The "Sundown Towns: Are They A Thing Of The Past?" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Back in mid-June of this year I wrote a few stories titled "Black Lives Matter" with one of them talking about the small town to the North-West of Lancaster, Pennsylvania by the name of Elizabethtown.  E-town, as it is known, is about 20 miles from Lancaster.  It is a community of about 11,000 residents that is situated in scenic northwestern Lancaster County and is about 10 miles south of Hershey and 20 miles from Harrisburg and York as well as Lancaster.  The Borough of Elizabethtown provides a variety of municipal services and activities that contribute to the exceptional quality of life in Elizabethtown.  And, it also was the topic of a story written on August 9th by Lancaster Newspaper's "The Scribbler", aka Jack Brubaker.  The title of his column that particular Sunday was "Was Elizabethtown a segregated 'sundown town'?   For those readers who may never have ever heard of a "Sundown Town," also know as a "Sunset Town"  or "Gray Town", it is a locale were everyone living in the neighborhood is white in color.  

The term came from signs posted that said "colored people" had to leave the town by sundown.  The practice was usually part of southern state towns, but certainly was not restricted to just the south.  These towns had a practice of excluding non-whites via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.  Northern states could be just as inhospitable to black travelers as states from the South.  Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and especially since the Fair Housing Act of 1968, prohibition of racial discrimination in the sale and rental and financing of housing, the number of sundown towns has decreased.  "The Scribbler" had a question sent to him asking if he knew if the town of Elizabethtown was at one time one of these such towns.  Elizabethtown's borough manager, Rebecca Denlinger, told Jack that she knows nothing about a sundown ordinance that prohibited dark-skinned people from living in Elizabethtown.  But, that wasn't the same answer given to Jack by some of the "old-timers" of the town.  One fellow reported that Elizabethtown was lily white from the 1930's until the 1950s.  Another gentleman told about E-town being a sundown town.  Mr. Gordon Berrier, who had lived in E-town for the majority of his 89 years, reported that some people who worked in some of the houses couldn't stay in the town overnight.  He said that in the early 1950s there were no Blacks going to school at Elizabethtown High School.  He also said that his Civics teacher said that in the 1930's an older black man wanted to stay at the town jailhouse overnight, but was told that Mount Joy was 5 miles down the road and he would have to travel there to stay overnight.  Mount Joy was not a sundown town, but Elizabethtown was.  Mr. Berrier also told Jack that if you hired a Black person in Elizabethtown, that person was required to leave town before the sun went down.  Gordon Berrier's younger brother Jerry reported that one of his best friends was a Black student in the nearby Mount Joy School System.  His name was Gerald Wilson and was a star basketball player for Mt. Joy in the early 1950s.  Gerald Wilson's son, Gerald, Jr., who lived in Manheim Township were I reside, said that every time his father played basketball in Elizabethtown, the police had to escort him on and off the court and when he ran back and forth on the court the E-town cheerleaders tried to trip him.  Sociologist James Loewen wrote "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism" and his website updates the book by adding that Elizabethtown was most certainly a sundown town.  Actually, if you search the database for Pennsylvania and sundown towns, you will find not only Elizabethtown, but Manheim, New Holland and Conestoga.  And, there may also be some areas of the city of Lancaster that also had restrictions prohibiting selling houses to people of color.  Some practices are hard to get rid of, but it will eventually happen.  But, why does it have to take so long?  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.