Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- W. Chicago
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Surely
- Was there an ordinance?
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Surely Not
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
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| 1930 | ||||||||
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| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | ||||||||
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| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Threat of Violence
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
August 2007
My grandmother lived there as a child, before moving back into the city. It’s quiet and now wealthy (used to be much more blue collar when I was a kid.) And it’s white.
When I was a kid, there was a black family who moved in across the
street. We played with the boy, who was a couple years older than I and
a couple years younger than my brother (his sister was older than my
brother and not in our play set). I don’t recall him going to our public
school, though, and they didn’t live there long. They moved, and I later
learned it was because of threats and hostility towards them. (They did
keep a menacing german shepherd who scared the beejezus out of me when I
would walk home from school. I bet it was a good deterrent from petty
mischief.)
There was another family, a white family with a few kids, who adopted a
black baby girl. They, too, left town due to hostility and threats.
My sister lives there now, and my niece works at a butcher shop
in town (highly regarded in the suburbs.) One of the butchers (white) is married to a black woman, and one day (probably last year) she was
waiting outside the shop for her husband to get off work. She was merely sitting on a bench on the sidewalk, and a cop came by and asked her her business. She said she was waiting for her husband, he said something along the lines of “oh, we had a call,” and that was it. She doesn’t pick him up at work any longer.
Around 1950, a black surgeon bought a lot. The Park District responded by condemning the lot for a park. The owner of the lot sued and won. He built on the lot and lived there.