Sundown Towns

Except for Jack, every man on that infield knew why Jimmy was hysterical. Catahoula was a strict sundown town, one of hundreds of all-white enclaves across the Deep South that passed laws and posted signs forbidding blacks to be inside their city limits after dark. Girls and women routinely escaped with ridicule and tongue lashings, but black males caught by the police were subject to fines or jail, and beatings or worse awaited any man of color captured by Klansmen after sunset. – p.  219

According to author Kate Kelly, there were at least 10,000 'sundown towns' in the United States as late as the 1960s. In such towns and cities, nonwhites were by ordinance required to vacate the municipality’s boundaries before dark. If found in violation, they were subject to arrest, rough handling by police, or worse, to unofficial detention by citizens of the town. These communities were by no means limited to the Deep South—from Levittown, N.Y., to Glendale, California and most states in between, including a large majority of cities in Illinois, such restrictions were conspicuously posted at the town’s outskirts and were usually, though haphazardly enforced. Many other forms of legal harassment were common for out-of-town blacks and minorities. They were banned from attendance at most public entertainment, could not utilize public parks or swimming pools, and were strictly segregated in buses, train cars, and transit stations. The Green Book, a must-have travel guide and manual for out-of-state blacks visiting the harshly segregated Deep South of that tine, suggested behaviors to dodge or outwit the Jim Crow statutes, in one instance cautioning owners of new automobiles to have a chauffeur's cap handy, so that if stopped, they could say they were “delivering the car to a white man."