The 'Sundown Towns' From 'Lovecraft Country' Were (and Are) a Real Thing
The following contains spoilers for episode 1 of HBO's Lovecraft Country
Lovecraft Country recently premiered on HBO.
The series features a scene where the lead Black protagonists must exit a town before sundown or face execution.
The "sundown town" was a real phenomena seen in both the South and North during the Jim Crow era, and after.
Before running from monster monsters, Lovecraft Country's trio of protagonists—Atticus (Jonathan Majors), Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), and Letitia (Jurnee Smollett)—encounter the even more dangerous game of Sheriff Eustace Hunt and his "sundown town," a jurisdiction that ruled Blacks must leave town limits before sunset.
The racist stipulation makes for the most intense sequence of the pilot, and it may have been one of the least fictional moments of the episode.
"Sundown towns" were a real phenomena across the United States from 1890 to the years following Jim Crow, as town histories and housing policies continued to discourage Black residents.
Sociologist James W. Loewen has spent years researching the phenomena—he uses the term all-whites "on purpose" to emphasize the continued unnatural demographics of some U.S. towns; they were built specifically for whites only.
Loewen notes that this practice was actually most common in northern states, and he counted 502 sundown towns in Illinois alone. (Loewen has critiqued media representation of sundown towns, noting the disproportionate portrayal of southern towns.) There are, in fact, thousands of former "sundown towns" (find them in the database here), some of which continue to wrestle with their troubled history in the wake of renewed attention garnered by Black Lives Matter protests. (Loewen also notes that there are towns whose sundown histories continue to ensure all white populations.)
How violently enforced were these communities? In Loewen's book Sundown Towns, he tells of a white family from Alabama who, upon moving to a sundown town in Indiana and fearing their Black maid might be killed, told her to return to the south.
In Martinsville, Indiana, a 21-year-old Black woman, Carol Jenkins, was stabbed to death after dark while selling encyclopedias. That was 1968. Loewen believed sundown towns reached their peak in 1970, years after Jim Crow.
Sundown towns also excluded other non-whites, including Native Americans, Mexicans, and Asians. Some towns also excluded Jews.
In Lovecraft Country, the town of Ardham (similar to "Arkham" in H.P. Lovecraft lore) may be a fictional place in Massachusetts with fictional hostile monsters, but the sundown horror was very real. And so too were the monsters who prowled those nights.
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