On Oct. 5, Sinclair Community College hosted a discussion on sundown towns in America. Chief Diversity Officer Michael Carter (who recently won the Outstanding Diversity Champion Award from the Dayton Business Journal) hosted the discussion and Dr. Ross Coen was the guest speaker. Dr. Coen has a Ph.d. in history and teaches at the University of Washington.
Sundown towns were communities made only of white residents due to the forced exclusion of black people. In most cases they were suburbs or neighborhoods within larger cities and fewer than 25,000 people. Some communities also deliberately excluded Native Americans, Mexicans, Asians (particularly people from Japan and China), Jewish people, and Catholics. The term ‘sundown town’ refers to the fact that while it might be acceptable for people of color to be in a certain town during the day, “The expression was ‘to not let the sun set on you in this town,’” Dr. Coen said.
It is difficult to say how many of these towns existed, but it is estimated there were as many as 10,000 in the Midwest, the North, and the West. There were none in the South.
“The mechanism to restrict black movement in the South had such a long history and was so entrenched in other forms, beginning with antebellum slavery,” Dr. Coen said. “There were these other formalized, entrenched, institutionalized forms of oppression.”
In the South, there was no need for sundown towns. Additionally, black labor was so important in the South it would have been economically damaging to exclude black people in southern towns.
Sundown towns arose during the late 19th century and early 20th century, as part of black Americans leaving the south during the Great Migration. The end of Reconstruction (1863-1877) gave rise to the KKK, Jim Crow laws, and lynchings in the 1890s, and black people moved from the south to escape those things and for economic opportunity. As many as 1 million migrated in a 50 year period after Reconstruction and until the post World War II period. But yet, there are thousands of suburbs and entire towns in this country that are almost entirely white. The only explanation is that black people were systematically driven out.
“You can quantify this with a basic statistics analysis,” Dr. Coen said.
In the year 1890, black residents lived in towns all over the country but 40 years later in 1930, those same towns had basically zero black residents.
“There was some deliberate, forced mechanism by which African Americans were prohibited from settling in those communities,” Dr. Coen said. “Often sundown towns would come into being by white-led riots in which African Americans were directly forced to flee for their lives.”
This would then result in the destruction of their homes and their businesses, and sometimes their murders. Other times, it was simply the police or regular citizens taking it upon themselves to make sure no person of color remained within the city limits at nightfall, often accompanied by beatings. There were signs that announced the town as all white.
“Anna, Illinois is representative of many sundown towns where the instigating act that lead to the exclusion of black people was a real or perceived criminal act by a black man of a murder or rape of a white woman,” Dr. Coen said. “This led to this fury and mob mentality which led to forcibly driving black people from that community.”
In 1909 in Anna, Illinois, a white woman was found dead and a black man named William James was arrested, but it’s not clear if there was any real evidence against him. An angry mob stormed the jail and James was lynched, and the town kicked all black people out. The town is predominantly white to this day.
“This sort of thing repeated itself again and again and again,” Dr. Coen said. In Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and elsewhere.
“Many of these people were scapegoated,” said Carter. “There was no evidence that the person committed the crime.”
Most sundown towns deliberately hid the means in which they remained all white. This is why so many people aren’t familiar with them. There are very few surviving historical records of sundown towns because there were few actual laws passed. Communities realized that this racial hostility would be damaging to their economic and civic health, and that mentality remains today.
“Many individuals do not know that they were born and raised in a sundown town,” Dr. Coen said.
Coen himself is from a small town in North Dakota where only one black family lived for a few years. He doesn’t have evidence that it was a sundown, but he believes that it’s very likely.
The cities of Marion and Fairborn in Ohio have been documented as sundown towns.
So many sundown towns have gone completely unnoticed because nothing happened there; no murders, no destruction of property, no forcing out black people who lived there. Some towns were always white and made every effort to remain that way. Documenting the history of those towns is much more difficult. There are also very few books on sundown towns compared to books on segregations and lynchings. Historian and sociologist James Loewen died in August of this year. He introduced America to sundown towns on a large scale and “literally wrote the book on this topic,” according to Dr. Coen.
A postal worker from New York named Victor Green wrote a travel guide for black people called “The Green Book,” which outlined safe places for African Americans to stay the night or get a meal and communities to avoid.
“The Green Book was an essential guide to provide for their safety,” said Dr. Coen. “It was used by an estimated 2 million black travelers in this county.”
The legacy of sundown towns has had a direct and long lasting effect on African Americans. There is a direct line to the ghettoization of large urban centers such as Detroit, Chicago, and Gary, Ind. These cities isolate people of color and cut off economic opportunity which has built over generations. Black people were prevented from renting and buying homes in sundown towns; black home ownership is much lower than white ownership today.
“All white communities perpetuate the stereotypes on which the sundown towns were founded in the first place,” Dr. Coen said.
When people lack any connections, interactions, or professional relationships with people of color, it reinforces racial stereotypes that are based on group identity rather than individual identity, leading to dehumanization.
For America to tell a story of progress, our racist history has to be perceived as far in the past. We tell the story of slavery and segregation because these things don’t exist anymore but there are still all white communities all over this county, even though there are no signs or laws that prevent black people from living there. It makes white Americans uncomfortable when faced with the fact that racist things are still happening today. They tend to perceive this as a personal attack on themselves but when the structure of society institutionally favors white people over people of color, members of that society don’t have to be actively racist to perpetuate racism.
Reparations are a controversial topic. They are not just about slavery but the thousands of cases where property was stolen or destroyed, and black people were unjustly tortured and murdered.
“[Reparations] make white Americans so uncomfortable because they think: ‘why should my tax dollars be given to someone else for something that happened 150 years ago that I did not personally participate in?” Dr. Coen said.
He explained that reparations don’t necessarily mean writing a check. Reparations would be more effective if they were actual public policy changes in regards to housing, public education, job training, etc. – things that increase both funding and access to economic opportunities for racially marginalized people. There has been tangible theft of black people in this country that needs to be acknowledged.
We have to be honest about our history as a country; then we can work on policies that can actually change the effect of sundown towns.
Rachel Rosen
Reporter/Social Media Coordinator