[Ads-l] "The 91"

[Wilson Gray]

> the colored neighborhood

Colored were allowed to live in Vegas back in the days of Jim Crow?!
They're barely allowed to live there today. Maybe the author was just
trying to add a little local color.😜 IAC, Nevada was a so-called "sundown
town" - NIGGER, DON'T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE - state, in those
days. Depending on the state, Japanese-Americans, Jewish-Americans,
Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and even dogs were also subject to
sundowning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
"Playwright John Henry Redwood III wrote the play *No Niggers, No Jews, No
Dogs* after he saw the words written on a sign from a sundown town in
Mississippi. The play is set in a sundown town in the American South."

>From Here to Eternity: A Novel
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0812984315
James Jones, ‎George Hendrick - 2012 - ‎Preview - ‎Page 188
"DON'T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU IN HARLAN, NIGGER!"

Of course,  sundown towns weren't peculiar to the South.

https://books.google.com/books?id=FPxJ_aG_B-8C
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
James W. Loewen
The New Press, Sep 29, 2005 - Social Science - 562 pages
“Don’t let the sun go down on you in this town.” We equate these words with
the Jim Crow South but, in a sweeping analysis of American residential
patterns, award-winning and bestselling author James W. Loewen demonstrates
that strict racial exclusion was the norm in American towns and villages
from sea to shining sea for much of the twentieth century.

Ironically, Ferguson, Missouri, was once such a town, as were all other
towns in Saint Louis County, with the exception of Webster Groves, "St.
Louis author Jonathan Franzen's" true hometown, and Kinloch, a now
all-black village that was once, like the Watts district of Los Angeles, an
all-white town.

On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 6:36 PM, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:

> I'm currently rereading Tim Powers' novel _Last Call_, and was just struck
> by something. Powers specializes in fantasy of the "secret history" type,
> so the following is set in (what purports to be) our world and timeline. In
> my experience, Powers does his homework, but the following seems like an
> anachronism to me.
>
> The first chapter is set in Las Vegas in 1943, and it's written in tight
> third person, through the eyes of one of the characters.
>
> "They drove around, and found a new casino called the Moulin Rouge in the
> colored neighborhood west of the 91."
>
> We've discussed the use of "the :number:" to refer to highways, but I was
> under the impression that that was a Southern California innovation, dating
> to sometime in the 1980s and usually referring to interstates . Would
> someone in Las Vegas in the '40s use it, to refer to (I presume) a state
> highway? Anyone know?
>
> Jim Parish
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org