On Historical Sundown Towns and Racial Bias

Abstract

Sundown towns refer to places that restricted or excluded the movement or settlement of racial and ethnic minorities. Although 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 examined whether the geographic distribution of sundown towns in the United States is evident in regional aggregates of the racial biases of modern-day residents. Using the geolocated responses of more than 1.3 million people, we found that counties characterized in the past by sundown policies or the presence of sundown towns have higher levels of implicit and explicit bias today. These findings are consistent across preregistered robustness checks, but exploratory analyses highlight potential boundary conditions. This research integrates social, historical, and geographical psychology to demonstrate that the effects of a shameful period in U.S. history still persist today.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2026 · DOI ↗