Whiteland, Indiana: A Probable Sundown Town

Whiteland, in Johnson County south of Indianapolis, was platted in eighteen sixty-three by Joel B. White and others and incorporated as a town in eighteen eighty-six. Researchers studying sundown towns, communities that used custom, ordinance, or threat to exclude Black residents after dark, list Whiteland as a probable example.

Documentation of how that exclusion worked is limited. Whiteland is one of a cluster of small towns along this stretch of central Indiana that the history of racial exclusion has touched. It sits today as a quiet Indianapolis suburb, its past not commemorated but not entirely forgotten either.