Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Don't Know
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Don’t Know
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | ||||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | ||||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | ||||||||
| 2000 | ||||||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Unknown
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
“Until recently [1926], Shamrock was an all-white town and Wheeler County an all-white town county. As one man put it, Negroes were not even permitted
‘to stick their heads out of the train coaches.’ Negroes first came into Shamrock about 1926, when an out-
of-town construction company paved the streets.” Then cotton came in, “and Negroes were brought in to pick the cotton. Most of them left when their work
was over, but some remained.” Incited by Jesse Lee Washington’s crimes in the summer of 1930 (Washington was nearly lynched), a considerable element of the white people insisted upon running all
the Negroes out of this “white man’s country.”
-from a 1933 book
Message 01/06/2008: I was six years old in 1959, and I was living in nearby Dumas, Texas. I can still very clearly remember hearing an adult (resident of Dumas)say that Shamrock “knows how to treat their niggers; they don’t let’em out after dark.”