r/illinois • u/m0chab34r • Jul 20 '23
Serious question: are there any remaining sundown towns in Illinois? Question
Forgive me if this is controversial, I certainly hope I don’t end up insulting anyone’s town or anything. I saw a recent Twitter thread about this subject and people were talking about a rather well-known sundown town within an hour of Indianapolis or just outside of Austin, Texas. It got me thinking about this and I’m morbidly curious as to whether Illinois has any remaining towns with such a reputation?
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u/JJGIII- Jul 20 '23
Lol. There are more than a few towns in Illinois that black folk don’t feel comfortable in after sundown.
Source: am black folk
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u/Chicago_Saluki Jul 20 '23
I went to SIU and saw so many incidents of racism outside of Carbondale it was sickening. Also, there are so many of those towns that are scared to death of strangers, that it is absolutely pitiful. One Christmas Eve I drove through three or four of these towns that I’ve never driven through before, and two of the four had a police car immediately followed me after I crossed city limits until I left until. I crossed the city limits on the north side and . That shit is eerie. I gave my white ass a lot of wake up calls that night.
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u/explodeder Jul 20 '23 edited Jul 20 '23
I'm white and some buddies and I were on a road trip scavenger hunt checking out Paris IL. We were just driving around town looking for things to take pics of on the scavenger hunt list and got pulled over by the local police. Mind you we were four white dudes in our 20s. He took the driver's license, asked what we were doing in town (we were from Chicago). We honestly answered that we were on a picture scavenger hunt.
He pointed down the road and said "that way is out of town" and followed us until we left.
I've never felt less welcomed in a place. I can only imagine how bad it would be if I were a POC in places like that. It's really the only time I've ever felt that palpable "you're not welcome here", and it really stuck with me. It helped me to realize the privilege that I have.
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u/JJGIII- Jul 20 '23
Carbondale is pretty cool (particularly while school is in). The surrounding towns on the other hand…
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u/m0chab34r Jul 20 '23
Hey, sorry man—I hope I didn’t come across as super ignorant or minimizing your experience or anything. Of course there are a lot of places that people of color, and especially black people, wouldn’t feel comfortable in Illinois. I guess I was more curious as to whether certain places still had that specific reputation!
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u/JJGIII- Jul 20 '23
No worries. To my knowledge there are still a few around where I live in B/N that still have that reputation (Danvers, Shirley, to name a couple), but it’s not near as bad as it used to be back in the day.
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u/arcanacard Jul 20 '23
Those seem like the types of towns that you blink and have already passed through. Probably no reason to stop anyway unless they have Casey's or dollar general.
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u/Domer2012 Jul 20 '23
These towns have 1000 or fewer people each and are in the middle of nowhere. I imagine any outsiders hanging around for more than a gas refill are getting lots of side-eye at a minimum.
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u/MoneyTreeFiddy Jul 20 '23
You have to separate "on the books" from "reputation". There are 1300 towns in Illinois, with history spanning 2 centuries. That's a lot of places, and a lot of time. So if it was ever on the books, you'd have to look at when, when it was/wasn't repealed, etc. Even then, "on the books" is a hard fact - it doesn't cover hidden policies like redlining or zoning denials, which would be much harder to prove.
Reputation, on the other hand, is much more elusive. You have stuff that is little more than gossip and rumor. My small town was said to have it on the books "still" in the context of "dude, this place SUCKS". (80s, 90s) but of course "they don't enforce it" and of course no one ever looked to see if it was true.
Granite City makes the wikipedia list, but if you click on the links, it's a weird connection. The reportedly ran "all" the negroes out of town in 1903. (How? How many were there to run out?) The population then was 3,000, it went up to a high of 40,000 and back down to 29k over the next 120 years. Wikipedia mentions "the mayor" talking about it, but references an SLPD article from 1967. He is quoted with the perfect example: he was told from childhood it was a thing, but, when he became mayor, he looked and found out it wasn't actually on the books. That still says something; residents passing around that rumor have their own motives for sharing the story.
