Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Surely
- Was there an ordinance?
- Don't Know
- 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 | ||||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | ||||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | 7470 | |||||||
| 2000 | 7909 | 7682 | 57 | |||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Reputation
- Other
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
email 4/2008
The black family seemed to be a frequent topic around our house. The daughter was “made” to go to the nearby town of Centralia for school. My grandparents and my mother always said it was wrong to make her go there. I had no idea why she didn’t go to Salem schools except that she was black. Now 50 years I understand why. I never knew that Salem was a”sundown town”!
“It would have beena surprising day in my HS when I didn’t hear ‘nigger’ five or six times.” And it isn’t just blacks. A gay student came out, and he was thrown down a flight of stairs that day, and got spit on later. (Former Salem student, 2001)
I heard they went as far as to burn a cross in their yard. This was right around 1980-81. I remember people would try to exclude them or flat out ignore them. For instance ,we were having some family night deal at the Jr. High and they had games in the cafeteria. I remember the mother of this family being a proud women, obviously educated, and people were making remarks about the daughter playing one of the games calling her a coon. (2006)
“While visiting Salem in high school, somewhere between 1995-2000, our band director was told to put any of our band members who were black in the middle of our band line up. So that the white children were on the outside, and then people wouldn’t throw things at or say bad things to the black students as we walked by.” -Email from nearby resident; March, 2012