calsfoundation@cals.org
November 18, 2009
From the 1890s to the late 1960s, many white populations in towns across the United States purposely established policies to keep African Americans out. Such towns were commonly called “sundown towns” because of signs occasionally posted at the edge of town warning African Americans to be gone by sundown. One such sundown town, Cotter (Baxter County), is the subject of this 1950s advertisement proudly advertising the fact that it was “100 per cent white.”