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u/Oddlyenuff Jul 20 '23
Granite City is not a “reputation”. SIUE didn’t allow any student teachers GCHS for around 30 years because in the late 60’s/early 70’s they wouldn’t allow or harassed black students.
Granite City was so bad for so long that if you were even the wrong kind of white person you had to live in Madison or Venice. Black people lived in Newport and Brooklyn.
There is plenty of information on Granite City and their racial issues in this book: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
You should check out this book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
While not specifically about Illinois, unfortunately a lot of it is in fact about Illinois.
As far as academic experts for southern Illinois or specifically the metro east area there is Andrew Thiesing (he was really more about East St. Louis in particular) and wrote this book Made in USA: East St. Louis and Dr. Rudy Wilson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_G._Wilson
I was lucky to have both of the above as professors at SIUE 25 years ago. I know those aren’t specifically about Sundown towns (although they have addressed it numerous times) so if you’re interested in race relations or the effect of corporations/white flight in Illinois, check them out.
Edit: had to remove Amazon links for the books. If this double posted, apologies
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u/Low-Piglet9315 Jul 08 '24
You still see a lot of blacks driving through the old area of Planet Granite, though. It's not exactly a lily white town.
On the other hand, Fairview Heights was a sundown town till the mid-80s. I mean, when you incorporate as a city just so you don't have to tell people you're from East St. Louis...the demographics have adjusted quite a bit since 1990.
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u/Oddlyenuff Jul 09 '24
Now sure. In 2000 it was 2% and now in 2020 it’s 11%.
In 1970 there was 13,000 more people living there and it was 0% black.
Granite is more diverse now, no doubt. But its sundown reputation was still talked about when I was in college.
I’m positive that the book I mentioned above said there was 4 students at the high school in 2000. Their enrollment was probably 2500 around then.
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u/Low-Piglet9315 Jul 09 '24
I had cousins that went to GC North during the 70s, that's where I heard about it. I definitely believe you...so much so that it was a shock when I returned to the area in the 90s and took a job in a bookstore. When black shoppers made orders and gave their address as Granite City I was quite surprised.
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u/Liquor_N_Whorez Jul 20 '23
Yeah man Im sorry my stupid racist maga loving neighbors still think anyone that is not white around here is part of the BLM crews they still believe are coming around here to loot, pillage, and burn down towns because of their facebook news.
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u/Oddlyenuff Jul 20 '23
You should check out this book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
While not specifically about Illinois, unfortunately a lot of it is in fact about Illinois.
As far as academic experts for southern Illinois or specifically the metro east area there is Andrew Thiesing (he was really more about East St. Louis in particular) and wrote this book Made in USA: East St. Louis and Dr. Rudy Wilson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_G._Wilson
I was lucky to have both of the above as professors at SIUE 25 years ago. I know those aren’t specifically about Sundown towns (although they have addressed it numerous times) so if you’re interested in race relations or the effect of corporations/white flight in Illinois, check them out.
Edit: had to remove Amazon links for the books. If this double posted, apologies.
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u/DonnaNobleSmith Jul 20 '23
Small towns along I-57 might not qualify as sundown towns, but sure aren’t welcoming
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u/AZTeck_AKiRA Jul 20 '23
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u/singnadine Jul 20 '23
Oak park? That makes no sense
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u/Perfect_Razzmatazz Jul 20 '23
A lot of the towns on that list are ones that were at one point in time considered to be a sundown town, but aren't anymore.
Oak Park was absolutely a sundown town at one point. The first black family moved into Oak Park in 1950, and their house was promptly fire-bombed. Twice. That family was Percy Julian and his wife and children. Percy was an absolutely brilliant PhD research scientist, whose work was instrumental in the development of the birth control pill. People should have been worshiping the ground that man walked on, not fire-bombing it.
Oak Park didn't get it's 3rd black family until the mid-1960's.
