Illinois
Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Surely
- Was there an ordinance?
- Don't Know
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Probably Not, Although Still Very Few Black People
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | ||||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | ||||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | 583 | |||||||
| 2000 | 613 | 602 | 1 | |||||
| 2010 | 536 | 5 | 1 | |||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Other
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
They all seemed to have the same kind of law: that you could come to town but couldn’t stay past 5PM (Local genealogist, 2004)
A local resident in 1960s said restaurants would only serve blacks at the curbside.
Someone who grew up in the 50’s on a farm outside of Ashley said via email his father told him the following stories:
“… an African American reserved a room, or attempted to reserve a room at a motel in Ashley, IL… My dad said that someone, perhaps the mayor or other influential town leaders, ‘ran (the African American) out of town.'”
“Another story he told me later, perhaps late 1960s was that an African American was dragged through the fields near my dad’s fields. The African American died and the killers were never found.”