AMIND 141 Module 7 Discussion Board: Where We Live, Sundown Towns and Indian Reservations
This week we explore American housing policy in the 20th century through the lens of Indian Reservations and Sundown Towns. For this week’s discussion board I would like you to use the reading, video and lecture materials to describe the concept of Sundown Towns to an imagined friend or family member who is unfamiliar with these housing policies: What are Sundown Towns? How do they relate to Indian Reservations? How do they operate? And how did they come to be? What was the intention of 20th century American society in creating them?
POST
Sundown towns are “any town or city in the US that is intentionally white” (Loewen). These towns were designed to prohibit Black people from entering or staying after the sun set (some of these towns didn’t allow Black people to enter during daylight hours). They were established through societal standards and pressures, and they became extremely prevalent throughout the years. In his article, Loewen mentions that “about 500 Illinois communities – two-thirds of all incorporated municipalities larger than 1,000 – were Sundown towns.” Other than societal pressure, these sundown towns operated and continued through the use of violence and threats: “In 1925, when a black family moved into Oneida, the largest town in the county, whites dynamited their home, severely injuring them. County historian Esther Sanderson reported that the family moved from town shortly thereafter ‘and no others ever came in’ (Loewen). In Professor Hassing’s lecture, he also mentioned the Tulsa Race Riots/ Massacre. In Tulsa, extreme violence (including military force and airplanes) was used in an attempt to drive off the Black population in the city. However, “Tulsa was not an outlier… because the massacre was not successful in driving out African Americans and thus Tulsa was kept from engaging in the public forgetting that these other communities engaged in” (Hassing). Many other cities around the US also used similar tactics to discriminate against African Americans and drive them off from various cities and communities. The intention of society in creating sundown towns was segregate Black Americans (along with other minorities) from white Americans, denying them the resources and opportunities they needed. These towns were used as a way to further perpetuate white supremacy and domination. Sundown towns relate to Indian Reservations because both aimed to take land from a certain group and force them into certain areas in America. Through a series of policies (including the Dawe’s Act and General Allotment Act), the US government forced Indigenous Peoples off of their land, taking away their culture, rights, and resources–much like with Sundown Towns. Furthermore, Indigenous Peoples faced similar experiences, including the use of force and violence in attempts to segregate them from the rest of society. Lastly, in Hassing’s lecture, he states that “after all we know that many Tribal Nations were confined to reservations and evidence suggests that this policy of exclusion from the countryside and the suburbs wasnt limited to African Americans, here in the west exclusionary policies targeted Chinese and Japanese Americans, Hispanic and Latinos, as well as African Americans and Indigenous Peoples” (Hassing).
