On Historical Sundown Towns and Racial Bias

Sundown towns refer to places that restricted or excluded the movement or settlement of racial and ethnic minorities within their borders. Though civil rights legislation largely put an end to their official aspects, the cultural legacy of sundown towns may persist today within geographical regions. In the present research, we examine whether the geographic distribution of American sundown towns is evident in regional aggregates of the racial biases of modern-day residents. Using the geolocated responses of more than 1.3 million Project Implicit visitors, we found that counties characterized in the past by either sundown policies or the presence of sundown towns have higher levels of implicit and explicit racial bias today. These findings are robust across analytic choices, but generalizability and discriminant tests provided mixed evidence. This research contributes to a growing literature linking environments and biases, and demonstrates that the legacy of a shameful period in American history is not limited to the history books.