How The Legacy Of Sundown Towns Affects Black Travelers

“The cashier was like, ‘You best not be around here after dark. This is a sun­down town,’” he said.

A sun­down town as explained by James W. Loewen, a for­mer soci­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at the University of Vermont and author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, refers to a town, neigh­bor­hood, or com­mu­ni­ty with a whol­ly white pop­u­la­tion, cre­at­ed inten­tion­al­ly by sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly keep­ing out eth­nic minorities.

“A lot of African Americans don’t real­ly trav­el to cer­tain parts of the coun­try. I did not know this. I’m being naïve, trav­el­ing, but they don’t trav­el to cer­tain parts of the coun­try because cer­tain peo­ple have those mind­sets,” Williams told BuzzFeed News. “The racism and prej­u­dice is still in those towns, the mind­set from the Jim Crow era is passed down, and these peo­ple have no expo­sure because they don’t get out.”

According to Loewen’s rolling data­base, at least 60 of Kentucky’s 782 towns are believed to be or pre­vi­ous­ly have been con­sid­ered sun­down towns. But these towns aren’t just in the South. They are all over the US and con­cen­trat­ed par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Midwest, he says.

Despite the phe­nom­e­non, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences to sun­down towns are few and often wrapped into tales of the expul­sion of Black com­mu­ni­ties in places like Forsyth Countyand Anna, Illinois, which is alleged­ly known col­lo­qui­al­ly to be an acronym for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.”

In her 1969 mem­oir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the late poet Maya Angelou describes Mississippi with the phrase, “Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi.” The same sen­ti­ment would appear on sig­nage post­ed at city bound­aries of sun­down towns, mak­ing clear that Black peo­ple were not wel­come and risked their lives if they dared to defy the decree. Last year the con­cept was por­trayed on the pre­mière episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country in which the three pro­tag­o­nists are forced to flee a town while being stalked by a police officer.

Activist orga­ni­za­tions have used the term more recent­ly. In 2017, the NAACP issued a trav­el warn­ing for the entire state of Missouri, a first for the orga­ni­za­tion. The deci­sion was in response to a bill designed to lim­it dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits by mak­ing changes to the Missouri Human Rights Act. Senate Bill No. 43 would require employ­ees prove that their pro­tect­ed char­ac­ter­is­tics were a “moti­vat­ing fac­tor” for being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against when pre­vi­ous­ly the require­ment was that sim­ply showed it was a “con­tribut­ing factor.”

The NAACP also ref­er­enced anec­do­tal exam­ples of hate crimes, and data which showed Black motorists were 75% more like­ly to be pulled over and stopped and searched by police enforce­ment than their white coun­ter­parts. (The state of Missouri offered no pub­lic response to the NAACP but did make a Black woman the face of its tourism cam­paign last year.)

And in 2020, a group called the Defund San Antonio Police Department Coalition issued a trav­el warn­ing for San Antonio, label­ing the city as a sun­down town. “A trav­el advi­so­ry has been issued to warn that any Black peo­ple in or trav­el­ing to San Antonio use increased cau­tion when vis­it­ing the city due to the city’s polic­ing poli­cies that put Black Lives in dan­ger,” wrote orga­niz­ers in a press release.

Today, the lega­cy of sun­down towns con­tin­ues to cast a shad­ow on the tra­di­tion of the great American road trip, cre­at­ing addi­tion­al chal­lenges for Black motorists who dare to jour­ney off the beat­en path.

Williams took up hik­ing as a hob­by in response to the pan­dem­ic. In June 2020, he made the sev­en-hour jour­ney by road with a non-Black friend to vis­it Virginia’s hid­den gem, Devil’s Bathtub.

“When I usu­al­ly trav­el, I’m going to cities like New York, Miami, Atlanta, major pop­u­lat­ed cities. I want­ed to get in touch with my nature side and I want­ed to explore the rur­al American South,” said Williams.

In recent years, the angst of being a Black motorist has been cap­tured with the hash­tag #DrivingWhileBlack. As Americans flock to the open roads in a bid to reclaim their sum­mer after more than a year of restric­tions, the free­dom and excite­ment of the road trip isn’t with­out caveats for minori­ties look­ing to ven­ture to less diverse destinations.

“En route, there were a bunch of Confederate flags, a lot of ‘Make America Great Again’ flags, there’s even a few Klan lounges in South Carolina that we came across,” said Williams. “It’s when you veer off to the back roads that don’t con­nect to the high­way, that’s when you find your­self in trou­ble, and it sucks because the hik­ing spots [are] in these back wood­ed areas like West Virginia and Kentucky.”

Williams said he didn’t believe the cashier who sug­gest­ed he leave town before sun­down did so with mali­cious intent. “I don’t think she was being racist toward me. If any­thing I got the ener­gy that she was look­ing out for me so I believed her and got out of there,” he said.

Rather than chal­lenge the con­ven­tion and try his luck, Williams and his com­pan­ion quick­ly got on with their jour­ney back to Maryland, because “dead men tell no tales.” Despite the expe­ri­ence, he said he would be down to do it all again, but “would def­i­nite­ly be cautious.

