From Maine to California, thousands of communities across the United States historically practiced – and in some cases, still practice – a form of racial segregation by excluding racial or ethnic groups through some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, or violence. These communities are sometimes called “sundown towns” because members of discriminated groups were expected to be out of town by sundown (meaning they could not live there).
For 50+ years post-Civil War, African Americans created more than fifty identifiable towns. The first all-black communities began in Ontario as an offshoot of the abolitionist movement. An ex-Kentucky slave founded the first black town in the U.S. in 1835, New Philadelphia, Illinois. More black towns emerged in the first years after the Civil War. Unable to secure land and economic opportunity in the ex-Confederate states, African Americans looked west, with its reserves of inexpensive land accessed through the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave citizens 160 acres of public land provided they live on it, improve it, and pay a small registration fee.
Eatonville, Florida, incorporated in 1887, is America’s oldest municipality established by African American freedmen. Zora Neale Hurston grew up there: “First place I aimed to stop to collect material was Eatonville. I knew that the town was full of material and I could get it without hurt, harm, or danger.”
Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was also founded in 1887. The town had a post office, churches, banks, schools and stores. Founded by the Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railroad, Mound Bayou was along the rail line that extended through the Mississippi delta, an area of thick woods and swamps containing some of the richest cotton-producing lands in the state. The fear of swampland diseases deterred white settlement, so the railroad hired two prominent African-American politicians as land promoters, including the family of Confederate ex-president Jefferson Davis. The four-square-mile area selected included two bayous and several Indian burial mounds, inspiring the name of Mound Bayou. By 1888 the town had 40 residents, and about 200 in the surrounding countryside. Twelve years later it had grown to 287 residents, with 1,500 African Americans in the vicinity. Mound Bayou’s population peaked at 1100 in 1911, with nearly 8000 in the surrounding rural area. By 1914, however, Bank of Mound Bayou closed, and the town experienced its first population losses. By the early 1920s, the town lost its vitality and began to resemble other poverty-stricken delta communities.
Greenwood, near North Tulsa, Oklahoma, was founded in 1906 by O.W. Gurley, a wealthy black man who owned land in Arkansas. According to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. In 1889, Gurley traveled to Oklahoma to participate in the Oklahoma Land Run. He purchased 40 acres, designated “only to be sold to colored.” Infamously, the town, which gained fame as “Black Wall Street,” was destroyed in 1921, after it was burned by angry white mobs.
Blackdom, New Mexico. In 1911, a small utopian settlement of African American families developed in the New Mexico plains about 20 miles south of Roswell. Founded by homesteader Francis Marion Boyer, who was fleeing threats from the Ku Klux Klan, it became the state’s first community of African Americans. “We have a post office, store, church, school house, pumping plant, office building and several residents already established.” However, after crop failures the town by the late 1920s had rapidly depopulated. Today little remains of the town except a plaque on a lonely highway.
Though Blackdom did not survive, black settlements like it were common elsewhere during a period of migration sometimes called the Great Exodus following the Homestead Act of 1862, particularly in Kansas. “During the decade of the 1870s, 9,500 blacks from Kentucky and Tennessee migrated to Kansas. By 1880 there were 43,110 blacks in Kansas.” Many of the promises of paid passage and waiting success proved false. Still, the Topeka Colored Citizen declared in 1879, “If blacks come here and starve, all well. It is better to starve to death in Kansas than to be shot and killed in the South.”
Boley, Creek Nation, Indian Territory the largest all-black town in (Oklahoma) Indian Territory, was founded in 1904 by two white entrepreneurs, William Boley and Lake Moore, but they chose an African American to handle promotion of the town. It was on a rail line and in a timbered, well-watered prairie that easily supported agriculture. Newcomers arrived by train, living in tents until they could clear land for homes and stores. During the first year, Creek Indians rode through Boley’s streets on shooting sprees that killed several people. Boley’s reputation for lawlessness continued into 1905, when a peace officer was killed while leading a posse after a gang of white horse thieves who terrorized Boley. However, it became one of the wealthiest black towns in the country. Despite Booker T. Washington’s endorsement, Boley’s spectacular growth was over by 1910. When the Twin Territories became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, Democrats emerged as the dominant party and quickly disfranchised black voters and segregated public schools and accommodations. This eliminated the town’s major appeal as a community where African Americans could escape the Jim Crow restrictions they faced in southern states.
Nicodemus, Kansas, was the first predominantly black community that gained national attention. Nicodemus was founded by a white minister and land speculator, who during the mid-1870s joined three black Kansas residents in planning an agricultural community in sparsely populated western Kansas. Nicodemus was named after a legendary African slave prince who purchased his freedom. The first 30 colonists arrived from Kentucky in 1877. By 1880, 258 blacks and 58 whites resided in the town and surrounding township. Its fortunes began to decline in the late 1880s: An 1885 blizzard destroyed 40% of the wheat crop, prompting the first exodus from the area. By 1888 three railroads had bypassed the town. Toward the end of the decade, Oklahoma became more appealing to prospective black homesteaders. In the area, several communities still exist. Their populations have declined, but in many descendants still live.
The town of North Brentwood (outside Washington, D.C.), originally called Snakes Den. was the first incorporated black municipality in the area, established in the 1890s after a white Civil War veteran sold property to a local realty company. The northern tract was designated for blacks to develop. “North Brentwood’s first residents were former slaves of local planters and Civil War veterans.” Other black towns and communities in Prince George’s include Glenarden, Lincoln, Chapel Hill, Rossville and Ridgely. “Fairmount Heights was founded at the turn of the century and Glenarden in the 1920s. It was a very vibrant community. There is little left of it, but the church and school are still there.” A symbol of hope and faith, the church was typically the first institution established in a new black community, usually followed by a school and a charity hall. Many of Montgomery County’s historic landmark churches still proudly stand as cornerstones.
Allensworth, California, founded in 1908 by Colonel ALlen Allensworth is “the first and only California town to be founded, financed and governed by black Americans.” Born into slavery in Kentucky, Colonel Allensworth was the highest-ranking Black officer in the U.S. Army. After Reconstruction, Allensworth searched to find a place for those trying to escape the Jim Crow South: “The town is a very, very small town, only has a little bit over 400 residents,” Allensworth dreamed that his new community could be self-sufficient and become known as the “Tuskegee of the West.” It has now been designated as a California state park.
None of the surviving black towns ever reached the potential envisioned by their founder-promoters. Nicodemus, Boley, and Mound Bayou continue, but they are not dynamic centers of economic or cultural activity. None of the black towns could compete with the attraction of larger cities, which lured millions of Americans from farms and small towns across the nation during the twentieth century. By 1915, thousands of southern African Americans who might have considered black towns now sought northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York for political freedom and economic opportunity. Nonetheless, for one brief period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nearly 100 fledgling black communities throughout the nation symbolized the aspirations of African Americans for political freedom and economic opportunity.
Hamilton, Kenneth Marvin. Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877–1915. Urbana, Ill., 1991.
Wiley, Ben Wayne . Ebonyville in the South and Southwest: Political Life in the All-Black Town, Ph.D. diss., U of Texas, Arlington, 1984..
https://www.mapbox.com/blog/uncovering-the-distribution-of-sundown-towns
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