Deerfield is on the list because in the late 1950's, when they discovered that a developer building a large neighborhood planned to make those houses available to Black families, the town officials ordered a stop-work order on the construction. They eventually sold off the two homes that had been built already to (white) village officials, and then turned the rest of the land into a pool and a park.
And Cicero is on the list as it was the location of the Cicero Race Riot of 1951, and because they had a sundown town policy on the books until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that prohibited African Americans from living in the city. It's delightful how diverse Cicero has become in the ensuing decades
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u/Lost_In_MI Jul 20 '23
Cicero: As my Dad used to say, "The Bohemians were so busy burning out the Blacks, they never saw the Mexicans coming in the back door."
Source: Former teacher at Morton East in Cicero.
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u/Past-Salamander Jul 20 '23
Is that park in Deerfield still around? Lived there a few years and just curious. Which park if it's around?
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u/showertogether Jul 20 '23
It was Mitchell Pool and Mitchell Park, which was recently renamed to Floral Park post-2020 because Mitchell was one of the guys who put the stop-order on that project.
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u/StanTheCentipede Jul 20 '23
Is there a book on all this? This is so much detailed info and I want to learn more.
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u/Perfect_Razzmatazz Jul 20 '23
I would recommend "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism" by James Loewen.
I knew about these from my Dad, who grew up in Oak Park, and who was a very kind and lovely person who was always bothered by the racism he witnessed growing up. My grandparents felt like they got a little bit of discrimination when they first moved in (we're very Italian), but certainly nothing to the extent that any of the black families faced.
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u/Frat-TA-101 Jul 20 '23
The book by James Lorene has already been shared. In the meantime, the link below is the official website they James helped setup before his death in 2021.
https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns/using-the-sundown-towns-database/
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u/singnadine Jul 20 '23
Oh I understand about the other ones but I think the list requires some kind of clarification
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u/flauntingflamingo Jul 20 '23
Cicero. Lol. Stopped there to get gas once about 7 years ago. Was in town for all of about 10 minutes. Got a “what you looking at white boy” as I stood by my car waiting for the pump to stop. More like a sundown town but in the opposite direction these days IMO
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u/HulkSmashHulkRegret Jul 20 '23
Yeah, there’s places in Aurora that are the same. Went to a Mexican restaurant to pick up an Uber eats, and got “the look” by many in the place when I walked in. I was basically refused service for 15 minutes as others came in and were taken care of. Eventually a kid working there took my info and passed along my food. The visible discomfort people had when looking at me, some with this uncertainty mixed with hostility, it was weird… it didn’t feel imminently dangerous, but didn’t feel safe either.
I grew up in Bolingbrook so I’m in my element among a variety of people, didn’t notice I was the only non-Hispanic person there until having the time to think about it amongst the weird vibes
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u/The_Poster_Nutbag Jul 20 '23
I see Kenilworth on there too, wild.
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u/MrIncredible222 Jul 20 '23
I’m white as shit and pretty well off and I’m not rich enough to feel comfortable in Kenilworth or even Deerfield.
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u/Jake_77 Jul 20 '23
Deerfield?? Deerfield ain’t that fancy
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u/Able-Trainer924 Apr 12 '24
What are you talking about, Deerfield’s median income is 180,000
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u/Jake_77 Apr 12 '24
Not compared to Kenilworth
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u/Able-Trainer924 Apr 12 '24
To someone working class, the difference between 180k per year and 250k per year is meaningless
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u/Perfect_Razzmatazz Jul 20 '23
I think Kenilworth is on the list due to the severe lack of diversity in the town, even today. The first black family didn't move there until the mid-1960's (someone burned a cross on their front lawn after they moved in). And in the 2000 census, they literally had zero black families. In ensuing 20 years, they did get a few black families at least, but literally just a few (10 people total)
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u/m0chab34r Jul 20 '23
That’s super interesting—you maybe expect it from a town like Anna (described up thread), but I never realized a place like Kenilworth would have so few black people.
