List of sundown towns in the United States

A sundown town is a municipality or neighborhood within the United States that practices or once practiced a form of racial segregation characterized by intimidation, hostility, or violence among White people directed toward non-Whites, especially against African Americans. Typically such towns originally had a majority African American population, whose residents were then violently driven out by whites with property being illegally seized as part of the process. The term "sundown town" derives from the practice of White towns then erecting signage alerting non-Whites to vacate the area before sundown. Sundown towns might include entire sundown counties or sundown suburbs and have historically been strengthened by the local presence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a White supremacist organization. Discrimination practices commonly found in sundown towns became federally illegal during the 20th century.
Although the United States has a history of expulsion of African Americans from certain communities dating to the 18th century, sundown towns became common during the nadir of American race relations after the Reconstruction era ended in 1877 and through the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. The period was marked by the lawful continuation of racial segregation in the United States, known as the Jim Crow era. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 codified enforcement of federal law abolishing restrictive housing covenants.
Sundown towns could issue written warnings to non-Whites by way of signage, city ordinances, housing covenants, and notices posted in local papers or directly on the homes of non-White families and their employers. Violent means of expelling minorities from their communities may include the realization or threat of firing gunshots and dynamite into their homes, burning down their homes, planting burning crosses and bombs in their yards, mobbing them, lynching them, and massacring them.
A sundown town is an all-White community that shows or has shown hostility toward non-Whites. Sundown town practices may be evoked in the form of city ordinances barring people of color after dark, exclusionary covenants for housing opportunity, signage warning ethnic groups to vacate, unequal treatment by local law enforcement, and unwritten rules permitting harassment. Sundown towns in the United States include present communities that do not "socially accept" people who are not White. Although African Americans are primarily the focus of sundown town claims, Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans have also been subject to this discriminatory practice.
Legally, municipalities cannot currently enforce restrictions or discrimination against people by race or other protected classes, but this has not always been the case. The 1948 United States Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer outlawed the legal enforcement of restrictive housing covenants. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibited housing discrimination and defined equal protection, enforcement of such provisions would not be codified until the Civil Rights Act of 1968. As such, any location that is listed below is not an indicator of that place practicing traditional sundown town rules today.