Sun Prairie

Basic Information

Type of Place

Suburb

Metro Area

Politics c. 1860?

Don’t Know

Unions, Organized Labor?

Don’t Know

Sundown Town Status

Sundown Town in the Past?

Possible

Was there an ordinance?

Don't Know

Sign?

Don’t Know

Year of Greatest Interest

Still Sundown?

Surely Not

Census Information

The available census data from 1860 to the present

	Total	White	Black	Asian	Native	Hispanic	Other	BHshld
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950	2263		0
1960	4008		0
1970	9935		101
1980	12931		76
1990	15333		103
2000
2010	29,364		2,297
2020

Method of Exclusion

• Unknown

Main Ethnic Group(s)

• Unknown

Group(s) Excluded

• Black
• Jewish

Comments

email 3/2008

I work for a large company in Madison, I am on the African-American employee council. For our annual picnic in 2006 we selected a park in Sun Prairie. Many of the black employees live there, it is also conveniently close to others.

We had about 60 people, all but 3 of whom were black. Many children, mostly under age 8. I was one of the white people and it is telling that I didn’t notice the police presence nearly as quickly as the others did. We had almost the whole park to ourselves, but for some reason the police drove by about every 15 minutes for the 4 hours we were in the park. A few times they even drove in to the parking lot and parked for a few minutes. I also wonder if that park usually has NO visitors on a summer afternoon.

According to a Madison resident, a friend at her synagogue claimed that in the 70s she had proposed that the public schools in Sun Prairie sponsor Holocaust Education (which was well researched and age appropriate). The community responded immediately and the family encountered resistance. Her daughter even received death threats on her locker. This caused the family to move out of Sun Prairie.