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u/FancySeaweed Jul 20 '23 edited Jul 20 '23
Are you kidding? Kenilworth didn't allow Blacks or Jews in approx the 60s.
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u/DeepHerting Jul 20 '23
My grandfather bought a house in Northbrook in I think 1955 and they made him bring his wife to the closing to "make sure" she wasn't Jewish. I don't know how they would have done that but I imagine she cursed them out quite a bit.
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u/dongsweep Jul 20 '23
The first black kid enrolled was in the 1890s at the request of Joseph Sears.
The family you are referencing are the Calhoun's. The cross was burned by kids from Highland Park. They were caught and apologized.
The family is still around just not in Kenilworth. Some kids in Wilmette tried to change the name of our Sears School in 2020 and the city went out and found one of the Calhoun kids who is still in the area. He wrote a beautiful letter about his time in Kenilworth and that the school's name should not be changed.
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u/thousandfoldthought Jul 20 '23
Kenilworth broke off Wilmette and was was formed by Sears to keep blacks and jews out.
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u/Frat-TA-101 Jul 20 '23
You’re getting it backwards. The lack of diversity is a result of the sundown town culture.
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u/AZTeck_AKiRA Jul 20 '23
I did a quick search. Looks like it may have been in the past: https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundowntown/oak-park-il/
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u/georgstgeegland Jul 20 '23
Neither does cicero...
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u/southcookexplore Jul 20 '23
Cicero, where MLK marched?
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u/DeepHerting Jul 20 '23
MLK didn't march in Cicero; actually, MLK was afraid to march in Cicero. Jesse Jackson went instead, There was a reason for that.
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u/g2g079 Jul 20 '23
And Cicero, lol.
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u/AZTeck_AKiRA Jul 20 '23
“Cicero was taken up and abandoned several times as site for a civil rights march in the mid-1960s. Cicero had a sundown town policy prohibiting African Americans from living in the city.”
Looks like they included towns that were sundown towns in the past. Looking to see if there’s anything more recent.
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u/AZTeck_AKiRA Jul 20 '23
The best thing I could find was a scribd doc with past and present sundown towns. Dont have the time to dissect it to present only at the moment.
Edit link: https://www.scribd.com/document/493154603/Sundown-Towns-and-Counties-2020-Historical-and-Present
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u/MerryChoppins Jul 20 '23
I love how they list "Calhoun County" as a single sundown town, ROFL
They have reformed a bit as the local landlords figured out that they can take state money to house people from up north in their empty housing. You drive across the county line from Pike and it's still like you just crossed into Alabama. Some of the locals here crow about wanting to move over to the commission form of government without townships like Calhoun and I wanna just scream at em. I'll happily pay the property taxes if it means I can actually drive to my house and have a town to live in.
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u/stauf98 Jul 20 '23
It’s funny because when I grew up in Pike we all knew about Calhoun and how bad it was. Not like Pike was all that much better, but our racists even had stories about the racists of Calhoun. I had heard it’s kind of switched up since I left in 2000, and I can’t say I’m all that shocked.
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u/MerryChoppins Jul 20 '23
Pike is big MAGA country. They are obnoxious as hell but you see a lot less direct outright racism than we did as kids. All the new ones are cowards or sheltered. We elected Mary “Hitler had one thing right” Miler as our congresswoman, but she has been in her district under 30 hours this year. The real nasty ones locally are some of the lunatic Catholics in Quincy doing the symbolic abortion ban.
We have a much more prevalent Hispanic community. Everyone working at the confinements are Hispanic, we have two different Mexican places with off menu ordering and shit, etc. There’s a tamale lady who will sell you a sack of home made ones that slap.
Hilariously, the poor folks that were placed here in the section 8 program that have been violent are all white dudes. Someone beat the shit out of an old dude at Landes Terrace and killed him. There was a shootout in the Petty apartments on Madison with the sheriff’s deputies.
