Sundown Towns Didn’t End in the 1960s — Some Counties Still Have the Demographics to Prove It

There is a question that Americans almost never ask about the small towns and suburbs that dot the landscape between the coasts, the communities that present themselves as the heartland, as the backbone of the nation, as the places where traditional values and neighborly decency persist in an age of urban dysfunction: where are the Black people? Not why are there so few — that question at least acknowledges the absence — but the more fundamental question: where did they go? Because in thousands of these communities, Black people were once present. They lived there, worked there, owned property there. And then, between roughly 1890 and 1968, they were driven out — by violence, by ordinance, by economic strangulation, by the simple expedient of a sign posted at the town limits that read, in language whose clarity required no interpretation: “N-----, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in This Town.”

James W. Loewen, the sociologist best known for Lies My Teacher Told Me, spent years documenting this phenomenon and published his findings in 2005 in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. His research identified more than ten thousand communities across all fifty states — not just the South, emphatically not just the South — that had either expelled their Black residents or had established formal or informal policies preventing Black people from living within their boundaries. These were not marginal settlements. They included suburbs of major cities, county seats, state capitals, and communities that today are presented, without irony, as examples of the wholesome American small town.

How Sundown Towns Were Made

The most important fact about sundown towns is one that contradicts the assumption most Americans make about them: they were not “naturally” white. They were made white. The process of creating a sundown town typically began with a community that had Black residents — sometimes a substantial Black population — and ended with their complete removal. This was accomplished through a variety of mechanisms, each calibrated to the legal and social conditions of the time and place, and all of them effective.

The most direct method was violence. In Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1912, a white mob drove out the entire Black population — approximately eleven hundred people — after a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman. The expulsion was accomplished over several weeks through a campaign of nightriding, arson, and murder. Black-owned property was seized or purchased at extortion prices. Within a month, the county’s Black population had gone from over a thousand to zero. It remained zero for seventy-five years. When civil rights marchers attempted to walk through Forsyth County in 1987, they were met by a mob of white counter-protesters throwing rocks and bottles. As of the 2020 census, the county was approximately 4% Black in a state that is 33% Black.

In Anna, Illinois — a town whose name locals openly acknowledged stood for “Ain’t No N-----s Allowed” — the Black population was expelled in 1909 after a white woman was found murdered. A mob lynched a Black man named William James, then drove out every Black family in the town. Anna remained effectively all-white for over a century. Neighboring Jonesboro enacted the same policy. The entire southern tip of Illinois, a region known as “Little Egypt,” became a sundown zone despite being north of the Mason-Dixon line and in the state of Abraham Lincoln.

“The most revealing thing about sundown towns is not that they existed. It is that they worked. The communities that expelled their Black residents in 1910 are, in many cases, still white in 2026. The violence was temporary. The demographic result is permanent.”
— James W. Loewen, from an interview on "Sundown Towns," 2006

The Mechanisms of Exclusion

Violence was the most dramatic method of creating sundown towns, but it was not the most common. The majority of sundown communities maintained their racial exclusivity through a layered system of legal, economic, and social mechanisms that were no less effective for being less spectacular. Restrictive covenants — clauses written into property deeds that prohibited the sale or rental of property to Black buyers — were the primary legal tool. These covenants were not individual decisions by individual property owners. They were systematic, often covering entire subdivisions, and they were enforced by courts until the Supreme Court ruled them unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948. Even after Shelley, the covenants remained in the deeds — unenforceable but not removed — and the social norms they codified persisted.

Real estate agents practiced racial steering, directing Black homebuyers away from sundown communities and toward neighborhoods designated for Black occupancy. This practice was not informal or occasional. It was standard operating procedure for the real estate industry, endorsed by the National Association of Realtors’ own code of ethics, which until 1950 explicitly stated that a realtor should never introduce members of any race or nationality into a neighborhood where their presence would be detrimental to property values. The Federal Housing Administration, which insured the mortgages that built suburban America, refused to insure loans in integrated neighborhoods and explicitly required racial homogeneity as a condition of its mortgage insurance program.

Police enforcement was another critical mechanism. In sundown towns, Black people who were found within city limits after dark were arrested, fined, or simply driven to the town line with a warning not to return. This was not extralegal vigilantism. It was official policy, enforced by sworn officers of the law, funded by taxpayer dollars, and accepted by the courts. In Vidor, Texas — a sundown town adjacent to Beaumont — the police department functioned as the enforcement arm of the town’s racial exclusion policy well into the 1990s. When a federal court ordered the desegregation of a public housing project in Vidor in 1993, the Black families who moved in were subjected to such intense harassment, including cross burnings and death threats, that most left within months.

The Geography of Exclusion

One of Loewen’s most important findings was that sundown towns were not a Southern phenomenon. The South, with its system of legal segregation, actually had relatively few sundown towns, because Jim Crow accommodated the presence of Black people in subordinate roles — as domestics, laborers, and sharecroppers — and therefore did not require their complete exclusion. The regions with the highest concentrations of sundown towns were the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and the suburban rings around major Northern cities. Illinois alone had hundreds of sundown towns. Oregon, which had been founded as an explicitly white state — its 1857 constitution prohibited Black people from residing within its borders — was almost entirely a sundown state outside of Portland.

The suburban dimension is particularly important for understanding the modern wealth gap. The postwar suburbs that defined the American middle class — Levittown, New York; Lakewood, California; the ring suburbs of Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland — were, in their original conception and execution, sundown communities. William Levitt, the developer who built the paradigmatic American suburb, stated publicly that he would not sell to Black buyers because it would be “bad for business.” The FHA, which insured the mortgages, required racial homogeneity. The result was that the greatest wealth-building opportunity in American history — the postwar housing boom, in which homes purchased for $8,000 in 1950 appreciated to $300,000 or more by 2000 — was made available exclusively to white families.

