It’s time to talk about what some people would rather forget.
The sign language was blunt. There was never any doubt about the message or the target.
The first word was a racist slur.
Then: “Don’t let the sun set on your head in this city.”
Originally the “sundown sign” went at the train station. Then it was moved to the middle of the main street.
It happened more than a century ago. Texas.
DeLeon, Texas.
It wasn’t the only sign like that in Texas. I’ve met people who claimed to personally see signs in Bowie, Glen Rose and Grand Saline.
Do not get me wrong. I don’t choose Texas or even the South.
In an internet search I found similar racist characters mentioned in cities in California, Washington, Nebraska and Indiana. One town in British Columbia even had a sign warning Chinese people to stay outside.
But we’re sure De Leon, 95 miles southwest of Fort Worth, had such a sign for years.
It rose more than a century ago, in 1886, in the bitter post-reconstruction decade.
That was so long ago that the nice people in that quiet peanut farming village might prefer to forget it.
I found it by chance because two historians have written about it.
The De Leon sign is actually part of a more embarrassing story set in 19th-century Texas.
White vigilantes threatened the black residents of Comanche County and forced them to relocate.
In the 1880s, Comanche County was a growing cattle and cotton market. The towns of Comanche, De Leon, and Gustine and the surrounding county were home to 8,608 people, including 79 black residents.
Those were tough times in Texas, both for race relations and for the justice system. According to The New Handbook of Texas, white lynching gangs began to undermine the entire justice system in 1885, with 23 white men, 19 black men, and a white woman being kidnapped and murdered.
The following year, what became known as “the Comanche County exodus” began with the murder of a white woman, Sallie Stephens.
According to historian BB Lightfoot’s 1953 account in Southwestern Historical Quarterly, a black suspect named Tom McNeal was lynched. After the sign appeared at the De Leon train station, armed white vigilantes went door to door telling every black resident to pack up and leave Comanche County.
One by one, each black family moved, usually to Waco or Dallas. They left family homes, churches, farms and the land of lifelong memories.
At the 1890 census, the only black residents were two orphans living with white families.
Later, the Texas Central Railroad asked to move the De Leon sign. The train carriers were threatened.
So it was moved to the city well in the middle of Texas Avenue between the peanut mill and a tractor dealer, according to an updated 1996 report in a local magazine, the Messenger.
The earlier account was lackluster: “Because it doesn’t have a Negro population, Comanche County is one of the few places in the South that doesn’t have an obvious racial problem.”
According to the New Handbook, Comanche County did not have a single black resident in 1940. In 1970 the count counted two.
The 2000 census found 62 black residents of Comanche County, still fewer than in 1880.
Neither report says when the De Leon sign was removed.