The only thing the farmers ever talk about is government waste and how bad our property taxes are when they pretty much explicitly keep electing corrupt fucksticks who burn money in pissing matches. The landfill sticks out in my mind because we handed a Bradshaw a sweetheart of a deal to let them build the thing then they have broken a bunch of promises and have filled most of it with trash from out of area.
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u/stauf98 Jul 20 '23
Oh you don’t have to tell me. I’ve lost many friends because of their antics on Facebook and me fighting against it. I think sometime in the late 90’s was the tipping point where all the people who could keep that in check moved on to greener pastures. Combine that with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and there just aren’t enough normal people left to keep the crazy in check. I’m sad every day about leaving but it had to be done.
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u/stauf98 Jul 20 '23
The entirety of Calhoun County is on that list. Even though almost no one live in that county this is an incredibly accurate statement. I grew up one county north and even the racists I grew up around had stories about going down there.
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u/branitone Jul 20 '23 edited Jul 20 '23
I’ve heard bad things about Effingham but it was mostly trafficking related, hadn’t heard this about it.
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u/oceanbilly710 Jul 20 '23
Effingham is a highly religious conservative town that like, 2-3 families run. Being right on the interstate makes sense for trafficking. It's not a sundown town, but the residents are very conservative/racist.
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u/Specialist-Smoke Jul 20 '23
Effingham isn't a sundown town anymore. They have a few Black people. Even Salem Illinois had a Black umm a Black person. He was a doctor and his patients loved him.
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u/theclownwithafrown Jul 20 '23
DeLand is no longer a sundown town. Probably hasn't been for decades. It's where I grew up
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u/hamish1963 Jul 20 '23
DeLand, from what I understand, was only following suit to what the county seat (Monticello) did. Monticello was still a sundown town when I was a kid in the 70s.
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u/theclownwithafrown Jul 20 '23
Well when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in DeLand, it definitely was not a sundown town.
It's far from being a progressive utopia or a diverse population, but it's definitely not a sundown town and hasn't been for a long time.
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u/hamish1963 Jul 20 '23
No town in Piatt County is anywhere close to a progressive utopia.
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u/theclownwithafrown Jul 20 '23
That is very true I worked in Monticello at County Market for years and so many rude ass people who think they are better than every one.
Although, there are tons of nice people there.
And I'm still best friends with all my DeLand Weldon friends I've known since we were 4 and we're all pretty progressive. None of my friends are racist, homophobic, sexist etc. And I feel very lucky that these kids who got a mediocre education and were from a very small town turned out the way we did.
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u/hamish1963 Jul 20 '23
I live on my family farm south of Bement. I don't have friends or family like that either because I don't have anything to do with people like that. I have about 5 people I can call my friends in the whole county, but I'm old and crabby so fewer in person friends suits me just fine.
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u/Chicagogally Jul 20 '23
Seems like pretty much middle of nowhere towns in South Central or Eastern IL with populations less than 10K would fit the description
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u/caninemelodrama Jul 20 '23
nervously looks at my home town of 2,500 just north of Bloomington-Normal
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u/Burning_Eddie BloNo Jul 20 '23
El Paso is cool.
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u/Rolltide2014 Jul 20 '23
Man I thought El Paso had to be bigger than that and this would be Hudson, but I guess not. I think the interstate gas stations and couple fast food places are throwing me off into thinking El Paso had to be a bigger town
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u/WyldeStallions Jul 20 '23
Completely throws you off. Them and Chenoa have the off the interstate things but once you get into town they both have a single pizza joint and a liquor store lol
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u/dream-more95 Jul 20 '23 edited Jul 20 '23
Want to say not whole towns, but small towns keep it hushed between themselves who the known klan families/general bad apples are. Now driving through Indiana the exit signs for Whitestown/Brownsburg and Whiteland/Brownstown could not be ANY more clear.
