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Sundown town, a town that excludes African Americans from living in it. Many towns went sundown after expelling black populations though most sundown towns did not have significant black populations to begin with. A partial listing is available at Category:Sundown towns in the United States.
A sundown town is an all-White community that shows or has shown hostility toward non-Whites. Sundown town practices may be evoked in the form of city ordinances barring people of color after dark, exclusionary covenants for housing opportunity, signage warning ethnic groups to vacate, unequal treatment by local law enforcement, and unwritten rules permitting harassment.
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 ...
In the Midwest and West, up to 10,000 "sundown towns" existed across the United States between 1890 and 1960, according to blackpast.org, a website that states it's “dedicated to providing ...
Loewen wrote about sundown towns throughout his career, including in Lies Across America, in which he called the affluent suburb of Darien, Connecticut, a modern-day de facto sundown town. [16] Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. It also gained excellent reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist. The book inspired a ...
When I was growing up near Corbin, Ky., in the 80s, the little town was still grappling with a shameful event that happened decades earlier
By the 1880s, Elwood had become a sundown town, prohibiting Black people from residing within the town. In 1897, when a number of Black families attempted to settle in the town and were driven out, The Evening Times in Washington, D.C., reported that for more than two decades Black people had not been "permitted to remain any length of time."
Free land, costly homes. The idea stretches back to the Homestead Act of 1862: Spur economic growth in rural America by giving away free land to those who will make good use of it.