A new study has found that residents in U.S. counties with at least one historic “sundown town” are more likely to exhibit racial bias today than those in counties with no former sundown towns.
A sundown town is a community that excluded African Americans from staying in town after sunset. Sundown restrictions led to extreme racial violence and prevented Black people from owning property in those towns. Most sundown towns arose between the end of the Reconstruction era around 1890 to 1968, when the Fair Housing Act was implemented. Several state universities are located in what were sundown towns, including Arizona State University and the University of Oklahoma.
For their latest study, authors Maximilian Primbs, a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern University, and Jimmy Calanchini, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, examined data from 1.3 million White participants regarding their levels of implicit bias and explicit bias. The data was collected between 2002 and 2024 by Project Implicit.
Counties with at least one sundown town had higher contemporary implicit and explicit racial bias than counties with no sundown town. The authors suggest this pattern could be due to the historical legacies of discriminatory policing and laws, limited interracial contact, and violence-established patterns that persist long after sundown towns were eliminated.
“This growing area of research has shown that biased people build biased institutions, enact biased laws, and create cultures of bias,” said Dr. Calanchini. “Those structural forces persist long after the people who built them are gone. They continue to shape the biases of people who live and work in them, and also attract more biased people to those places, which further perpetuates the cycle of bias in places.”
More information can be found on the Tougaloo College Sundown Towns Database.
