🌅 Today’s stat: 2,248

SOURCE

Rigby et al. (2025)

WHAT TO KNOW

• Sundown towns are places that once enacted legal or conventional practices designed to restrict the residency of non-white people, most often Black Americans, with the aim to maintain the towns as all-white spaces. The earliest examples were established in the aftermath of the Civil War, as rural towns in the Midwest, Southern, and Western U.S. began to exclude newly freed slaves who, by 1890, had settled in all but 119 of the nation’s then-thousands of counties.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Practices designed to exclude non-white residents varied in sundown towns throughout the 1890s to 1940s, ranging from threatening signs or sirens at dusk warning non-white people to leave, to the enforced exclusion of groups through organized lynchings and racial violence (often led by groups like the Ku Klux Klan). Experts say almost all suburban neighborhoods developed throughout the Jim Crow-era were designed to be sundown towns, leveraging legal tools like restrictive covenants to bar the sale or lease of property to non-white people, with economic and health consequences still felt today.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• In his 2005 book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, researcher James W. Loewen (the best-selling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me) outlines three steps former sundown towns should take to overcome their past: Admit (“We did this”), Apologize (“It was wrong, we apologize”), and Renounce (“We don’t do it anymore”). One former sundown town that recently confronted its past is Glendale, California, a suburb north of Los Angeles where Black people represented just 0.2% of the population a century ago and still comprise less than 2% today. In September 2020, the city became the first in the state to pass an ordinance acknowledging its racist past, apologizing for and condemning the discriminatory practices.