I have a professor that asserted in class that sundown towns in the USA were actually "sundown laws". I had always been under the impression that sundown towns were places where it was "understood" that minorities weren't allowed after dark, not an actual codified law. Which view is correct? Were they sundown towns or sundown laws, as my professor suggests?
(This is obviously not my area of specialty, but it's an interest of mine due to being an important part of local history in my area.) So a bit of a yes and no. Jim Loewen, who is better known for Lies My Teacher Told Me but also does work on sundown towns, has not found a specific sundown town ordinance yet. You can click through his database and he invites help identifying and classifying sundown towns. Someone even scraped the books of Goshen, IN, the most infamous sundown town, and still found nothing, although everyone in town believed there was an ordinance enforcing the sundown rule. However, segregation was often written into land ownership covenants, which can be easily confused with town ordinances. These racist covenants were so common it would be hard to even systematically track them, and they pop up in the news every once in a while. Your professor may have been conflating these two things, since 1) racist covenants totally existed, and 2) everyone believed the town ordinances were real, which in a way, makes them real enough. So you could make it illegal for black people to live anywhere in your town, combine it with hotels refusing to serve them, and now it's effectively illegal to be in the town after sundown by without the fuss of having a town ordinance. :/