“Sundown Towns” — Black Workers and White Segregation in the Rural Midwest

<p>As a child, I was an avid reader and intensely curious. I wondered, for example, why all the land around my central Illinois hometown was so pancake flat. I wondered what the land had looked liked before the farmers came and made it an endless checkerboard of corn and soybean fields. I wondered who could possibly want all those soybeans.</p> <p>I wondered about the people in my hometown. Where did they all come from? Why were they all so much alike? I wondered why everyone I knew was a White person. What had happened to all the Indigenous people who had once lived in Illinois. The only remnants of their ever having been there seemed to be place names like Maroa, Wapella, Moweaqua, Peoria, Kickapoo, and Kankakee, and the old University of Illinois mascot, Chief Illiniwek.</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/@regie.stites/sundown-towns-black-workers-and-white-segregation-in-the-rural-midwest-5b5b383364d0"><strong>Click Here</strong></a></p>