Fact check: Image shows a screenshot of a sundown town sign from the movie 'Green Book'

Dezimey Kum, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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The claim: Image shows a sundown town in Mississippi that is 'whites only' after dark

Social media users revived a stark reminder of America's history of racism with an image of a sundown town sign.

A May 2 Facebook post shows a sign in Mississippi saying a town is "whites only within city limits after dark."

"Please be aware of the Sundown Towns in your state," reads text in the post. "I was in disbelief when I saw this because they can’t possibly still exist."

The Facebook post accumulated more than 300 shares within two days, but the image spread much more widely on Twitter.

"It’s 2022 and there are still Sundown towns in America. Let that sink in," reads a May 2 tweet, which received more than 100,000 likes and 30,000 retweets.

But the photo does not show a sundown town in 2022.

The image is a screenshot from a scene in the 2018 movie "Green Book." There is no evidence that suggesting sundown towns still exist today.

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USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook and Twitter users who posted the claim for comment.

The sundown town sign was not photographed in 2022

The post's image of the sundown town sign is from a scene in Green Book, in which characters drive through a fictional Mississippi sundown town in 1962.

Victor Hugo Green’s guide, "The Negro Motorist Green Book," helped Black travelers avoid sundown towns – all-white communities that prohibited Black people after dark. It also listed Black-friendly establishments such as hotels and restaurants.

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The guidebook provided a list of safe places for Black Americans to eat and sleep during the Jim Crow era.

The movie "Green Book" was inspired by the true story of pianist Don Shirley’s concert tour in 1962. His driver used the guidebook to identify rest stops for the Black pianist amid the dangers of their road trip.

No evidence sundown towns remain today

There don't appear to be any sundown towns still in existence, said Candacy Taylor, who has researched sundown towns and wrote "Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America."

"As far as we know, there aren't any that still exist," she said.

Thousands of sundown towns had existed in the U.S. beginning in 1890, many of which were primarily found in the North and West, according to a 2019 PolitiFact interview with the late James W. Loewen, who exposed the history and persistence of sundown towns.

There's a common misconception that sundown towns were only in the South because of Jim Crow, but the North also had extreme levels of segregation, Taylor said.

"There were some (sundown) downtowns in Mississippi, but there weren't collectively (many) compared to other states in the country," she said.

Loewen’s ongoing sundown town database includes 10 municipalities in Mississippi that are believed to have been sundown towns.

Most evidence of sundown towns has been destroyed, Taylor said.

"It is so difficult to find any evidence of official sundown town signs now," she said.

Our rating: Missing context

Based on our research, we rate MISSING CONTEXT the claim that an image shows a sundown town in Mississippi. While there are U.S. cities that are believed to be or previously have been considered sundown towns, the viral image used to highlight that point came from a movie.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Sundown town sign is from movie, not current image