Sundown Towns and La Crosse

CONTENT WARNING: This blog post contains primary source images that use anti-Black language. 

In 2016, Mayor Tim Kabat signed a proclamation acknowledging and apologizing for La Crosse’s history of anti-Black discrimination. This proclamation also designated La Crosse as a sundown town. This action was based on research compiled during my 2015-2016 senior capstone project at UWL, within which I identified La Crosse as a sundown town.  

What is a sundown town? 

A sundown town is a community that purposefully excluded Black Americans by force, law, or custom. Formal and lawful anti-Black policies are considered to be de jure discrimination, while informal anti-Black practices that existed but were not recognized by law are defined as de facto discrimination. Some sundown towns were created by white residents using both de jure and de facto discrimination; others were created from one or the other. 

Sociologist Dr. James Loewen was a famous researcher of sundown towns and published Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Loewen’s definition of sundown towns is a bit more broad than other researchers. By his definition, any community that purposefully and knowingly maintained a culture of keeping their town white is a sundown town. Loewen lists many strategies that communities used to create sundown towns. It was this definition that I used to identify La Crosse as a sundown town. 

However, there are historians who argue that we should keep the definition of a sundown town narrower—that only communities that had a sign, ordinance, or a siren warning Black Americans to leave before dark are a sundown town. This argument often suggests that communities that used other strategies need a different term altogether.  

In this way, it is up to interpretation whether or not La Crosse can explicitly be designated as a sundown town, and this is a nuanced history that deserves thorough examination and continued conversation. Within this blog, I’ll be discussing this history with the interpretation that La Crosse is a sundown town, and presenting the primary sources that support this interpretation. 

In November 2021, the La Crosse Public Library hosted a panel of experts to explore this history and look at it from a state and national view point. At the end of this conversation, it was agreed that whether or not we categorize La Crosse as a sundown town, the facts still remain: 

Together, these facts illustrate that very few Black Americans lived here in the 20th century, and anti-Black racism—systemic and otherwise—contributed to this phenomenon. White La Crosse residents maintained a culture that kept out community nearly all-white for almost a century. This culture was created using de facto discrimination, which is documented in primary sources. To be sure, there could have also been de jure discrimination, but I have yet to locate the records that provide evidence for this. 

The UWL Oral History Program (OHP) collected oral histories from La Crosse residents as early as the 1960s. This collection is a rich resource of what life was like in La Crosse from the late 1800s through the 20th century. Below are excerpts from two oral histories. The first exhibits a white resident who wished to keep the La Crosse community “all-white.” The second depicts an example of a Black woman, Robbie Moss, expressing what it was like to live in a nearly all-white La Crosse during the 20th century. 

In 1922, the La Crosse Tribune reported that the head of Wisconsin’s KKK claimed there were 500 members in La Crosse. While this wasn’t necessarily fact—it was likely an exaggeration to express power—it was still printed in the newspaper, and for some residents, this headline was a threat to their safety. 

The UWL OHP collection contains a number of interviews in which white interviewees discuss their own involvement with the KKK and the night that a cross was burned on the top of Grandad Bluff. This seems to have been a real event that did indeed happen at least once.