Updating Löwen’s Table 1

Ever since I first read Table 1 of Sundown Towns (pages 55 and 56 of the book), I was curious about two things:

1. how many of the counties listed as having few or no African–Americans were the very counties that had so consistently voted Republican since the Civil War?
2. what have the trends been since 1930?

Löwen did give some discussion of what had happened since 1930 — an increase up to around 1970 or even 1980, and then a major decrease in counties without blacks. However, he did not tabulate the changes since 1930.

Since the 1970 census (and possibly since the 1960, although I have never found the relevant data) genuine black populations have been able to be determined via the counting of black households, so as to exclude:

1. prison inmates
2. residents at military bases
3. live-in servants in white households

Many rural sundown counties, especially since the 1970s, have had large black populations of prison inmates counted in their census populations.

To update Table 1 of Sundown Towns to more modern censuses, I have chosen to maintain Löwen’s 40-year gap between censuses. Data for the 1970 and 2010 census allow a comparison by householders rather than total black residents including prison inmates. Thus, I have changed the criterion from ten blacks to five black households for the 1970 and 2010 census. A mistake in compiling associated maps caused me to slightly modify the original Table 1 for the 1890 and 1930 censuses to include counties with exactly ten black residents. I have included Tennessee for this updated table because:

1. Tennessee had large areas that opposed secession — larger, in fact, than Texas and Arkansas
• the eastern half of Tennessee, indeed, provided far more recruits for the Union Army than Texas or Arkansas, and the Confederate government had constant trouble controlling it
2. like Texas and Arkansas but unlike the other eight states of the Confederacy, Tennessee never had either literacy tests or cumulative poll taxes as a requirement for voting
3. Tennessee during Jim Crow was akin to the Border States in being divided according to Civil War loyalties, rather than overwhelmingly Democratic everywhere or almost everywhere
4. today, unlike the eight core states of the plantation South, Tennessee’s largest ancestry is not African–American

On pages 467 and 468 of Sundown Towns, it is noted that several states included in Table 1 contained substantial areas belonging to the plantation South. Actually, what is said of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri could equally well be said of Delaware and Oklahoma, whose most southern or southeastern regions are undoubtedly plantation South. [In fact, if criterion 4) above defined the plantation South, that region would include Maryland and Delaware as well as the eight core southeastern coastal states.] Among the seventeen states where de jure segregation was practised before Brown, West Virginia alone contained no plantation South area.

States that support Löwen’s conclusions are shaded red and those which do so strongly are shaded dark red.

Contiguous US Outside Plantation South — Counties with No or Few African Americans:

Total	118	431	235	707	570	861	62	382
State	Census
	1890		1930		1970		2010
	0 blacks	≤10 blacks	0 blacks	≤10 blacks	0 black households	≤5 black households	0 black households	≤5 black households
Arizona	0	2	1	1	0	0	0	0
Arkansas	0	1	3	9	13	16	0	4
California	0	4	0	8	2	7	0	1
Colorado	5	19	8	28	21	37	3	8
Connecticut	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Delaware	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Idaho	1	10	14	33	25	32	2	18
Illinois	0	8	6	18	21	37	0	9
Indiana	1	15	6	23	14	27	1	4
Iowa	13	29	12	39	40	61	0	19
Kansas	6	20	6	23	26	44	5	34
Kentucky	0	0	0	4	8	18	0	13
Maine	0	2	0	5	1	7	0	0
Maryland	0	0	0	0	1	1	0	0
Massachusetts	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Michigan	4	24	7	26	20	31	0	10
Minnesota	22	57	16	62	38	61	1	12
Missouri	0	8	12	28	32	47	2	16
Montana	0	2	11	41	36	45	10	29
Nebraska	9	42	28	64	56	68	9	47
Nevada	1	6	1	8	4	6	0	2
New Hampshire	0	0	0	2	0	1	0	0
New Jersey	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
New Mexico	0	1	3	12	5	8	1	2
New York	0	1	0	1	0	2	0	1
North Dakota	13	26	20	43	43	49	7	34
Ohio	0	1	1	2	2	9	0	1
Oklahoma	1	3	4	11	9	14	0	6
Oregon	1	17	4	25	9	11	1	4
Pennsylvania	0	3	1	4	1	8	0	3
Rhode Island	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
South Dakota	19	37	23	52	42	50	14	48
Tennessee	0	0	0	2	7	11	0	7
Texas	3	21	8	29	22	37	1	15
Utah	5	17	15	22	16	20	4	11
Vermont	0	3	1	4	2	5	0	1
Washington	5	16	6	20	7	15	1	3
West Virginia	1	3	1	4	11	16	0	10
Wisconsin	8	28	16	43	24	45	0	7
Wyoming	0	5	1	11	12	15	0	3

Conclusions:

By and large, the table above covering the contiguous US outside the plantation South verifies Löwen’s expectations. The number of counties with few or no black households in 1970 is greater than in 1930, but the number had fallen substantially by 2010. Notably, the number of counties (excluding those with populations under 1,000) absolutely without black households in 2010 is about one-ninth the 1970 number. Most of these lie in the High Plains, which never had any black residents even before sundown exclusion became general in rural areas outside the plantation South. Research in the High Plains is undoubtedly almost impossible because most areas are so distant from towns which ever allowed or had black residents. This is obliquely noted on page 467.

The number or counties with five or fewer black households in 2010 was less than half as many as in 1970.

Apart from heavily urbanised northeastern states where local governments are based upon smaller units than the census-defined county, and Arizona, every state follows this basic pattern. Even in the lower Northeast and Arizona, the pattern is not actually deviated from. Indeed, Arizona and New Jersey share with the nonplantation South a pattern of increasing exclusion northwestwards — that is, further from the plantation South. As Löwen noted, the Midwest, Plains and nonplantation South contain those states with the most striking representation of this pattern.