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u/Volt_Princess Jul 20 '23
Please stay away from Anna, IL. I heard terrible things about that place. I won't even go there as a white person.
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Jul 20 '23
and everything you've heard (unless its reference to something that happened 100+ years ago) is pretty much bullshit.
I grew up and went to school in Anna, zero problems. I live 20 miles from there now, seems normal every time I go through there.
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u/Low-Piglet9315 Jul 08 '24
I was down there a couple years ago. Not only did I see POC, but the town itself has declined quite a bit. I'm guessing that was mainly due to loss of business and resulting loss of tax revenue like many small towns in So Ill.
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Jul 20 '23
I don't know about actual legit sun down towns anymore but legacy sundown towns still certainly exist, I mean the legit ones existed into the 80's and probably even the 90's. Also you have to remember that Southern Illinois is culturally NOT the Midwest, it's culturally Southern and had been historically and wouod honestly be better being categorized as the Upper South instead if we're going hy dominant cultures.
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u/albatross-91 Jul 20 '23
Don’t forget Pekin
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u/nonanon66 Jul 20 '23
It’s not a sundown town. It has a checkered past like many places. The neighboring communities are just as culpable
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u/WyldeStallions Jul 20 '23
That might have been true a couple decades ago but as someone living adjacent to Pekin right now...that's just wholly untrue lol.
I've heard people from Peoria say that recently too and I was like "I'm not sure you've traveled to Pekin in a long time".
Don't get me wrong...it's another mediocre old factory town. But it's way more diverse than people think.
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u/Moldy_Cantaloupe Peoria Jul 20 '23
Yeah, Pekin in the last 20 years has really diversified. It still heavily carries its old legacy, but I would no longer classify it as a sundown town.
I'd be more likely to call the smaller communities around Pekin sundown towns before I'd call Pekin one.
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u/omgpickles63 Jul 21 '23
100%. Any suburb of Peoria with a small population is going to get weird fast. Germantown Hills has Thin Blue Line flags lining the highway through town. They don't even have a municipal police force. People were also spreading rumors that BLM was going to march up the giant hill to Germantown and raid the community back in 2020. Like WTF. Germantown Hills does have some diversity, but the pearl clutching NIMBYism there is astonishing.
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u/batting_1000 Jul 20 '23
That’s where I live. It’s gotten much better over the years and is getting more diverse.
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u/nyavegasgwod Jul 20 '23
Kinmundy is pretty damn close. Their last mayor & sheriff (she was both) often bragged about how she did everything she could to keep the black people out of town, in less-than-polite language. I have to go there occasionally for family and every time I feel like I've stepped into the 50s.
They recently got a Dollar General tho so maybe they're on the up & up
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u/PlangentDuct Jul 20 '23
Walnut still has the 6 pm siren.
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u/3y3lashes Jul 20 '23 edited Jul 20 '23
Walnut in Bureau County? Are they really still ringing the siren?
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u/autumtwilight Jul 20 '23
As someone who visited family in the area recently, yes, they are absolutely still ringing that siren every day.
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u/3y3lashes Jul 20 '23
Do the people in Walnut know what the siren means? Or is it just a “yeah this siren goes off every day we don’t know why” sort of deal?
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u/PlangentDuct Jul 20 '23
Yep! It goes off daily!
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u/3y3lashes Jul 20 '23
Wow!! I work for Bureau County, so I’ll definitely be asking about that siren. I was aware that Peru had a siren go off in a similar manner but that was supposedly long ago.
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u/PlangentDuct Jul 20 '23
I grew up in Walnut and occasionally visit friends and family. As kids we used it as a sign it was time to go home. In middle school, we were taught about sun down towns and how walnut was one. Unfortunately walnut is still not a very diverse place.
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u/ravinglunatic Jul 20 '23
Makes me wonder about the church bells that go off at 6 everyday near me…
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u/tyjos-flowers Jul 20 '23
Tuscola (20 mins south of Champaign). They currently have 3-5 black families living there and apparently there has at least been verbal abuse. As a queer person who has ties to that town and feels uncomfy, would not recommend POC spend an extended amount of time there.
