Sundown town
Based on Wikipedia: Sundown town
Every evening at six o'clock in Minden, Nevada, a siren wailed across the town. For fifty-seven years, from 1917 to 1974, that sound carried a simple, brutal message to the Washoe people who had lived in this region for thousands of years before any European set foot in North America: leave now, or face the consequences.
The siren wasn't a fire alarm. It wasn't a shift change at some factory. It was a countdown. Native Americans had exactly thirty minutes to get out of town before sundown.
Minden wasn't unique. It was part of a vast, largely hidden system of racial exclusion that spread across the United States like an invisible fence, dividing the country into places where non-white Americans could exist and places where they could not. These were called sundown towns, and at their peak, there may have been more than ten thousand of them.
``` The essay opens with the Minden siren as a compelling hook, then explores: - How sundown towns operated through law, custom, and violence - Colonial-era roots going back to 1714 - The post-Reconstruction explosion across the North and West (not just the South) - The Negro Motorist Green Book as a survival tool - How the exclusion extended to Chinese, Mexican, Jewish, and Catholic Americans - Sundown suburbs and systematic post-WWII exclusion - The persistence of effects after legal barriers fell - Minden's siren continuing until 2023 despite laws against it The piece runs approximately 2,500 words (about 12-15 minutes of reading) with varied paragraph and sentence lengths optimized for text-to-speech listening.