After Sundown: The Hidden History of Exclusion in the Tampa Bay Area

By Joe Marzo

For much of the twentieth century, the line between freedom and danger in parts of the Tampa Bay area was drawn by the setting sun. In communities across Pinellas County and beyond, Black residents and visitors understood — through signs, ordinances, police pressure, or simply the silent weight of social custom — that they were not welcome after dark. These places were known as "sundown towns," and their legacy still shapes the region's neighborhoods today.

What a Sundown Town Actually Was

A sundown town wasn't merely a place where racism happened. According to the historians who first cataloged the phenomenon, it was an entire community that was, for decades, kept "all white" on purpose — through a combination of laws, restrictive deed covenants, police enforcement, employer pressure, and threats of violence. The name came from signs that often stood at city limits warning Black travelers to be gone before dusk.

The phrase entered the national vocabulary largely through the late sociologist James Loewen, whose 2005 book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism documented thousands of such communities across the country. Most arose between 1890 and the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and contrary to popular assumption, the majority were not in the Deep South but in the Midwest, the West, and Appalachia. Florida nevertheless had its share, and the Tampa Bay area — particularly Pinellas County — featured prominently among them.

Importantly, an ordinance was never required. As local historian James Schnur has documented for Pinellas County publications, until the mid-twentieth century Florida municipalities lacked the "home rule" authority to pass their own ordinances without state legislative consent. State-level Jim Crow laws did much of the work, allowing cities to enforce exclusion through informal but ruthlessly effective means.

Gulfport: The Best-Documented Case

Of all the communities in the region, Gulfport has the clearest documentary trail. It is the only Pinellas County town included in the Tougaloo College sundown towns database, the most comprehensive academic catalog of such places.

Gulfport never wrote its racial restrictions into law, but city leaders embraced them openly. The clearest evidence comes from May 1937, when town councilmember and former mayor Bruno Beckhard spoke to a St. Petersburg Times reporter about a proposed bathing beach for Black residents on nearby Boca Ciega Bay. Calling the plan a "betrayal of the town of Gulfport," Beckhard stated the council's position plainly: Gulfport, he said, had never receded from its long-standing policy that no Black people would be allowed within the town limits after sundown.

The census numbers confirm what the words asserted. In the 1940 census, only two of Gulfport's 1,581 residents were Black. Ten years later, after the population had more than doubled to 3,702, the count of Black residents was still just two. Longtime residents have recalled signs at the city limits that read, in language too blunt for many descendants to repeat verbatim today, that Black people should not let the sun set on them in Gulfport. The unwritten policy persisted into at least the 1950s, and one resident interviewed for an article as recently as 2010 still described the town as a former sundown community.

In recent years, Gulfport's city council has begun moving toward a formal acknowledgment of this history.

Largo: Exclusion by Ordinance

If Gulfport relied on the unwritten word, Largo went further. The agricultural community north of St. Petersburg depended heavily on Black labor in its citrus groves — yet that labor force was not permitted to live within the city.

A 1907 St. Petersburg Times article boosting Largo described it approvingly as a place where "no negroes" were allowed, ranking Black residents alongside "blind pigs" (illegal saloons) as "nuisances" the town had successfully kept out. The community was incorporated only two years earlier, and the exclusionary culture was already firmly established.

In 1934, Largo's commissioners — a group that included citrus-industry figures William F. Belcher, members of the McMullen family, John S. Taylor, and M. W. Ulmer — went a step beyond informal practice and codified the policy into Section 339 of the town's ordinances under the heading "Segregation of Races." After its passage, anyone identified as belonging to the "African or Negro race" who was found living outside the small zone designated for Black residents could face a fifty-dollar fine or sixty days in jail.

To the south of Largo, the small Black communities of Baskins, Dansville, and Ridgecrest were kept geographically and socially separate. Their residents could harvest the groves; they could not live in the town that the groves enriched.

