Sundown towns produced measurable winners and losers across county boundaries.

Evidence

Research shows that counties adjacent to counties that were once sundown towns tend to have a higher-than-average disparity between black and white poverty rates, resulting in higher black poverty rates and lower white poverty rates. Black poverty is understandably higher because being surrounded by a cluster of sundown towns limited black mobility and led to fewer economic opportunities for black people in the area. As the sociologist Heather McConnell has stated, “This large-scale segregation within and across counties could directly benefit whites through the protection or hoarding of resources.” The financial winners were the privileged white Americans (and later their descendants) who lived in these towns and benefited from the decreased competition for jobs and homes. The financial losers were the black Americans who were not allowed to live there. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 447

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘winners and losers’ framing parallel to surrounding sundown towns extends the resource-hoarding logic of segregation that supports saturation-system arguments.
• DEEPTHINKING: Empirical finding that exclusion benefits whites through resource hoarding gives reparations a non-moral, purely distributional accounting leg — the harm to blacks and the windfall to whites are two sides of one mechanism.