The Wealth That Exclusion Built

The economic consequences of sundown towns are not historical curiosities. They are the architecture of the present-day racial wealth gap. The communities that excluded Black residents during the twentieth century are, by and large, the wealthiest communities in the country today. They are the towns with the best-funded school districts, the lowest crime rates, the highest property values, and the strongest tax bases. This is not a coincidence. These communities accumulated wealth precisely because they excluded Black residents — because the exclusion allowed property values to appreciate without the depressive effects that American racism imposes on integrated neighborhoods, and because the accumulated home equity and generational wealth transfers that flow from homeownership were concentrated in communities from which Black families were barred.

The arithmetic is straightforward. A white family that purchased a home in a sundown suburb in 1955 for $12,000 and passed that home to their children, who sold it in 2005 for $350,000, transferred approximately $340,000 in wealth that was made possible, in part, by the racial exclusion that maintained property values and community investment. The Black family that was denied access to that suburb, that purchased a home in a redlined neighborhood instead, and that watched as that home appreciated to $80,000 or $100,000 or $120,000 while the surrounding neighborhood was systematically disinvested — that family experienced not just a housing gap but a compounding wealth gap that widens with each generation.

Richard Rothstein, in The Color of Law, documented this mechanism with precision: the racial wealth gap in America is not the residue of slavery alone. It is the product of twentieth-century housing policy — of FHA redlining, of restrictive covenants, of sundown town enforcement, of the deliberate construction of a suburban landscape from which Black families were excluded during the single greatest period of wealth accumulation in human history. The median white family today holds approximately ten times the wealth of the median Black family. The home equity gap — driven in significant part by the sundown town phenomenon — accounts for the largest share of that disparity.

The Demographics That Persist

Perhaps the most damning evidence of the sundown town legacy is demographic. Communities that expelled or excluded Black residents in the early twentieth century remain, in many cases, effectively all-white today — not because of active enforcement (in most cases), but because the initial exclusion created conditions that are self-perpetuating. Property values in formerly sundown communities are high, which prices out many Black families who were denied the opportunity to build the equity that would have made such purchases possible. Social networks in these communities are homogeneous, which means that the informal channels through which housing information, job opportunities, and community membership are transmitted operate within exclusively white networks. The reputation of these communities precedes them — Black families who are aware of a town’s sundown history do not choose to move there, even when no formal barrier exists.

The numbers tell the story. Forsyth County, Georgia, expelled its Black population in 1912 and was 98% white as recently as 1990. Anna, Illinois, remains over 95% white. Vidor, Texas, was 99.4% white in the 2010 census. Thousands of communities across the country display similar patterns — a demographic composition that cannot be explained by natural settlement patterns, by economic factors alone, or by any mechanism other than the systematic exclusion that created them and the structural conditions that maintain them.

After Shelley, After Fair Housing

The legal history provides no comfort. Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 ruled that courts could not enforce restrictive covenants. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals. These were genuine legal achievements, and they removed the formal legal infrastructure of sundown towns. What they did not do — what law alone cannot do — was reverse the demographic, economic, and social patterns that decades of exclusion had created.

A town that is 98% white does not become integrated because a law says it cannot prevent Black residents from moving in. Integration requires affirmative effort — affordable housing construction, active recruitment, institutional changes in policing, schools, and civic life — and most formerly sundown communities have made no such effort. The law removed the signs. It did not change the demographics. It prohibited the most overt forms of exclusion. It did not address the accumulated wealth, the social networks, the cultural norms, or the property values that make these communities inaccessible to the families whose exclusion created those advantages in the first place.

What Sundown Towns Tell Us

The history of sundown towns tells us something that the conventional narrative of American race relations does not want to acknowledge: that residential segregation in America was not an accident of economics, was not the natural result of individual preferences, and was not limited to the South. It was a national project, pursued across all fifty states, enforced by every level of government, supported by the private sector, and maintained by a combination of violence, law, and economic exclusion that operated continuously for the better part of a century. The communities it created — overwhelmingly white, disproportionately wealthy, and blessed with the public services that wealth provides — are presented today as the products of hard work, good values, and sound investment. They are, in fact, the products of a system that reserved these advantages for white families and violently excluded everyone else.

This does not mean that the white families who live in these communities today bear individual guilt for the policies that created them. Most are several generations removed from the original acts of exclusion, and many are genuinely unaware of their community’s sundown history. But understanding that history is essential to understanding the present — to understanding why the racial wealth gap persists, why school funding is so unequal, why the geography of opportunity in America maps so precisely onto the geography of racial exclusion, and why the phrase “good neighborhood” in American English has always functioned as a racial category disguised as an economic one.

The sundown towns are still there. The signs are gone, but the demographics remain. The covenants are unenforceable, but the property values they protected continue to compound. The police no longer arrest Black travelers at the town line, but the social and economic barriers that replaced the badge are no less effective for being less visible. And the wealth that accumulated behind those barriers — the home equity, the school quality, the tax base, the generational transfers — continues to flow, decade after decade, to the families who were permitted to build it, while the families who were excluded continue to pay the compounding cost of an exclusion that the nation has acknowledged but not remedied. The signs came down. The gap did not close. And until the nation reckons not just with the signs but with the wealth they protected, the gap will not close — because the arithmetic of compound exclusion, like the arithmetic of compound interest, works in only one direction, and it does not forgive, and it does not forget, and it does not care whether the people who benefit from it know how it began.