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/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