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?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Don't Know
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- 1898
- 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 | 3635 | |||||||
| 2000 | 3488 | 3446 | 11 | |||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Violence Towards Newcomers
- Other
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
email 1/2008 Auburn resident, 1971-89, reports Virden is sundown:
I saw the information regarding your research of Sundown Towns in the current Teaching Tolerance magazine. There are not many central Illinois towns listed on your list and I most certainly grew up in a sundown town. Auburn, where I spent the first 23 years of my life, was an all white town…no other ethnic groups were present or allowed. There was a saying that “once the sun went down, no niggers were allowed in town.” Well, in all actuality, no black people were allowed in town at all; day or night. All three schools from K to 12, were all white the entire time I was there from 1977 to 1989. As far as I know, until just recently, that hadn’t changed. But Auburn was not the only town, there was Thayer, Virden, Divernon, Pawnee, Girard…and some smaller towns in between that most certainly had unwritten rules about black people. I just thought that I would add to your wealth of information and maybe you could do some more research into the towns in central Illinois.
In the fall of 1898 the Chicago-Virden Coal Company at Virden, IL, installed 300 AL Negroes, and 75 armed guards to protect them, in the place of employees who had walked out in protest against the company’s refusal to recognize the terms of an agreement between the IL Coal Operators’ Assn and the union. In the ensuing riot, ten striking miners and six guards were killed and about 30 persons injured. (Paul M. Angle, Bloody Williamson (NY: Knopf, 1952), 99.)