[Ads-l] "The 91"

[Laurence Horn]

> On Mar 26, 2018, at 2:31 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
>> 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.”

Seems unrealistic.  They always liked their dogs in the South.

LH
> 
> 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

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