Historically, curfews have been a common tool during American social unrest. But they’ve also been used in other contexts largely to control African Americans and restrict their movements, according to Elijah Anderson, Sterling professor of sociology at Yale University and the author of the book Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. “This idea of the curfew really goes back to slavery and Black-White relations, and not just in the south,” he said. “Even though Black people were emancipated, White people basically treated them as second-class people and worked to contain them.”
And while curfews during protests were viewed by many officials as necessary measures against rioters and looters whose actions overshadow largely peaceful demonstrations, such curfews have also been associated with exacerbating violence and suppressing Black voices.
Curfews were common in the U.S. during the Jim Crow era, when White communities created so-called sundown towns that banned Black Americans from residing in or even entering their neighborhoods in the evening. A few of them passed ordinances that made those curfews legal, while others enforced the rules informally with signs on the edge of town saying things like “N----r, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You In Our Town.”
Still others simply were known to be unwelcoming to Black passersby. “When Black people entered, they were told or they knew they had to keep on going and be out by sundown. That was the curfew,” Anderson said. These places were detailed in the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide for Black travelers who wanted to navigate around the pockets of White supremacy and unspeakable violence, which would often be the punishment for “breaking” the curfew.
Sundown towns spanned all across the U.S., and extended beyond small towns to large cities and out into suburbs, according to the historian James Loewen, who in 2001 began documenting them. They cropped up well into the mid-20th century, and by his count, there were 10,000 towns with such rules in the 1960s. And they didn’t just keep travelers out; the policies that made those towns unwelcoming to Black people are part of a larger effort to keep the country segregated through housing discrimination.