Whites-only counties outside the South nearly doubled between 1890 and 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
Category: Factual Claims
- CANDY: The California sundown-town count exceeding the entire traditional South is a striking, shareable reversal.
Related
- Non-southern counties with no black residents nearly doubled from 1890 to 1930 (similarity 0.97)
- Most towns in several US regions were sundown towns by design (similarity 0.84)
- Western states are white today partly because sundown towns expelled black residents (similarity 0.83)
- Most Midwest cities were sundown towns by 1930 (similarity 0.81)
- Sundown towns thrived outside the South to exclude blacks without slavery precedent (similarity 0.80)
- Most towns in major US regions were exclusionary all-white by design. (similarity 0.79)
- Sundown-town expulsion permanently shaped midwestern demographics (similarity 0.79)
- Sundown towns were a national, not southern, phenomenon after Reconstruction (similarity 0.78)