Is Your City A Sundown Town? This Interactive Map Will Tell You

An interactive map from Tougaloo College gives insight into cities and communities in the United States and whether they’re considered sundown towns.

According to Britannica, sundown in U.S. history is a town that excluded nonwhite people, most frequently African Americans, when the sun set. How people enforced these “rules” ranged anywhere from collective violence, such as public lynchings, discriminatory laws, and open housing discrimination.

The map is inspired by a database entered by the late historian and sociologist James W. Loewen. He is the author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns. Tougaloo’s History & Social Justice department has put what it describes as the “world’s only registry sundown towns.”

“A sundown town is not just a place where something racist happened,” researchers write on the database website. “It is an entire community (or even county) that for decades was ‘all white’ on purpose.”

Researchers go on to say that “All white” is in quotes because some towns have historically “allowed one Black family to remain when they drove out the rest.” They also point out that some sundown towns also kept out Chinese Americans, Jews, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and, in some cases, Mormons.

How To Read The Map

With the interactive map, users should hover over the state for an alphabetical list. The map key consists of six colors used as dots to identify the towns that are either surely, probably, possibly, or unlikely a sundown town.

Black dots represent Black towns or townships. Places on the interactive map with a red flag indicate places of particular interest.

At first glance, the Midwest and The Plains region appear to have more dots indicating surely, probable, and possible sundown towns. The map shows that there isn’t one state in America without suspicion of a sundown town.

Regarding Black towns and townships, the 10 listed are Pembroke and Brooklyn, Illinois. Expose, Mound Bayou, New Africa, Renova, and Winstonville, all in Mississippi. Maryville, South Carolina; Martinsville, Indiana; and North Amityville, New York.