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?
- Possible
- Was there an ordinance?
- Don't Know
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Surely Not
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | 4264 | 4 | ||||||
| 1870 | 5310 | 0 | ||||||
| 1880 | 7314 | 1 | ||||||
| 1890 | 16359 | 3 | ||||||
| 1900 | 22962 | 0 | ||||||
| 1910 | 26388 | 9 | ||||||
| 1920 | 30955 | 0 | ||||||
| 1930 | 39251 | 0 | ||||||
| 1940 | 40638 | 1 | ||||||
| 1950 | 42365 | 8 | ||||||
| 1960 | 45747 | 2 | ||||||
| 1970 | 48484 | 14 | ||||||
| 1980 | 48085 | 57 | ||||||
| 1990 | 49676 | 104 | ||||||
| 2000 | ||||||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Unknown
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
According to local residents, Sheboygan in the 1950s had a policeman who went to the railroad station to warn blacks not to stay there.
Testimony of a former resident:
“I recall being told when I moved to Sheboygan in August 1970 that in previous years blacks had not been allowed to stay in the city overnight. There was no generalized policy in that regard by 1970, but I suppose remnants of the onetime prohibition might have been carried on informally. We lived on the city’s south side initially, and later toward the southwest, mostly the working class section, and I saw no evidence of blacks being prohibited per se. But the black population was quite low. We had a black mailman sometime between 1970 and 1975, but at the junior high school where I taught in those years (also on the south side, not quite two blocks from our home) I don’t recall any black students.”
Testimony of a local resident:
“A black social worker from the state office in Madison, with an MSW, had to stay at a smaller motel outside of Sheboygan because she couldn’t stay at the main hotel in Sheboygan, in 1976. [Twelve years after the Civil Rights bill!] “She did not stay there [Sheboygan] and she did not raise a fuss, because she had another agenda.”
[Cliff Christl, “The WI State League,” Voyageur (Summer 2001), 25-26.]
“One of a small number of African Americans to play in the State League [WI minor league baseball], [John] Roseboro remembers well the warm welcome he received in virtually all-white Sheboygan.” He lived with a white family. “‘I had no problems whatsoever,’ said Roseboro. ‘It was very easy for us. I was a tenant of the Leffin family. The mother and father took good care of myself and two other players. They were great people.'” This would have been around 1945. [But compare the next paragraph.]
[Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment (NY: Vintage, 1984), 252-253.]
“”There isn’t a nigger in Sheboygan,” [John] Roseboro wrote his parents during his first season.”” So no one knew how to cut his hair. [hm. no one WOULD do it] re c.1953. “Fans taunted Roseboro with cries of ‘Sambo,'” etc. Eau Claire and St. Cloud were welcoming.