Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Don’t Know
- Unions, Organized Labor?
- Moderately 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 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | 10145 | 3 | ||||||
| 1930 | 10880 | 0 | ||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | 8137 | 2 | ||||||
| 1970 | 7247 | 1 | ||||||
| 1980 | 5630 | 5 | ||||||
| 1990 | 5155 | 3 | ||||||
| 2000 | 5131 | 12 | ||||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Threat of Violence
- Reputation
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Eastern European
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
One Indiana resident recalls that as late as 1939 Whiting, Indiana, prohibited Blacks from living within its city limits (referencing WPA Writers’ Project, 1939, Calumet Region Historical Guide, pp. 51, 233.)
Oral history suggests that Whiting gets its name because only whites can live there.
According to Richard M. Dorson:
“Whiting, the smallest and least known of the four cities, is marked by its exclusion of blacks and predominance of Slovaks…” (_Land of the Millrats_ (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981), 11.) He also suggests that Ogden Dunes was all-white owing to realtors as of c.1981 (p. 19).
Ed Zivich, Whiting resident quoted in Richard Dorson%u2019s _Land of the Millrats_, p. 34-35: “”Outsiders consider our community very prejudiced. I heard a story yesterday about this. After WWII blacks got into Whiting’s American Oil, Standard of Indiana, Lever Brothers, Federated Metals, but they could only stay in Whiting during the work day. For all the other plants they could catch a bus from the plant gates back to East Chicago, but for Federated Metals they had to walk through Hunkytown six blocks in downtown Whiting…. and get the next bus out of town %u2014 or else!””