Home Connecticut The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

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“Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark” reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England’s small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations.  From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts.  A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

Klan members march on Washington in 1926

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

  • Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.
  • One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s:  “My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors…came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark.”
  • A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. “He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. … [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn’t be up to any good…”

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, “No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race.” Then they often added, “Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants.”

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, “No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot.” The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner’s employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. (Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

sundown towns movie

A film that exposed Darien as one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere.”

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere’s descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of racecolorreligionsex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn’t necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.

Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2023. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen. 

56 comments

You Probably Weren’t Taught This Stuff in School | New Roots July 25, 2017 - 4:51 pm

[…] also represent the backlash of the North and Midwest to the sudden influx of people of color. Even socially-progressive New England has a history with this, and recently Goshen, Indiana publically acknowledged this tragic part of […]

Dennis Nelson August 28, 2017 - 9:01 am

In the late 1970’s, my father put our home up for sale in the small SW Michigan town we lived in. Upon hearing the news that the house was for sale, a number of our neighbors asked my father to refrain from selling to a black family. Dad was so pissed off he told them he would make it a point to sell to a black family if he could find one to buy the house. We never had more than one black family living in the town at a time when I was growing up.

Thomas August 28, 2017 - 2:37 pm

And look at Ashby now…

Perry Weiner September 10, 2017 - 9:10 pm

Well, Thomas, perhaps you mean to say that the state is now a sad state of affairs. If so, I wonder how you would thrive as an ex-slave with no commitment to provide you and your Black contemporaries to share in the twentieth century prosperity of the US, especially after Jim Crow laws that wrecked mortal danger upon Blacks, especially Black men! Unless you subscribe to the heinous theory that Blacks are inherently incapable of succeeding. If so, you’re simply a racist. if not, perhaps you might reconsider the question.

Dave November 30, 2017 - 4:24 pm

To might be replied Thomas, look at Appalachia, Northern New England or Native American reservations across the nation. These are all areas which I have experienced personally with staggering poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, and economic depression where there is virtually no black population. Your implication that Michigan is now a wasteland because of blacks is beyond ignorant. The fact is Michigan is in the deplorable state it is in now is due to the incompetence and willful negligence of its white politicians and also, the much wider economic degeneration of American industry in the Midwest, which by the way is also thanks to the rich white CEOs shipping all the jobs overseas so they could make an extra billion or two. God Bless America!

David Oravez August 29, 2017 - 6:33 pm

You wrote: “In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, there were five. Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. There were five black people living in Lincoln County in 1930, where there had been 26 in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.”

I am the proud decendant of those Hancock County African Americans. They originated from Frederic Allen, born in Cuba (though some records will say Pennsylvania) in 1813 and died on Negro Point, Eden (now Bar Harbor), Maine. He was a sea captain who, until later years after he died, was buried on his property called Spruce Hill – later buried with his wife Climenia. They were my 3rd great-grandparents. My grandmother and many of her siblings, like their mother, left Maine. Some were able to pass as white elsewhere.

Dobro January 30, 2018 - 12:10 pm

Does anyone know if there is any comparable research about CT. It’s my home state and we whites were taught that racism was a southern issue, I’m curious to learn the truth about race in CT. Growing up there it seems highly segregated.

Andrew Geraghty August 19, 2019 - 1:26 pm

Very interesting. I live in Ellsworth Falls, Hancock County, Maine and have been trying to find out more about Negro Point in Bar Harbor. Anything else you’d be willing to share! Thanks, Andrew

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