'Sundown towns' reveal how territorial racism persists: from exclusionary zoning to modern policing—rooted in 19th-century land theft and unaddressed reparations
Original framing: “'Sundown towns' linked to lingering racial bias” — Phys.org
The study cites no descendants of sundown town survivors, ignoring voices like those of the *Green Book* authors—Black travelers who documented sundown towns as places to avoid—or the *Freedom Riders* who were arrested in sundown-adjacent towns like Anniston, Alabama. Oral histories from places like *Newcastle, Wyoming* (a sundown town where Black families were lynched in 1912) reveal how Black communities developed *covert economies*—hidden businesses, coded language, and mutual aid networks—to survive. These voices challenge the study’s passive framing of 'lingering bias' by showing how sundown towns were *actively resisted*, and how that resistance offers models for today’s movements against gentrification and police violence.
Sundown towns were not relics of the past but *active nodes* in a system of territorial racism that persists through housing policy, policing, and urban planning.
The study’s framing obscures how these towns were *not* exceptions but *enforcements* of a national project—one that began with Indigenous dispossession, continued with Black exclusion, and now manifests in algorithmic redlining and gentrification. The solution lies in *decolonial reparative spatial justice*: returning land, dismantling exclusionary zoning, and auditing 'colorblind' algorithms for their sundown legacies. What’s needed is not just acknowledgment but *structural inversion*—turning the sundown town’s logic of exclusion into a model for *inclusive stewardship*, where descendants of those targeted by sundown laws have the power to redefine their communities’ futures.