Technology
Is Your City a Sunset City? This Interactive Map Will Tell You –
Tougaloo College’s interactive map permits you to explore cities and communities across the United States, and discover in the event that they are considered sunset cities.
Some interactive map from Tougaloo College means that you can study cities and communities within the United States and discover in the event that they are considered sunset cities.
According to Britannicasunset in US history is a city that excluded people of color, most frequently African Americans, when the sun went down. The way people enforced these “rules” ranged from collective violence similar to public lynchings, discriminatory laws, and discrimination in open housing.
The map is inspired by a database introduced by the late historian and sociologist James W. Loewen. He is the writer of the classic bestseller. Tougaloo’s History and Social Justice section has included what describes as “the only cities in the world with a twilight register.”
“Sunset Town isn’t just a place where something racist happened,” researchers write on the database’s website. “It’s an entire community (and even a county) that was intentionally ‘all white’ for decades.”
The researchers add that “All white” is in quotation marks because some towns historically “allowed one black family to remain while expelling the rest.” They also indicate that some sunset towns also barred Chinese, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, and in some cases, Mormons.
How to read a map
For the interactive map, users should hover over a state to see an alphabetical list. The map key consists of six colours used as dots to discover cities which are definitely, probably, possibly, or unlikely to be sunset cities.
Black dots indicate black cities or municipalities. Places on the interactive map with a red flag indicate places of special importance.
On at first glance, the Midwest and The Plains region seems to have more dots indicating definite, probable, and possible sunset cities. The map shows that there just isn’t a single state in America that doesn’t have a suspected sunset city.
As for black cities and towns, the ten listed are Pembroke and Brooklyn, Illinois. Expose, Mound Bayou, New Africa, Renova, and Winstonville, all in Mississippi. Maryville, South Carolina; Martinsville, Indiana; and North Amityville, New York.