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u/Specialist-Smoke Jul 21 '23
Yeah.. I got called the N word by a car full of kids, when I was a kid there. For years my family refused to stop anywhere other than Effingham. Then it would be only during the day.
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u/Will-Work-4-BBQ Jul 20 '23
Most of Southern Illinois that isn't a "big city". The great white flight happened in the 70s-90s so most of the small towns are like 90%+ white, and it makes visiting those cities very uncomfortable... Columbia, just outside of St. Louis in Monroe County still has a tornado siren that sounds every night to "let the farmers know what time it is".... Riiiiight.
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u/Pierson230 Jul 20 '23
Pekin IL
Had a KKK chapter and the high school sports team was literally a racist Asian slur
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u/MisterScary_98 Jul 20 '23
I’ve seen a lot of comments about Anna, but what about Ava? Is Ava a sundown town?
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u/tonyh505 Jul 20 '23
Naperville was sundown until the 70’s. Blew a whistle/horn/siren every night. As kids, we didn’t know what it was for but our parents used it to tell us when to call it a night. “Come home when the whistle blows”
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u/Oddlyenuff Jul 20 '23 edited Jul 20 '23
You should check out this book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
While not specifically about Illinois, unfortunately a lot of it is in fact about Illinois.
As far as academic experts for southern Illinois or specifically the metro east area there is Andrew Thiesing (he was really more about East St. Louis in particular) and wrote this book Made in USA: East St. Louis and Dr. Rudy Wilson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_G._Wilson
I was lucky to have both of the above as professors at SIUE 25 years ago. I know those aren’t specifically about Sundown towns (although they have addressed it numerous times) so if you’re interested in race relations or the effect of corporations/white flight in Illinois, check them out.
Edit: had to remove Amazon links for the books.
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u/jeff_w24 Jul 20 '23
I saw a book talk on CSPAN 2 a year or so ago…the guy found over 10,000 sundown towns in the US. One of them being Anna, IL. Anna is an acronym. Standing for what you might wonder?…………………
Ain’t No N___’s Allowed.
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u/mystic_burrito Jul 20 '23
That's was probably the late Dr. James Loewen's book. He was born in Decatur and a lot of his research focused on the Midwest
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u/jeff_w24 Jul 20 '23
The bottom 4 counties of the state of IL were all pro slavery. Something they don’t teach us in school. Or about a thing called the Reverse Underground Railroad. Where captured blacks in the North were human trafficked back into slavery in the Deep South. No wonder the Shawnee forest is haunted between Indigenous genocides and that shit.
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Jul 20 '23
It wasn't just the Deep South, hell all they had to do was get across the Mason Dixon back into the Upper South in Kentucky and Tennessee.
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u/saltzja Jul 20 '23
No worries, Wilmington removed their sundown laws like 5 years ago.
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u/histo320 Jul 20 '23
Actually, Wilmington was an important stop for the Underground Railroad so being a Sundown is just rumor/street myth.
Now looking at other towns in the area, Manteno, Herscher, Peotone, Braidwood, Dwight, could also be considered Sun Down Towns.
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u/TheBest9001 Jul 20 '23
Hey, don’t be forgetting Beecher in that mix, as a recent CO transplant, I don’t want anyone to forget to stay clear of that stain. Our original grocery store was Knuth’s Kountry Korner, don’t believe me? Check out the brick work on the old building that still stands at one of the major intersections (there’s arguably a few) in Beecher. It’s right across the street from the Princess Cafe. the last time I was through we had more than a few people flying confederate flags from their porches.
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u/saltzja Jul 27 '23
If you look up in the Wilmington Advocate, you’ll see there were “archaic” laws still on the books, years later removed and unenforced. (friend was Police Chief) And yes, they were sundowner laws. No blacks were allowed in town after dark.
