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?
- No
- Year of Greatest Interest
- 1954
- Still Sundown?
- Probably
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | ||||||||
| 1940 | 1173 | 100 | ||||||
| 1950 | 1085 | 34 | ||||||
| 1960 | 1094 | 15 | 6 | |||||
| 1970 | 1325 | 2 | ||||||
| 1980 | 1420 | |||||||
| 1990 | 1446 | 9 | ||||||
| 2000 | 1234 | 1208 | 1 | |||||
| 2010 | 1434 | 16 | ||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Violent Expulsion
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
Oral history done on-site, 1/2004, with elected city
official and mother of same: the black community was
at the S end of town, S 7th street, “behind where those
mobile homes are. Mother was in HS in the early
1950s. A black man beat up and maybe killed a white
HS cheerleader’s grandmother, with whom she lived,
and raped the cheerleader. He was arrested and
incarcerated, but whites threatened the entire black
community, and all left except one family… [I think
that family lived outside the corporate limits.]”
Another person who grew up in Vienna, now lives
in another S. IL town, told me, 2/2004: “I have heard
in 1954, the year that I was born, a black man raped a
white woman, and they burned out all the blacks in
town.” “There was a segregated area where the blacks
lived, called Nigger Hill. But I did not know that as a
negative word.” A whole community