Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Suburb
- Metro Area
- N. Chicago
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Perhaps, Some Oral Evidence
- Sign?
- Perhaps, Some Oral Evidence
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
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| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
Comments
All-White suburb.
“Along the exclusive North Shore, in suburban Wilmette, a committee requested any families unable to domicile their maids, servants, gardeners, and handymen on their own premises to dismiss ‘all Negroes’ in their employ. The committee recommended the firing of black janitors who lived in the basements of apartment buildings as well. The presence of unsupervised blacks, the committee felt, had ‘depressed real estate values’ in the village. There was no machinery to enforce the edict; still, it accomplished its purpose. Few blacks who did not have quarters in their white employers’ homes remained in Wilmette. Other domestics had to commute to their jobs from the small ghetto in the adjoining suburb, Evanston, or all the way from Chicago. In 1970, sixty years after the ‘anti-Negro committee’ made its decree, there were only 81 blacks among the 32,134 villagers of Wilmette: 59 were females, primarily domestic servants.” -The Slum and the Ghetto, Thomas L. Philpott