"The rise of sundown towns made it difficult and dangerous for Blacks to travel long distances by car. ...In response, Victor H. Green, a postal worker from Harlem, compiled the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to accommodations that served Black travelers"[27]

According to the list posted through the Zinn Education Project, North Palo Alto and East Palo Alto are listed as possible sundown towns in California. [1] However, I will contest with the following information that the City of Palo Alto (rather than only the northern section) should be categorized as a sundown town and East Palo Alto does not fit the category of a sundown town, but rather is the after effect of the racism and discriminatory policies which makeup sundown towns.

The phenomenon of sundown towns was first coined by the late sociology professor Jim Loewen. A sundown town is a community which has kept out non-whites from living in it for decades, leaving the community majority white except for one or two non-white exceptions. [2] Beginning from around the 1890s to 1960s, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United states for whites only. [3] Many of these towns drove out African Americans (and also Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexicans, Native Americans, and more) through force, law, or custom, leaving some towns still majority white today. [4][5]

A misconception about sundown towns is that they only exist in the Deep South. [6] However, the Deep South actually has almost no sundown towns. [7] For example, Mississippi only has 6 sundown towns while Illinois has at least 456. [8] Many historians may not discuss sundown communities or history because of how it would reflect on their communities. [9] Additionally, many Americans do not realize how much race relations worsened for people of color between the late 1800s to 1940s across the United States including the West. [10] However, there was greater opportunity for supporting families and finding jobs, prompting millions of African Americans to leave the south in what came to be known as the Great Migration. [11] In response to this migration and arrival of African Americans, many white Americans expelled African American migrants, or kept them out of their communities through various measures including the posting of “sundown signs” which warned people of color to leave their cities by sundown. [12]

Palo Alto did not have sundown signs posted through the city. However, the city does have a fair share of history of discriminating against people of color including: Forcibly destroying their Chinatown (click here to learn more), passing a resolution advocating for “a segregated district for the Oriental and colored people of the city”, actively protesting against property buyers of color coupled with violence and verbal abuse, and more. [13] To this day, buyers may find that the deeds of their Palo Alto homes to have the remains of that time with labels such as “property cannot to be leased, sold, or rented to to colored people”, or more specific deeds such as those in Jane Stanford’s Southgate region stating “that no house could cost less than $4,000; no cattle, horses, hobs or poultry could be kept on the property and no persons of African, Japanese, Chinese or Mongolian descent were to use or occupy the houses”. [14][15][16] People of color were faced with restrictions equal to domesticated animals. [17] There are also still many more recent accounts of prejudice and stereotyping by realtors in the Palo Alto area. [18] [19]

On the other hand, although the Zinn Project records East Palo Alto as a sundown town, the town was impacted differently by racism and discriminatory practices. While cities such as Palo Alto became majority white cities due to active segregation against minoritized groups, East Palo Alto became majority Black due to the active segregation against minoritized groups in surrounding cities. [20] That is not to say there are not cases of housing discrimination in East Palo Alto, but rather that East Palo Alto does not perfectly encapsulate the definition of a sundown town. [21]

Today Palo Alto has an increasing number of people of Asian descent, African Americans, Native American, Pacific Islander, Latinx, still make up a very small percent of the population. [22] However, unfortunately there has also been a resurgence of housing discrimination against Chinese buyers due to the fear of Chinese taking over the city due to the relocation of Chinese families because of the expansion of China’s economy. [23] Neighboring East Palo Alto’s demographic has drastically changed from being majority African American until the 2000s when the population became majority Latinx. [24][25] Additionally, East Palo Alto residents are also beginning to facing the problem of displacement due to the expansion of top tech companies such as Facebook and the influx of employees. [26]

Although explicit discriminatory policies and practices have been largely erased, the impact on the makeup of the community remains.