Sundown towns were a national, not southern, phenomenon after Reconstruction
Evidence
Sundown towns were the original opportunity hoarders: They limited the ability of black people to buy property inside city limits and take advantage of amenities available to white Americans. For the most part, sundown towns were not found in the South, with its historical ties to slavery. You see, in the South black people knew their place and knew that the hanging noose awaited their next misstep. Instead, sundown towns appeared throughout the nation, primarily during the period following Reconstruction between 1890 and 1940, when white people were once again looking for ways to exert their control over black Americans. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 338
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Defines ‘opportunity hoarding’ as applied to sundown towns — a key term in the accounting argument.
- XREF: The claim that exclusion was national rather than southern subverts the common framing that racism was a regional problem — connects to the broader reparations case.
Related
- Sundown towns thrived outside the South to exclude blacks without slavery precedent (similarity 0.94)
- Sundown towns produced measurable winners and losers across county boundaries. (similarity 0.85)
- Sundown-town exclusion hoarded resources for whites, raising their advantage (similarity 0.83)
- Sundown-town expulsion permanently shaped midwestern demographics (similarity 0.80)
- Sundown towns’ histories predict present-day Black-white inequality (similarity 0.80)
- Sundown towns were jurisdictions that kept African Americans out on purpose (similarity 0.79)
- Whites-only counties outside the South nearly doubled between 1890 and 1930 (similarity 0.78)