This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A sundown town is a community that prohibited Black people from staying within its borders after dark or from owning property. This was done through laws, signs, threats, harassment or violence.
More than 150 years after the end of slavery and a generation after Civil Rights reforms, a new study finds that places designated as "sundown towns" in the past are more racist today. Given its history of Jim Crow segregation laws, the South might seem like it was the epicenter of sundown towns. In fact, they were located all over the United States and were most prevalent in the Midwest.
In Anna, Illinois, for example, signs declaring Black people should leave before sunset persisted into the 1970s. Some Southern California communities, including Glendale and Burbank, passed ordinances declaring that Black people should leave before dark. Other places, like the planned community of Levittown, Pennsylvania, prevented nonwhite people from buying homes.
The study was led by UC Riverside psychology professor Jimmy Calanchini, who researches intergroup bias. The sample was enormous: More than 1.3 million white participants, about half of whom lived in counties that had at least one sundown town and half of whom lived in counties that did not have one. The sample was part of a large racial bias data set collected from 2002–2024 by Project Implicit, an international coalition of psychological scientists.
The study, published on the preprint server PsyArXiv, considered both implicit racial bias—unconscious or automatic bias—and explicit bias, bias of which people are aware. An example of implicit racial bias would be an employer giving white applicants the benefit of the doubt over equally qualified Black candidates. In contrast, explicit bias would be an employer deliberately deciding to hire only white people.
Calanchini and his colleague Maximilian Primbs considered sundown towns in three contexts: whether a county had at least one sundown town, the number of sundown towns in the county and whether the county as a whole was considered a sundown county. Counties with at least one sundown town and counties identified as sundown counties have higher implicit and explicit racial bias today than counties with no sundown town. Some counties were home to multiple sundown towns.
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