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Whether Groton was a sundown town is unknown – but the local select board has voted to reject the label
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Biden-Harris yard signs. A rainbow flag. “All are welcome” engraved stones.
Like many cities and towns jolted by the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans, Groton — a bucolic suburb of some 11,300 people — is trying to reconcile an ugly past with its present image.
Yet the town remains more than 90 percent white, which, like many American suburbs, may not be an accident. Groton was once a Ku Klux Klan stronghold, rife with anti-Catholic and nativist prejudice.
In an online database, Groton is listed as one of the possible, though unconfirmed, sundown towns that once existed in Massachusetts. For decades, such all-white jurisdictions excluded or expelled religious and ethnic minorities, usually Black people, sometimes by law and more often through violence and intimidation.
Read the full story.
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