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Donald Trump has had rallies in some communities that were once "sundown towns" — where Blacks were warned to stay away after sunset.
Kamala Harris’s campaign staff, various Democratic politicians, and social media users are accusing Donald Trump of deliberately choosing towns with racist histories as sites for his rallies.
Trump has held several events in what were once “sundown” towns — communities were Black people were told by law or threat to stay away after sunset. They include Howell, Mich.; LaCrosse, Wis.; and Johnstown, Pa.
“These relatively small cities — spread across midwestern swing states and far from dense metropolitan areas — all have one thing in common: They are former ‘sundown’ towns, where threats of Jim Crow-era violence enforced racial segregation,” The Independent reports.
Howell, a town of about 10,000 in the eastern part of the state, was once the “KKK capital of Michigan,” the Harris campaign said. A Ku Klux Klan leader, Robert Miles, held Klan rallies on a farm near Howell in the 1970s and 1980s.
Trump held a rally in Howell August 20. A month earlier, about a dozen white supremacists, wearing masks, marched through the town while chanting “We love Hitler. We love Trump.”
The Trump campaign denied any association with the marchers and said Howell’s history had nothing to do with the decision to have an event there. However, the Republican presidential nominee did make what could be construed as a racist dog whistle in Howell, saying sheriff’s deputies from the largely white town should monitor voting in Detroit, a majority Black city. That isn’t simply a dog whistle, “it’s a bullhorn,” said a statement from Harris campaign spokesperson Alyssa Bradley.
Ahead of the Trump event, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, told ABC News, “Anyone who’s doing a little bit of research might have said that’s really a bad idea [to have a rally in Howell]. Look at the optics. You’re showing up where the KKK was just at the same time you’re in Michigan.”
At the Howell rally, Trump claimed he would be better at fighting crime than a Democratic administration. “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be.”
He said there has been a 43 percent increase in violent crime nationwide since President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, but this figure is wildly inaccurate, the Detroit Free Press reports. The violent crime rate in the U.S. fell 6 percent in 2023, the paper notes, citing FBI data. Crime is also down in Michigan and in Detroit, the state’s largest city.
A TikTok user called attention to Trump’s choice of event sites. “You got a presidential candidate for the GOP doing a sundown town tour around the country, not looking for political gain,” the user said. “He’s f****** rallying the troops.”
Trump’s campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told The Independent that Biden and Harris should be equally scrutinized for appearances in former sundown towns. Biden visited Howell in 2021, and Harris had an event in LaCrosse this year. But the mainstream media has not focused on these appearances because it “serves as a divisive, anti-Trump, mouthpiece for the Democrat Party,” Leavitt said.
Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, told the publication Harris should be questioned about holding events in large cities that have been the site of racist incidents, such as Atlanta, Detroit, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.
Democratic Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, whose district includes Howell and surrounding Livingston County, wrote on X that the area has changed since her youth and that many activists are working to make it more welcoming and inclusive. “But Donald Trump didn’t come to Howell today to bring people together, to call out that hateful behavior, or to offer any kind of hopeful vision for the future,” she posted August 20. “The recent marches may or may not be why Trump and [Republican Congressman Mike] Rogers chose Howell — but the visit risks reopening old wounds. Real leaders should take the opportunity to condemn the hatred that has been on display.”
Another X user, University of Alabama law professor and former prosecutor Joyce Vance, wrote Sunday that she’d been following the reaction to Trump’s appearances in former sundown towns and noted that he’d had a rally in another of them, Cullman, Ala., in 2021. “Could it be coincidence that is bringing Trump to these places?” she wrote. “Anything is possible, but Cullman, for instance, is out-of-the-way. Any number of places in Alabama would’ve been more suitable. Sometimes the dog whistle is actually works, loudly spoken.”
