Non-southern counties with no black residents nearly doubled from 1890 to 1930

Evidence

In 1890 there were only 119 counties in the United States outside the “traditional South” (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana) that had no black residents, but by 1930 that number had almost doubled to 235 counties. Why did black people disappear from these counties? The answer is, they became sundown towns. Loewen estimates that more than half of all the cities in Oregon, Indiana, Ohio, eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ozarks, among other regions, were sundown towns. There were also sundown suburbs in places like La Jolla, California. By Loewen’s count, California at one time had more sundown towns “than all parts of the traditional south put together.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 339

Categorization

• XREF: The county data is a hard number that a legal brief can anchor — the near-doubling 119 to 235 shows active, organized exclusion, not happenstance.