Sundown Towns: America’s Hidden History of Racial Exclusion and How It Never Really Ended — a Northern and Midwestern Story as Much as a Southern One, Running from the 20th Century Into Today
Illinois had 456 sundown towns. Mississippi had 6. Sundown towns — communities that excluded Black Americans through violence, law, and intimidation — were a Northern and Midwestern institution. This research-backed article covers their history, the towns that changed, the ones that didn’t, and how discrimination adapted rather than disappeared.
STANDARD
Sundown Towns
America’s Hidden History of Racial Exclusion and How It Never Really Ended
Illinois had 456 sundown towns. Mississippi had 6. This was never a Southern story.
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Contents
1. What a Sundown Town Was
2. The Geography of Exclusion: Why Illinois, Not Mississippi
3. How They Were Built: Violence, Law, and Social Pressure
4. The Towns: Specific Histories
5. How They Changed — or Didn’t
6. Second Generation Sundown Towns: The Modern Mechanisms
7. The Legacy in Numbers
8. What Remains
9. Sources
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Most Americans who know the phrase sundown town picture rural Alabama. A dirt road. A hand-painted sign. Something from the Jim Crow South that was dismantled along with the rest of legal segregation sometime in the 1960s.
The reality is different in almost every particular. Sundown towns were most common in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and across the Midwest and West. The Deep South — with its formal Jim Crow infrastructure of legal segregation — had relatively little use for them. It was the North and the Midwest that needed sundown towns, because it was the North and the Midwest that pretended racial exclusion was not happening while enforcing it through violence, housing law, and social pressure.
Over 2,400 sundown towns were cataloged across the United States, with the greatest density in the Midwest. Illinois alone had at least 456. Mississippi had no more than 6. (Loewen, 2005; PMC, Structural Racism Study, 2023)
This is the article most American history classes did not teach. It covers the history of sundown towns from the late 19th century through the 21st, how they formed, how they enforced themselves, the specific communities where the history is documented, and what happened after the signs came down.
Spoiler: most of what happened is that the signs came down and the towns stayed white.
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1. What a Sundown Town Was
A sundown town is a community that for decades kept non-whites from living in it and was thus all-white on purpose. The name comes from the signs formerly posted at their city limits — signs that usually read ‘N—, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in ——.’ Anna and Jonesboro in southern Illinois still had such signs in the 1970s. (Loewen, Sundown Towns, 2005)
Sundown towns were municipalities that enforced policies to exclude African Americans and other minority groups from living in or even being present within town limits after dark. Enforcement methods ranged from violence, such as lynchings and mob attacks, to housing discrimination through exclusionary covenants preventing Black people from owning property. (Britannica, Sundown Town, 2026)
The category was not limited to Black Americans. <cite index="7-1">Sundown towns excluded not only Black residents but also Jewish residents, Asian immigrants in the West, Italians in the Northeast, and in some cases labor union members and homosexuals.</cite> The primary target was consistently African American, but the mechanism of exclusion was applied wherever a community’s white population decided that a group did not belong.
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2. The Geography of Exclusion: Why Illinois, Not Mississippi
Sundown towns were most common in the Midwest, Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the West, with relatively few in the Deep South. The Deep South had formal legal segregation — Jim Crow laws that mandated separation at every level of public life. These laws did not require sundown towns because they achieved the same result through other means. (Britannica, 2026; Loewen, 2005)
In Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, sundown towns were created in waves of violence in the early decades of the 20th century and then maintained well into the contemporary era. (Zinn Education Project, 2024)
The timing matters. Most sundown towns were created between 1890 and 1940 — the same period as the Great Migration, when African Americans left the South in the millions seeking work and a better life in Northern cities and towns. The sundown town was the North’s answer to this movement: a mechanism of exclusion that did not require the formal legislative architecture of Jim Crow because it operated through violence and informal social enforcement instead.
