Sundown Towns: The Places Where Black People Couldn’t Stay After Dark

Sundown towns were municipalities that excluded Black residents through law, violence, or both — enforcing an informal curfew that made it a crime to be Black inside city limits after dark. Historian James W. Loewen documented more than 10,000 of them across the United States. They existed in every state, were most heavily concentrated outside the Deep South, and were actively enabled by federal housing policy. The racial wealth gap in contemporary America has a direct geographic origin in this system.

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The Name Came from the Signs, and the Violence Enforced What the Signs Said

The name came from the signs. Some towns posted them on the roads leading in: “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here.” Some used softer language. Many posted nothing at all and communicated the message through violence.

Historian James W. Loewen documented more than 10,000 sundown towns in the United States. They existed in every state outside of the Deep South — and in the Deep South, similar arrangements operated through segregation ordinances rather than explicit expulsion. The practice of creating and maintaining all-white communities through threat, law, and organized violence was not a Southern phenomenon. It was a national one.^1^

A Sundown Town Was Any Community That Used Law or Terror to Stay All-White

A sundown town was any municipality that excluded Black residents — and often other minorities, including Chinese and Mexican Americans, Jews, and Native Americans — either through explicit law, systematic intimidation, or both. The defining feature was the expulsion of any Black person present after dark, enforced by whatever combination of official and unofficial violence the community required.

Some exclusions were accomplished through local ordinances. Anna, Illinois, maintained a city ordinance for decades restricting Black residents; locals claimed the town’s name stood for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.” Hawthorne, California, passed an ordinance in 1930 requiring Black residents to leave the city limits by 6 p.m. Similar ordinances existed in municipalities across Indiana, Oregon, and Illinois.^2^

Others operated without formal law. The city of Levittown, Pennsylvania — the 17,000-home planned community built by William Levitt starting in 1952 and held up as the model of postwar American suburban development — included a clause in all lease agreements explicitly prohibiting occupancy by non-white residents. The Federal Housing Administration, which backed the mortgages that made Levittown possible, explicitly required such segregation clauses as a condition of loan insurance until 1948. When Daisy and Bill Myers, a Black family, moved into Levittown in August 1957, they faced eight months of harassment that included a burning cross on their lawn, a Confederate flag on the neighbor’s house, rocks thrown through windows, and a crowd of 500 white residents outside their home.^3^

Most Sundown Towns Were Created by a Single Act of Organized Violence

Many sundown towns were created in a single act of communal violence: a race massacre, an expulsion, a burning. After the destruction, Black residents were simply absent, and the absence became a feature.

Forsyth County, Georgia, had a Black population of roughly 1,100 people in 1912. After the lynching of Rob Edwards in September 1912 and a series of subsequent night raids on Black homes, the entire Black population of the county fled within two months. Forsyth County remained essentially all-white for more than seventy years — through the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, Black visitors reported being run off the roads and shot at. In January 1987, Hosea Williams led a Brotherhood March into Forsyth County and was met by a white mob of 400 throwing rocks and bottles. A second march two weeks later drew 20,000 civil rights marchers and a counter-protest from the Ku Klux Klan.^4^

Pierce City, Missouri, expelled its entire Black population of roughly 200 people in August 1901 after the lynching of Will Godley, who had been accused of murdering a white woman. Black-owned homes were burned. Black residents who didn’t flee fast enough were shot. Pierce City remained sundown for decades.

How Did Federal Policy Enable Sundown Towns at National Scale?

The sundown town phenomenon operated in active partnership with the legal system at every level. The Federal Housing Administration’s underwriting manual from 1936 — the document that governed which neighborhoods would receive government-backed mortgage insurance — explicitly warned appraisers to note “infiltration of inharmonious racial groups” as a negative factor in neighborhood valuations. This “redlining” meant that Black families seeking mortgages in white neighborhoods were systematically denied financing while the same neighborhoods were being declared off-limits through sundown enforcement.^5^

State laws in Oregon explicitly barred Black settlement until 1926. Indiana’s Klan-dominated legislature in the 1920s ensured that sundown enforcement operated with official protection. And local police in hundreds of sundown towns were the primary enforcement mechanism for the curfew — Black people found inside city limits after dark were arrested, beaten, and expelled, not by mobs (though mobs reinforced the point) but by officers of the law.

Loewen Found Sundown Towns in Every State, with the Highest Concentrations in the North

James Loewen’s research, published in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism in 2005, found evidence of sundown practices in towns and suburbs across all fifty states. His most conservative count identified more than 10,000 such municipalities. The states with the highest concentrations were outside the South: Illinois had at least 476 documented sundown towns, Ohio had 186, and Indiana — where the Ku Klux Klan controlled the state government in the 1920s — had at least 76.

The concentration outside the South was not coincidental. The Great Migration — the movement of approximately six million Black people out of the South between 1910 and 1970 — was partly driven by racial terror and partly by economic opportunity. Sundown towns and suburbs were how white communities in the North and Midwest blocked Black access to the economic opportunity they were fleeing toward. The highway to Chicago ran through towns where stopping for gas after dark could get you killed.

Sundown Towns Locked Black Families Out of the Postwar Wealth Boom

The economic consequence of sundown towns was the systematic exclusion of Black families from the postwar wealth-building that transformed American suburbia. The suburbs built between 1945 and 1970 — Levittown, Park Forest, Lakewood — were the primary vehicles through which the American middle class accumulated home equity, the primary American form of heritable wealth. Black families were excluded from those suburbs through sundown enforcement, FHA redlining, and racially restrictive covenants, then left to buy homes in urban neighborhoods that banks systematically undervalued. The racial wealth gap documented in every economic study of contemporary America has its origin in this geography.

Many sundown towns still exist as all-white or near-all-white municipalities, their original demographics maintained not through active enforcement any longer but through the self-perpetuating effects of segregated school districts, property value differentials, and social networks that developed over decades of exclusion. The signs came down. The demographics didn’t change.

The lynching era that created Forsyth County’s all-white demographics was part of the same system the Black Codes established and the first Ku Klux Klan enforced. The Tulsa Race Massacre is the most documented single example of what happened when Black economic achievement became visible enough to threaten a white community.

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Sources:

1. Loewen, James W. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. New Press, 2005.
2. Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright, 2017.
3. Kushner, David. Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb. Walker & Company, 2009.
4. Jaspin, Elliot. Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. Basic Books, 2007.
5. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press, 1985.