The Beaches: Indian Rocks, Pass-a-Grille, and the Gulf Coast

The Pinellas beaches developed in the early twentieth century under explicit racial restrictions. In 1914, the Florida Beach Development Company posted a sign in what is now Kolb Park in Indian Rocks Beach warning that "Colored People Trespassing on This Property Will Be Prosecuted." Members of the historically Black Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church south of Largo would have faced immediate arrest had they tried to swim there.

Pass-a-Grille on the southern tip of the barrier islands had once hosted a small Black community in the early 1900s, when William Bradley's family and others fished, crabbed, and welcomed mainland visitors near 20th Avenue and Pass-a-Grille Way. As Florida's 1920s land boom transformed the beaches into resort property, these families were squeezed out. The Bradleys, the last Black family on the island, left in 1923. Pass-a-Grille soon became a sundown community in practice.

Loewen's Florida list also includes Holmes Beach across Tampa Bay in Manatee County, and other coastal towns whose names contained the word "beach" — historians have noted that many such places, in Florida and elsewhere, enforced rules requiring Black people to be off the sand by dark.

St. Petersburg, Pinellas Park, and Lealman

St. Petersburg itself was never an officially all-white city — it had substantial Black neighborhoods, particularly along what is now 22nd Street South — but the city enforced strict spatial segregation. Black residents were generally not permitted in downtown except to work, and beach access was tightly restricted. Spa Beach, the city's main bathing area, was for white beachgoers only until the late 1950s.

Driving through certain areas after dark could be dangerous. Local historians have recorded that the corridor through north St. Petersburg, Lealman, and Pinellas Park was treacherous for Black motorists unfamiliar with the area; a flat tire or empty gas tank could turn into a life-threatening situation. Enforcement, by multiple accounts, came partly from law enforcement officers who would stop Black drivers to "inquire" about their business. Both Pinellas Park and much of Lealman would have qualified as sundown communities a half-century ago, though that is no longer the case today.

In the broader region, the Tougaloo database also lists Elfers in Pasco County. According to accounts collected there, residents in the 1920s killed Black sawmill workers and hung a warning sign at the town's entrance.

Clearwater and Tampa

Larger cities like Clearwater and Tampa were never sundown towns in the strict sense — both had significant Black populations throughout the twentieth century. But segregation was thoroughgoing. The Clearwater railroad depot in 1922 had separate waiting rooms for "white" and "colored" passengers. Tampa's Black residents, concentrated historically in neighborhoods like the Scrub and later Central Avenue and West Tampa, lived under restrictive covenants, sundown-style enforcement in surrounding suburbs, and the constant threat of violence that Black Floridians elsewhere also faced.

Why It Still Matters

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made the legal infrastructure of sundown towns illegal. The informal infrastructure — the reputations, the demographic patterns, the steered real estate sales, the inherited wealth gap between families who could buy property and families who could not — proved more durable.

Many of the Tampa Bay communities discussed here look very different today. Pinellas Park, Lealman, and the beaches are more diverse than they were in 1950, and Gulfport in particular has cultivated a reputation as one of the more progressive small towns in the area. But the patterns set during the sundown era left lasting marks: in which neighborhoods accumulated generational wealth, in which families could buy beachfront property when it was cheap, in who inherited what.

Historians of the region have argued that the first step toward repair is simply telling the truth about what happened. Local newspapers like The Gabber in Gulfport and The Weekly Challenger in St. Petersburg, along with researchers like James Schnur and Josette Green, have done much of that work in recent years. Gulfport's halting movement toward formal acknowledgment of its past is one of the few official efforts in the region.

The signs at the city limits are long gone. The history they pointed to is not.

Sources: Reporting from The Gabber, The Weekly Challenger, and the St. Petersburg Times/Tampa Bay Times archives; the Tougaloo College History and Social Justice sundown towns database; James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005); the work of Pinellas County historian James Schnur; and coverage by WTSP and NBC Miami.