Sundown town
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Part of a series of articles on Racial segregation |
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Sundown towns, sometimes known as sunset towns or gray towns, are all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practice a form of segregation by enforcing restrictions excluding people of other races via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence. The term came from signs that were posted stating that coloured people had to leave the town by sundown. Since the Supreme Court's 1917 ruling in Buchanan v. Warley, racial discrimination in housing sales has been illegal, but lingering racial prejudice against non-white residents remains in certain communities to this day.
Some communities placed at their borders signs with statements similar to the one posted in Hawthorne, California, in the 1930s, which read: "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne".James W. Loewen, the Washington, D.C.-based author, told The Washington Post in 2006 he found reports of thousands of such places, and sometimes, the sign makers tried to get clever. Some came in a series, like the old Burma-Shave signs, saying: " . . . If You Can Read . . . You'd Better Run . . . If You Can't Read . . . You'd Better Run Anyway."
During the nadir of American race relations post Civil War, about 1890-1940, many thousands of towns became sundown towns. African-Americans, who had lived predominantly in rural areas in the northern states, moved to major urban centers that were not sundown towns. Towns in the southern states, where many of the workers were African-Americans, were less often sundown towns.
In some 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 a number of ways, including harassment by law enforcement officers.
Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and especially since the Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibited racial discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing, the number of sundown towns has decreased. However, as sociologist James W. Loewen writes in his book on the subject, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005), it is impossible to precisely count 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 notes that hundreds of cities across America have been sundown towns at some point in their history.
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