Sundown Towns, Durable Exclusion, and The Legacy of Northern Racial Regimes

Historical racial regimes have long legacies of sustaining racial inequality. To date, most scholarship on American racial regimes looks at the legacies of southern racial regimes— chattel slavery or the relative violence of a state’s Jim Crow era–on modern racial inequality. Sundown towns emerged in the same era, yet were more common in the Midwest and West and are a more localized racial regime. We test whether sundown town status is associated with local racial demographics generations later by utilizing newly available data identifying thousands of sundown towns. We construct a decennial panel (1970-2020) at the Census place level and use a combination of matching and a two-way fixed effects model to estimate the association between historical sundown town status and racial-ethnic demographic trajectory. Relative to matched places that are otherwise similar but were not identified as sundown towns, former sundown towns accumulated a steadily growing demographic gap: by 2020, they had a white population share roughly 3.4 percentage points higher and a Black population share roughly 2.2 percentage points lower. These gaps emerged gradually across the panel, consistent with a persistent racially exclusionary dynamic, and show that the exclusionary character of these places was actively sustained decades after formal enforcement had ended, empirically confirming the exclusionary legacy of Northern racial regimes.