When My Family and I Looked for a Home in the Chicago Suburbs, We Kept Finding a Color Line

“We’re a South Asian couple.  One of us passes for Black, the other for White.  One grew up in the Northeast, one in the United Kingdom. Neither of us had any reason to know that we’d relocated to the epicenter of America’s sundown town phenomenon, the region with the most confirmed Whites-only towns and counties in the country.  We hadn’t imagined that in 1901 White residents of Maywood, Melrose Park and Bellwood lined up on train platforms armed with revolvers to keep Black people migrating from the South from settling in those towns.  We hadn’t understood that all of DuPage County is believed to have been a sundown county—a place where a Black person ought not be caught when the sun set, or they could expect to be violently run out, or even killed.  It’s unsettling to find that so many of the places made all-White through violence remain overwhelmingly White today, as if the threat still hangs in the air and in the culture.”

Published in the Chicago Tribune, 7/6/22, read full article here