Race relations worsened between 1890 and the 1930s not just in the South but across America. Black Americans were the targets of racial violence and discrimination in the North, East, and West as well. African Americans reached every county of Montana. More than 400 lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The sundown town movement systematically reversed these demographics in hundreds of communities. (America’s Black Holocaust Museum, 2025)
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3. How They Were Built: Violence, Law, and Social Pressure
Mass Expulsions
Many towns expelled their Black residents through single acts of collective violence. In 1909, after a spectacle lynching, Anna and Jonesboro in southern Illinois expelled their African American populations. Both cities have been all-white ever since. It is common knowledge that Black people are not allowed to live there. (Loewen, 2005)
Wyandotte, Michigan illustrates the incremental process: in the early 1870s, whites drove out a Black barber. In 1881 and 1888, they expelled Black hotel workers. In 1907, four white men beat and robbed a Black man at the train station. In 1916, a mob bombarded a boardinghouse, driving out all African Americans. Each act built on the last until the exclusion was complete and self-sustaining. (Loewen, 2005)
Legal Mechanisms
Legal formalities included exclusionary zoning, restrictive covenants in property deeds that prohibited sale to non-white buyers, and denial of city services to Black residents and businesses. These mechanisms made the informal violent exclusion legally durable. Even when courts struck down racially explicit covenants in 1948, the social infrastructure of exclusion remained functional for decades. (Britannica, 2026; YPN Realtor, 2024)
Social Enforcement
The most durable enforcement mechanism required no law and no violence. It was the unspoken knowledge, transmitted through generations of white residents, that certain people were not welcome. New residents learned it from their neighbors. Real estate agents knew which neighborhoods were showing and which were not. Police understood which calls to prioritize and which to deprioritize. The mechanism worked without coordination because everyone involved had internalized the same set of rules.
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4. The Towns: Specific Histories
Anna-Jonesboro, Illinois
Twin towns in southern Illinois, population 7,000. In 1909, following a spectacle lynching, both communities expelled their African American populations. The exclusion was so total and so persistent that locals joked the name Anna stood for Ain’t No N—s Allowed. Both cities maintained posted signs through the 1970s. The communities remain predominantly white today. (Loewen, 2005)
Appleton, Wisconsin
Appleton had a long reputation for being unwelcoming to Black residents well into the 21st century. One resident reported an ordinance prohibiting Black people from living within city limits that persisted until around 1954. Census data showed only five Black families living in Appleton in the 1950s, a significant drop from 18 families in 1900 — a decline that tracks directly with the enforcement of exclusion. (NewsOne, 2026)
Darien, Connecticut
Darien was notorious for excluding not only Black residents but Jewish residents as well in the 1920s. A wealthy suburban community rather than a rural backwater, Darien demonstrates that sundown town behavior was not limited to economically marginal communities. Exclusionary zoning and restrictive covenants operated as effectively in wealthy Connecticut suburbs as in southern Illinois mill towns. (NewsOne, 2026)
Levittown, New York and Pennsylvania
The Levittowns — built after World War II as the prototypical American suburb — included racially restrictive covenants in their original deeds. William Levitt explicitly stated that he would not permit an African American to buy a home in his developments. The argument was market-driven rather than ideological: white buyers, he said, would not purchase homes in integrated neighborhoods. The suburbs that defined the American Dream for a generation were built as sundown communities.
Chevy Chase, Maryland
In 2000, Chevy Chase’s 6,183 residents included just 18 people living in families with at least one African American householder. An affluent suburb directly adjacent to the nation’s capital. Whites were increasingly fleeing nearly all-white suburbs for even whiter exurbs, adding sprawl to the already numerous economic, psychological and sociological tolls of residential segregation. (Loewen, 2005, reviewed in Washington Post)
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5. How They Changed — or Didn’t
With the American civil rights movement, many of the civil rights owed to African Americans were finally restored, and explicit racial segregation was made illegal. The overall trend in the country starting about 1968 was a decline in the number of sundown towns, alongside increasing racial integration. However, many towns and localities remained overwhelmingly white into the 21st century. (Britannica, 2026)
The distinction between towns that genuinely changed and towns where discrimination simply adapted is one of the most important analytical questions in this history. Some communities underwent real demographic change after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — the combination of legal prohibition of discrimination and the gradual weakening of social enforcement mechanisms allowed Black families to move in, and they did. These towns are measurably more integrated than they were in 1960.
Others changed their signage and changed nothing else. The mechanisms of exclusion shifted from the explicit to the implicit, from the legal to the extralegal, from violence to economic barriers. The result in terms of racial composition was often identical to the pre-1968 situation. The community looked the same. It just no longer posted signs explaining why.
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6. Second Generation Sundown Towns: The Modern Mechanisms
The old sundown laws are technically off the books, and racially explicit property deed restrictions are no longer enforceable. But the legacy is still very much alive. A lot of these old sundown towns are still almost completely white today. Property values are higher, schools are better funded, and neighboring Black communities stayed poor. Instead of explicit exclusion, it is more subtle: expensive houses, strict zoning laws, barely any affordable housing. These mechanisms still keep people of color out. (WeSpeaking.net, 2026)
Real Estate Steering
Discriminatory practices in real estate such as steering — where agents guide buyers toward or away from certain neighborhoods based on race, national origin, or another protected characteristic — continue to perpetuate segregation even when the practices are unintentional. Racial bias in mortgage lending still exists, making it more challenging for minority families to purchase homes in certain areas. (YPN Realtor, 2024)
Exclusionary Zoning
Minimum lot sizes, prohibitions on multi-family housing, and requirements for expensive site improvements effectively price out lower-income buyers and renters. Since wealth and race correlate directly as a consequence of historical exclusion, exclusionary zoning achieves racial exclusion without naming it. The communities that use this mechanism most aggressively are often former sundown towns whose residents understand exactly what the zoning is doing even if they do not say so explicitly.
