Fred Goree played outfield for the Kansas City Monarchs in the early 1940s. On a road trip through Illinois, the team bus entered a sundown town after dark. Goree learned what sundown towns did to enforce their rules.
He survived. Not everyone who made that mistake did.
The signs at the city limits used a slur. The sheriff's department enforced them. Seventy percent of documented sundown towns in Illinois -- the state with the most thorough research -- were in the North. The Negro Leagues played in the North.
The Green Book tried to help. The Green Book was not enough.
The Scientific Data paper geocoded 2,248 documented sundown places to US Census geographies. The Seamheads database has every Negro Leagues game and ballpark. This chapter is the first time the two have been joined. The join is published under CC0.
A national dataset of historical US sundown towns linked to US Census geographies, published in Nature's Scientific Data in January 2025. Geocoded, evidence-rated (Confirmed, Probable, Possible), and built atop the Loewen/Berrey crowdsourced database hosted at Tougaloo. This chapter respects the evidence tiers -- Confirmed at full opacity, Probable at 70%, Possible at 40%.
The primary source feeding the Scientific Data paper. Hosted at justice.tougaloo.edu. Crowdsourced from local historians, NAACP records, contemporary newspapers, and the late James Loewen's personal archives. The database documents what has been found. Researchers state explicitly what it cannot capture: the towns no one wrote down.
Seamheads game-level schedules joined to a period-accurate 1920--1950 US road network reconstructed from USGS and LOC historical maps. The routes between ballparks are calculated against the road network of the time, not the modern interstate system. Every route segment is dated.
The amber dots are the same Negro Leagues ballparks from the last chapter. The reader recognizes them. The oxblood layer underneath has never been drawn against the schedule before. The reader chooses to turn it on. The reader cannot then unsee it.
Each line is a documented road-trip leg between two Negro Leagues cities. The color is the Corridor Danger Score -- the count of documented sundown towns within five miles of the historical road network, weighted by evidence tier.
Lower bound. Confirmed-only documentation. The actual figure on each route is higher.
For every documented Negro Leagues ballpark, the count of documented sundown towns within 10, 25, and 50 miles. The top three ballparks for 10-mile density receive the case study treatment that follows.
Five documented cases. Four named towns and one aggregate number. Every claim sourced. Every gap in the documentation named as a gap, not papered over.
Negro Leagues schedules were constructed by team owners and league officials -- not by the players. The Green Book was published every year from 1936. Its absence of listings in certain cities was a documented fact visible to anyone who could read it.
The Corridor Danger Score maps the routes that were chosen against the documentation that existed at the time. This section documents. It does not impute. The reader draws the conclusion.
This is the world they moved through to get to the games. Now look at what they built when they got there.
On August 1, 1943, 51,723 people came to Comiskey Park to watch the East-West All-Star Game -- twenty thousand more than came to the MLB All-Star Game that year. They drove through every page of this chapter to be there.
Chapter 04 -- The Crowd That Came →Haynes, Jeremy. "The Sundown Corridor." The Other Box Score, theotherboxscore.org/chapters/ the-sundown-corridor/, [publication date].
Nardos, R., et al. "A national data set of historical US sundown towns for quantitative analysis." Scientific Data 12 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-04330-9
The Other Box Score. "The Sundown Corridor Dataset." CC0 1.0. github.com/other-boxscore/chapters/ 03-the-sundown-corridor/data/