Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Don’t Know
- Unions, Organized Labor?
- Don’t Know
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Perhaps, Some Oral Evidence
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Surely Not
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | 3232 | 18 | ||||||
| 1930 | 4046 | 87 | ||||||
| 1940 | 4643 | 51 | ||||||
| 1950 | 5839 | 59 | ||||||
| 1960 | 8443 | 20 | 2 | 0 | ||||
| 1970 | 10931 | 92 | ||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | 17728 | 259 | 2 | |||||
| 2000 | 19806 | 285 | 195 | 36 | 793 | |||
| 2010 | 27317 | 1711 | 84 | 52 | ||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Threat of Violence
- Reputation
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
* All but one in 1960 were males. 43 out of the 51 black residents in 1940 were male.
1970?: 10,931, 92 bl.
One former Crown Point resident writes
%u201CIn 1958, my family moved to the small agricultural county seat of Lake County, Indiana Crown Point. We lived there quite happily for 4 years.
My sisters and I were treated to a fair amount of teasing when we first arrived. I think the locals thought Texas was a foreign country and Texans, therefore, foreigners. We talked funny. For the most part, it was good-natured fun. However, I was hurt by disparaging comments about Texas whenever we studied the civil war and the issue of slavery, and my classmates sought to prove somehow I was morally ‘less than’ by dent of my birth state.
My parents set the record straight for me one time when I was bemoaning the teasing. They explained that Crown Point still had a curfew for Negroes! Negroes could not be out in public after dark in Crown Point in 1958.
I was quite surprised and disillusioned by this. After all, Houston had no such prohibitions. What a strange idea to an eight year old girl. She was bad because she had been born in a confederate state, where she saw African Americans everywhere and anytime, but the morally enlightened northern state of Indiana would not allow African Americans out at night! I don’t recall seeing any African Americans in Crown Point, IN.%u201D
About Town: Crown Point
State: IN
Message 01/07/2008: I visited Crown Point in 1955. My friend there told me it was a sundown town. I was from Alabama and had never heard of such a thing.
Email testimony from 08/2014: “Lived there as a teen from the mid 70’s to early 80’s. More than once I heard tales of signage that read, “If black don’t let the sun set on your back”. According to these stories, the signage was there in the 50’s. Though I never saw one, even an old one in someone’s garage or anything, and the people there seemed to collect everything! So I’d say any “official” signage is probably untrue, but homemade ones might be. Any threat of violence was low to nonexistent (at least among those in my age group). It’s more of a small town that wants to be left alone. In the 90’s the high school graduated its first Black student…”