Community Dynamics and Psychological Barriers
The history of exclusion creates psychological and social barriers that discourage minorities from moving into areas with a sundown town legacy. These towns often have reputations that persist, making them less attractive to minority buyers and renters even when the explicit barriers have been removed. The reputation is itself a form of continued enforcement. (YPN Realtor, 2024)
Discriminatory Policing
Dozens of communities remain 90 to 95 percent white with patterns of hostility, discriminatory policing, and unspoken rules that deliver the same message they posted on signs a century ago. The policing mechanism was always part of the sundown town enforcement system — the real enforcement came from the threat of violence and police looking the other way when mobs attacked. In the 21st century, discriminatory policing continues this function through selective enforcement, pretextual stops, and the creation of an environment in which Black people feel unwelcome and unsafe. (Black Journals, 2026)
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7. The Legacy in Numbers
A 2023 public health study examined the relationship between sundown town status and present-day outcomes. Over 2,400 sundown towns were cataloged across the United States, with the greatest density in the Midwest. Sundown towns had significantly less city-level diversity compared to non-sundown towns. The study found that sundown town segregation remained after the banning of redlining under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and that most of these historic sundown towns continue to have only small populations of people of color to this day. (PMC, Structural Racism Study, 2023)
The compounding effects include wealth gaps — sundown towns blocked Black families from buying homes in neighborhoods where property values were rising, cutting them off from one of the biggest ways ordinary people build wealth. The economic fallout from generations of forced exclusion continues to shape the financial position of affected families and communities in the 21st century. (WeSpeaking.net, 2026; YPN Realtor, 2024)
The COVID-19 pandemic produced another data point on the sundown town legacy. The 2023 PMC study found that sundown towns had lower COVID-19 local risk index compared to non-sundown towns — a finding that reflects the ongoing racial segregation of these communities and the health disparities that segregation produces for the minority communities excluded from them.
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8. What Remains
The world’s only sundown town registry says the research will never be complete because most towns destroyed their own records. The signs came down. The ordinances were repealed. The restrictive covenants became unenforceable. And in a majority of the documented sundown towns, the demographics remained essentially unchanged. (Black Journals, 2026)
This is the honest summary of what happened after 1968: a legal transformation that did not produce a social or economic transformation of equivalent depth. The mechanisms changed. The result in most of these communities did not.
Segregation wasn’t accidental or inevitable. It was deliberately built and deliberately maintained through laws, violence, and social pressure. Even though the era of explicit sundown towns is over, the damage lives on in neighborhoods, property values, school quality, and wealth gaps that persist today. The sundown town is not an artifact of a more racist past. It is the explanation for a more unequal present.
Illinois had 456 of them. Mississippi had 6. The American conversation about race that puts the South at the center of the problem has been, in this specific respect, exactly backwards. The North and the Midwest built these communities, maintained them across a century, and are living in their legacy today.
The signs came down. The towns, in most cases, stayed the same.
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9. Sources
America’s Black Holocaust Museum. (2025, November). Sundown Towns: Racial Segregation Past and Present. ABHMUSEUM.org.
Black Journals. (2026, April). Sundown Towns That STILL Exist — The 2026 Updated List. TheBlackJournals.com.
Britannica. (2026). Sundown Town: Meaning and History. Britannica.com.
Loewen, J.W. (2005). Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Touchstone / Simon & Schuster. Reviewed: Washington Post (Laura Wexler).
NewsOne. (2026, January). 10 Sundown Towns That Shaped a Dark Chapter in Black American History. NewsOne.com.
PMC / International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. (2023). Structural Racism Through Sundown Towns and Its Relationship to COVID-19 Local Risk and Racial and Ethnic Diversity. PMC10207838.
WeSpeaking.net. (2026, April). Today in Black History: Sundown Towns Past and Present. WeSpeaking.net.
YPN Realtor / National Association of Realtors. (2024, September). Sundown Towns: A Dark Chapter in American History and the Enduring Impact on Real Estate. YPN.Realtor.
Zinn Education Project. (2024). Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. ZinnEducationProject.org.
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