Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Suburb
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Perhaps, Some Oral Evidence
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Probably Not, Although Still Very Few Black People
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | 3,576 | 0 | ||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | 6,086 | 3 | ||||||
| 1960 | 8,577 | 44 | ||||||
| 1970 | 16,663 | 151 | ||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | 52,315 | 1,621 | ||||||
| 2000 | 68,315 | 2,733 | ||||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Police or Other Official Action
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
“When I moved to Edmond, Oklahoma in 1969, there
still was a city ordinance forbidding black people to be
in town after sundown. I do not know if it applied to
Native Americans, but I would not be surprised… My
husband had spent most of his youth in Edmond. I had
grown up in Arkansas and was very familiar with
segregation, but most of the cities I knew had black
families living there. When I married and we moved to
Edmond, I was surprised to see that there were no
black families in town. [My husband] and his family
told me about the city ordinance and said that it was
called a ‘sundown’ law. As I remember it the first black
family moved to Edmond in the late ’70s… I cannot
attest to actually seeing the ordinance, but I always
believed it had existed at one time because Oklahoma
City (Edmond is a suburb of OKC) had a very large
black population and Edmond became the ‘white flight’
capitol of the area when the OKC schools were
desegregated.”
-posted to the web, 2004
“Oklahoma has a history of poor race relations…
Edmond is a suburb of Oklahoma City, and when the
Oklahoma City schools began serious desegregation in
1972, the population of Edmond exploded with
parents fleeing the city… Edmond has traditionally be
majority white (currently over 86%), wealthy,
Republican, and racially intolerant. Indeed, Edmond
had ‘sundown laws’, prohibiting blacks from spending
the night within the town limits, on the books until
1974… They were not in force at that late date but no
one had bothered to remove them from the books.”
-anonymous post on the Slacker Friday weblog, 12
September 2005
“I have seen a real estate pamphlet from the 1940s that proclaims on it’s list of desirable attributes “No Negroes!”. This was the premier white flight suburb of Oklahoma City.”
-Email from Oklahoma resident 9/9/2008
“In the Edmond Historical Society museum there is an old post card from the Royce Cafe that reads something like “15,000 people, no Negros.”
-Email from Oklahoma resident 8/20/09