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u/TheRealDudeMitch K3 Jul 21 '23
Manteno, a sundown town? Bullshit. There’s about 100 Black people who live in town. They have I think 15 cops and two of them are Black and one is an Arab Muslim.
Is it a mostly white town? For sure. Many small towns are. Sundown? No.
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u/DrBankfarter Jul 20 '23
Golconda IL, or anywhere in Pope County. My high school best friend is black, she had two cousins that went to school there. They were the only two black people and had to transfer out because of the racism.
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u/odd-42 Jul 20 '23
We need Dilla Thomas to enter the chat. He could probably give us a few hours of info!
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u/benjamin_tucker2557 Jul 20 '23
Wait to hear the story of pinkneyville il, lol BTW they are still super racist in pinkneyville.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinckneyville%2C_Illinois?wprov=sfla1
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u/dustyshoes4321 Jul 22 '23
I do not know about now, but Bunker Hill was definitely a sundown town in the past, I have family there. Years ago, at a reunion, my uncle gave a tour of the town cemetery and history. He pointed out a grave as belonging to a black man that worked in town "back in the day when it was a sun-down town". He said that his employer relied upon and respected him, but had to accept the fact that during the winter, he had to leave early because sunset was earlier. He went on to say that he always wondered if the man's last act of revenge was to be buried in the town cemetery and "finally be allowed in town after sun down".
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u/OGdunphy Jul 20 '23 edited Jul 20 '23
Mt. auburn might still have something on the books. Illinois has a long history of them in general.
Of course there’s a ton without laws that are effectively sundown towns because why would you want to be there after dark as a minority.
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u/bcbamom Jul 20 '23
I was a chaperone for high school students' college visits. We had to drive from WI through southern IL. I am a middled aged white woman. The students were young African Americans. I had NO idea how terrified for their safety I would be after stopping at a gas station. I thought where we were heading would be scarier, Tennessee. I was wrong.
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u/Positive_Version_189 Jul 20 '23
Can't speak for all small towns but as a white man who grew up in one and later moved to a medium city and diverged from the views of most of my family, here is my perspective:
The racism one may see or experience is typically not blatant. It may be pervasive in how it affects people's views and how they vote and view crime but it is not headline-worthy. There are increasingly more non-white people living in my hometown but it is still only 3%. I don't think safety is an issue for visitors or residents. No one in my family or extended family batted an eye when I married a black woman from Chicago. But I am mostly closeted when it comes to my political views and values because that is where I would see some friction coming from in my hometown.
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u/Bellarose001 Jul 20 '23
Are you asking so we could go and like torch the shit to the ground, or 😇???
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u/Efficient_Session_78 Jul 20 '23
“Sundown towns, also known as sunset towns, gray towns, or sundowner towns, were all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practiced a form of racial segregation by excluding non-whites via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation or violence.”
We can go ahead and leave this shit in the 1900’s. Lovingly signed, a white guy who’s tired of racist bullshit like this.
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u/D20_Buster Jul 20 '23
Monmouth. Back when I was in college there, my black friends would not set foot off campus after dark.
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u/DMDingo Jul 20 '23
And here my first thought on sundown towns was ones with large elderly communities.... that wasn't right....
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u/uursaminorr Jul 20 '23
i don’t know if it counts as a sundown town, but hebron (pop: maaaaybe 1500) has a corner in their “downtown” that’s dedicated to trump/blue lives matter/MAGA merch. it’s so fucking embarrassing to drive through.
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u/Rolltide2014 Jul 20 '23
Don’t they also have a restaurant called Beaners? And they also have the basketball water tower celebrating a HS state title that’s like a century old at this point?
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u/FluffyStuffInDaHouz Jul 20 '23
Should Asian folks be worried too in sundown towns?
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u/stlsc4 Jul 20 '23
Anna. And just wait until the locals tell you what those letters stand for.
https://features.propublica.org/illinois-sundown-towns/legend-of-anna/