Sundown Towns: The Hill Country's Black Exclusion Zone

The wine trails and river-tubing outfitters and peach-stand economy of the Texas Hill Country draw visitors who often assume they are traveling through a place shaped mainly by German immigrant heritage and natural beauty. That framing is not wrong, exactly. But it leaves something out.

For most of the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the Hill Country was effectively an exclusion zone for Black Texans. Communities across Gillespie County, Mason County, Llano County, and Kerr County maintained effectively all-white populations. This was not an accident of geography. San Antonio and Austin, both within a few hours' travel, had substantial Black populations. The Hill Country's demographic whiteness was the result of sustained, systematic exclusion.

Sundown towns are communities where Black residents were warned, by informal custom, by posted signs, by threat, or by violence, that they were not welcome after dark. The pattern was common across the American South and Midwest, but the Hill Country had a particular character. Its German-descended communities, some of whose ancestors had opposed slavery in the eighteen fifties and died for Union loyalty in the eighteen sixties, coexisted in the same geography with a practice of racial exclusion that those same ancestors might have found difficult to reconcile.

The history is documented in census records, local newspapers, and scholarly work on sundown towns across the South. It is rarely foregrounded in the tourism that now sustains these communities. The bluebonnets and the dance halls and the Pedernales River are real. The exclusion that kept this landscape demographically homogeneous through the nineteen sixties was also real. Both belong to the history of the same place.