Sundown Towns

Prevalence of the Practice

Until recently, minimal awareness existed of how widespread this practice was. Local folklore specialists and some state historical societies would document the existence of sundown towns, but generally it was felt to be a limited practice and one that generally ended generations earlier.

Sociologist James T. Loewen became interested in this social phenomenon in 2001 when he was in the small town of Anna, Illinois and confirmed this story: the town's name (which originally had come from the name of a farmer's wife) had evolved to stand for “Ain't No Niggers Allowed.” The practice dated at least from 1909.

[Page 1283]After extensive research, Loewen learned that the majority of all communities outside the Old South barred African Americans except as transients or daytime laborers. In Illinois, for example, about 475 municipalities—70% of all incorporated places—had such a policy, formally or informally. Similar proportions are likely for Oregon, Indiana, and several other Northern states. Whites in the traditional South rarely engaged in the practice; thus Mississippi had only about 6 sundown towns because the African American population played an essential, if marginalized, role in the local economy of the South. Overall, Loewen estimates that at least 3,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 towns of varying size went sundown in the United States, typically in the period between 1890 and 1930.

Sundown towns ranged in population from very small towns of less than 500 to Appleton, Wisconsin, with 57,000 residents in 1970, and Warren, Michigan, with 180,000. Entire counties went sundown, such as Josephine County, Oregon; Washington County, Indiana; and Garrett County, Maryland. Multi-county areas also kept out African Americans, including a 4,000-square-mile area southwest of Fort Worth, Texas; a v-shaped area of more than 2,000 square miles in northeastern Arkansas and the western Missouri boot heel; six adjacent counties in the Appalachians of north Georgia; and a thick band of counties and towns on both sides of the Iowa-Missouri border. Indeed, Loewen has described entire subregions of the United States, such as the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and the suburbs of Los Angeles, that went sundown—not every suburb of Los Angeles, not every county and town in the Ozarks or the Cumberlands, but enough to warrant Loewen to make the generalization.

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