Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Strongly Republican
- Unions, Organized Labor?
- Strong
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 | 114 | |||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | 9,069 | 0 | ||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | ||||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | 34,757 | 3 | ||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | ||||||||
| 2000 | 33262 | 32549 | 98 | 177 | 114 | 362 | ||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Private Bad Behavior
- Reputation
- Unknown
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
- Unknown
Comments
Email from a former Resident:
“The sundown story I grew up hearing was that at sometime in the past a white NT woman was molested by a Black man. There was a big furor over this; as a result the NT City Council passed an ordinance requiring all Blacks to be out of town by the blowing of the eight o%u2019clock whistle at the city%u2019s water works”
“Tonawanda, the first stop outside of Buffalo, was like Ducktown, TN, in that it allowed no Negro to live there.” (from James A. Atkins, The Age of Jim Crow (NY: Vantage, 1964), 138.)
There was one black family in North Tonawanda when I was growing up [1960s?]. They were rich, light-skinned, and their daughter had a white boy friend. Another black family moved in. Teachers turned on their son, who wouldn’t take shit.
“The nicest word I learned was ‘colored.’ ‘Nigger’ was the typical term.” “I learned to hold my breath when blacks walked by because I was taught they smell bad.” “Whenever a neighbor would get pissed off at another neighbor, they’d yell, ‘I’m gonna sell my house to a god-damned nigger.'” I remember my [older relative] watching Martin Luther King and sneer, “Oh, you have a dream…” “George Wallace was so popular in my town. And this was a Democratic union town!”
People from Tonawanda ask me, “How do you live with all those niggers down there?” “I reply, ‘I like having sex with them.'”
Former North Tonawanda Resident:
“I grew up in North Tonawanda (between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, the terminus of the Erie Canal), and there were always rumors that Blacks were kept out of that town in the 19th century, but there was also a local story about “Black Hannah,” who supposedly lived in the woods near us.”