Native Americans to leave the towns by 6:30 p.m. each day.[26] A whistle, later a siren, was sounded at 6 p.m. daily, alerting Native Americans to leave by sundown.[24]: 23 [26] In 2021, the state of Nevada passed a law prohibiting the appropriation of Native American imagery by the mascots of schools, and the sounding of sirens that were once associated with sundown ordinances. Despite this law, Minden continued to play its siren for two more years, claiming that it was a nightly tribute to
first responders.[27][28][29][30] An additional state law in 2023 led Minden to end the siren.[31]
Two examples of the numerous road signs documented during the first half of the 20th century include:[33]
In Colorado: "No Mexicans After Night"
In Connecticut: "Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark"
In her 2011 article "Preemption, Patchwork Immigration Laws, and the Potential for Brown Sundown Towns" in the Fordham Law Review, Maria Marulanda outlines the possibility for non-blacks to be excluded from towns in the United States. She argues that immigration laws and ordinances in certain municipalities could create situations similar to those experienced by African Americans in sundown towns. Hispanic Americans are likely to suffer, despite the purported target being undocumented immigrants, in these cases of racial exclusion.[34]
From 1851 to at least 1876,
Antioch, California had a sundown ordinance that barred Chinese residents from being out in public after dark.[35] In 1876, white residents drove the Chinese out of town and then burned down the Chinatown section of the city.[35]
Described by former
NAACP President
Julian Bond as "one of the survival tools of segregated life",[38]The Negro Motorist Green Book (at times titled The Negro Traveler's Green Book or The Negro Motorist Green-Book, and commonly referred to simply as the "Green Book") was an annual segregation-era guidebook for African American motorists, published by New York travel agent and former
Hackensack, New Jersey, letter carrier
Victor H. Green.[38] It was published in the United States from 1936 to 1966, during the
Jim Crow era, when discrimination against non-whites was widespread.[39][40]
Road trips for African Americans were fraught with inconveniences and dangers because of racial segregation, racial profiling by police, the phenomenon of travelers just "disappearing", and the existence of numerous sundown towns. According to author Kate Kelly, "there were at least 10,000 'sundown towns' in the United States as late as the 1960s; in a 'sundown town' nonwhites had to leave the city limits by dusk, or they could be picked up by the police or worse. These towns were not limited to the South—they ranged from
Levittown, N.Y., to
Glendale, Calif.,[41] and included the majority of municipalities in
Illinois." The Green Book also advised drivers to wear, or have ready, a chauffeur's cap and, if stopped, relate that "they were delivering a car for a white person."[38]
On June 7, 2017, the NAACP issued a warning to prospective African-American travelers to Missouri. This is the first NAACP warning ever covering an entire state.[42] The NAACP conference president suggested that, if prospective African-American travelers must go to Missouri, they travel with
bail money in hand.[43]
Sundown suburbs
Many suburban areas in the United States were incorporated following the establishment of
Jim Crow laws. The majority of suburbs were made up of all white residents from the time they were first created. Most sundown suburbs were created between 1906 and 1968. By 1970, at the peak of the Civil Rights era, some sundown suburbs had already begun to desegregate. Harassment and inducements contributed to keeping African Americans out of new suburban areas.[44]
Gentleman's Agreement (1947), is known as "the only feature film [of its era] to treat sundown towns seriously."[24]: 14 However, it dealt with a town that excluded Jewish people rather than black people. According to James W. Loewen, "The anti-Nazi ideology opened more sundown suburbs to Jews than to African Americans... Gentleman's Agreement,
Elia Kazan's 1948 Academy Award-winning movie [exposed]
Darien, Connecticut, as an anti-Jewish sundown town."[24]: 394
In her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), poet
Maya Angelou describes Mississippi as inhospitable to African Americans after dark: "Don't let the sun set on you here nigger, Mississippi."[46]
Oprah Winfrey visited
Forsyth County, Georgia, on a 1987 episode of her television show following the
1987 Forsyth County protests. The protests stemmed from continued racial conflict and reputation as a sundown-town area into the 1960s, following the expulsion of African Americans in the 1920s.[3]
Trouble Behind (1991), a documentary by
Robby Henson, examines the history and legacy of racism in
Corbin, Kentucky, a small railroad community noteworthy both as the home of
Colonel Sanders'
Kentucky Fried Chicken and for "its race riots of 1919, during which over two hundred blacks were loaded onto boxcars and shipped out of town." The film aired at the 1991
Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize.[47][48][49]
In the first episode of the 2020 television series Lovecraft Country (2020) (TV series based on the 2016 book written by
Matt Ruff). The protagonists embarking on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America are pulled over by a police officer who informs them they are in a "sundown county" and threatens that they could be lynched if they don't leave the county before sundown.[57][58]
^
abLoewen, James William (2006).
"Sundown Towns Today". Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. New York City:
The New Press.
ISBN9781620974544. During the last few years while I have been doing the research for this book, many people have asked, after learning that hundreds or thousands of sundown towns and suburbs dot the map of the United States, "Still? Surely it's not like that today?"
^Taylor, Quintard (Summer 1982). "Slaves and Free Men: Blacks in the Oregon Country, 1840-1860". Oregon Historical Society Quarterly (83). Portland, Oregon:
Oregon Historical Society: 155.
^Mcclintock, Thomas C. (1995). "James Saules, Peter Burnett, and the Oregon Black Exclusion Law of June 1844". The Pacific Northwest Quarterly. 86 (3): 121–130.
JSTOR40491550.
^"Black Exclusion Laws in Oregon". oregonencyclopedia.org. Portland State University and Oregon Historical Society. Retrieved 15 August 2017.
^Gotham, Kevin Fox (2000). "Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants and the Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a US City, 1900–50". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 24 (3): 616–633.
doi:
10.1111/1468-2427.00268.
^Higley, Stephen R. (1995). Privilege, Power, and Place: The Geography of the American Upper Class. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 61–63.
ISBN978-0-8476-8021-4.
^Durham, Joseph T. (Spring 2006). "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism". Negro Educational Review. 57 (1/2): 137–140.
ProQuest219038563.
^Victor H. Green (2 November 2016).
"The Negro Motorist Green-Book". America On the Move. ((United States Travel Bureau)) (1940 ed.). New York City.
^Green, Victor H., ed. (1940).
The Negro Motorist Green-Book. New York: Victor H. Green & Co. – via New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.