Exercising cau­tion and trav­el­ing with inten­tion­al­i­ty is a key fea­ture for Black motorists, and is a phi­los­o­phy that trav­el blog­ger Sojourner White is guid­ed by.

Honoring the ety­mol­o­gy of her name, Sojourner, White dis­cov­ered her love for voy­ages on the road as a child trav­el­ing with her fam­i­ly from their home­town of Milwaukee.

“I trav­eled through­out my child­hood,” White, who runs a blog called Sojournies, told BuzzFeed News. “Milwaukee to Louisiana, St. Louis, Michigan, Atlanta, just because we have fam­i­ly spread out. We were always hop­ping in the van or the truck with me and my four broth­ers, explor­ing the US, and then it just kind of grew from there.”

White is famil­iar with sun­down towns. The lega­cy of fear about where Black trav­el­ers will not be wel­comed is some­thing that fre­quent­ly comes up in her net­work of bloggers.

“That’s the oth­er part of the pan­dem­ic: I have not inter­act­ed with white peo­ple as much, and so I find that I deal with racism less.”

“You hear peo­ple say, ‘My par­ents don’t want me to trav­el.’ They say it’s because of racism, and so it’s also a cul­tur­al thing with sun­down towns,” she said. “The after­ef­fects of it, even though they still do exist. As the younger gen­er­a­tion, I would say mil­len­ni­als, we’re the ones who are like, No, we’re gonna explore. We’re gonna kind of go out here. But it took a lot for peo­ple to get there.”

White, who is also a social work­er, said that when trav­el­ing on American roads, details like plan­ning where to stop made all the dif­fer­ence lest Black dri­vers unknow­ing­ly find them­selves “in the wrong spot.”

“It’s like, OK, we can stop in St. Louis, inten­tion­al­ly stop­ping in the big­ger cities to avoid any type of con­flict, grant­ed that even the cities have their issues, but it’s not like going to a space and being the only Black per­son for thou­sands of miles,” said White.

Like many trav­el con­tent cre­ators, the pan­dem­ic lim­it­ed her abil­i­ty to trav­el inter­na­tion­al­ly, so she focused on local excursions.

Because there were few­er trav­el­ers dur­ing the pan­dem­ic last sum­mer, White said she was able to indulge in the road trip expe­ri­ences she wouldn’t have oth­er­wise considered.

She drove to Oshkosh, a town in north­ern Wisconsin. “I’ve been doing a lot around Wisconsin recent­ly with the pan­dem­ic, and see­ing things I didn’t know were tourist attrac­tions. But the oth­er side of that is I didn’t real­ly explore Wisconsin a whole lot because of what I heard about being Black in oth­er areas,” said the 26-year-old.

“That’s the oth­er part of the pan­dem­ic: I have not inter­act­ed with white peo­ple as much, and so I find that I deal with racism less,” she said.

“When I was going up there last fall, all you saw was Trump signs, ‘All Lives Matter’ type of things, or ‘Blue Lives Matter.’ It wasn’t every­where, but that’s part of the rea­son why I don’t have a lot of road trips around the US to go see sights.”

In his book about sun­down towns, Loewen writes about how the social fab­ric of these towns remains very much steeped in the white suprema­cist val­ues they were found­ed on even if their pop­u­la­tions have become more diverse over time and sug­gests that res­i­dents are like­ly to hold a reverse atti­tude to travel.

“There’s all kinds of peo­ple who live in sun­down towns who do not want to, for exam­ple, go to Washington, DC, and vis­it the Smithsonian muse­ums and see the Capitol and do all the things that you do in Washington DC, because it’s too Black,” he told BuzzFeed News. “And the same thing, they real­ly don’t want to go to Atlanta, an actu­al tourist des­ti­na­tion, they don’t go. Chicago is also a prob­lem, all them Black folks.”

Loewen said the num­ber of sun­down towns is much high­er than the gen­er­al pub­lic would guess. But despite their preva­lence, lit­tle work has been done to inter­ro­gate the his­to­ry of these com­mu­ni­ties to rec­on­cile with the lega­cy of racism and the sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion sun­down issues that can present them­selves even where the pol­i­cy is no longer for­mal­ly enforced.

His web­site hosts a data­base and allows user-sub­mit­ted infor­ma­tion for bet­ter ver­i­fi­ca­tion. The project, he says, is the world’s “only reg­istry of sun­down towns,” and he hopes will dis­pel what he describes as the Hollywood myth that these towns exist almost exclu­sive­ly in the South.

“There are five Hollywood movies about sun­down towns and all of them are set in Mississippi, except one that’s out in Georgia. It sets us back in race rela­tions because the whole rest of the coun­try is like, Yeah, we’re all right. This is a good coun­try. Everything’s fine except those nasty white Southerners with all them sun­down towns, and they used to have slav­ery and all that. It’s a nation­al prob­lem. It’s more a Midwest prob­lem than it is a Southern prob­lem,” said Loewen.