Sundown restrictions descended directly from slavery’s pass system

Evidence

Some white people were fine with black Americans gaining equal rights—as long as they didn’t live on the same street. But as soon as black Americans attempted to move into white neighborhoods and demanded to be treated with the same respect afforded to their white peers, black Americans became a “problem” that needed to be solved. The Reconstruction Amendments had been designed to do exactly that: to bring the formerly enslaved into equal status with white Americans. Under slavery, white communities in the South had come up with “the original sundown rule: to be out after dark as a slave required written passes from owners.” This carried over into the post-slavery era, as white communities threatened freed black Americans who showed up in all-white towns after sundown. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 361

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘sundown’ rule as the continuity of slavery-era pass requirements into Jim Crow practice.
• XREF: Shows legal-form continuity across Emancipation, supporting Brown’s hidden-history premise that Reconstruction law was never allowed to do its work.