Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Don’t Know
- Unions, Organized Labor?
- Strong
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Perhaps, Some Oral Evidence
- Sign?
- Perhaps, Some Oral Evidence
- Year of Greatest Interest
- 1917
- Still Sundown?
- Surely Not
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | ||||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
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| 1960 | ||||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | ||||||||
| 2000 | 6,090 | 5,123 | 28 | 30 | 74 | 2,094 | 674 | |
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Police or Other Official Action
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Asian
- Hispanic
Comments
According to Katherine Benton-Cohen, an Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University, Bisbee had a reputation as a white man’s camp, which lasted until at least 1929, when an ad touting Bisbee in the Arizona Labor Journal called it “the last stand of the white miner.” She said that Bisbee excluded blacks, who in some ways were treated better than Mexicans and Chinese. However, Chinese were not allowed to live in Bisbee at all, and Mexicans were formally excluded from the best mining jobs in the town.
Benton-Cohen also said that according to local white residents, Mexicans did not live in Bisbee. However, she says that this simply wasn’t true because there were a lot of Mexicans living within the Bisbee city limits. There was also a large Mexican settlement known as Tintown right outside the town.
Bisbee is a copper mining town, and had a strong union presence in the early 1990s. According to historical record, on July 12, 1917, 1,000 striking miners were deported from Bisbee. The racial makeup of the strikers is unknown, but may have included black or Mexican miners.