On legacy persistence: historical KKK organizations and racial exclusion in American sundown towns

Why do some communities perpetuate historical patterns of racial exclusion while others abandon them? We examine American sundown towns, communities that from the 1890s through the 1960s barred people of color from remaining within their borders after sunset. We argue that Second Wave Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organizations, active from 1915 through the 1940s, institutionalized and enforced this exclusion, embedding it in local structures. These structures imprinted White adolescents with negative racial attitudes toward Black people, and imprinted individuals subsequently engaged in residential sorting, remaining in or relocating to sundown towns with a strong KKK presence while avoiding those without such a history. Second Wave Klan prevalence therefore predicts the racial attitudes of White residents in historical sundown towns today. We find support for our hypotheses in a sample of more than 600 White respondents surveyed in historical sundown towns. We advance research on place-based racial legacies by showing that historical organized enforcement helps explain why legacies persist unevenly across communities and that this persistence operates through two individual-level mechanisms: attitudinal imprinting and residential sorting.