Kansas City, Missouri sign indicating a nighttime curfew is in effect for minors, 2013
8 June 2020
A curfew is a law or regulation requiring that people be off the streets at a certain hour. Curfews can be either temporary or permanent, and they can apply to everyone or only to certain categories of people.
The word, like many English legal terms, comes from Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken in England following the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman coeverfeu, a compound of couvre (imperative form, to cover) + feu (fire), an order that fires should be banked and lights extinguished. The word also applied to the tolling of bells that signaled the start of the curfew. The French word appears in the 1285 Statutes for the City of London:
Defendu est qe nul seit si hardi estre trove alaunt ne wacraunt par my les Ruwes de la Citee, apres Coeverfu persone a Seint Martyn le grant a Espeye ne a Bokuyler ne a autre arme pur mal fere, ne dount mal supecion poet avenir; ne en autre manere nule, sil ne seit grant Seignour ou altre prodome de bone conysaunce, ou lour certeyn message qi de els serra garaunty qe vount li un a lautre pur conduyte de Lumere.
(It is ordered that none be so brazen as to be found going or wandering about the streets of the city, after curfew has been tolled at St. Martins le Grand, with sword or buckler, or other arms for doing harm, or whereof evil suspicion might arise; nor any in any other manner, unless he be a great lord or other lawful person of good repute, or their certain messenger, having their warrants to go from one to another, with lantern in hand.)
Curfew appears in English by c. 1330 when it is used in the poem The Seven Sages of Rome, found in the Auchinleck Manuscript, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.1:
Þan was þe lawe in Rome town,
Þat wheþer lord or garsoun,
Þat after corfu bi founde rominde
Faste men schoulden hem nimen and binde
And kepen him til þe sonne vprising,
And þan bifore þe fo[l]k him bring
And þourgh toun him villiche driue.(Then was the law in Rome town,
That [anyone] whether a lord or servant,
Who is found roaming after curfew
That men should quickly take and bind him
And keep him until the sun’s rising,
And then bring him before the people
And drive him humiliatingly through town.)
The basic meaning of curfew hasn’t changed since the medieval period, except that we no longer ring bells to announce its start. But while the meaning hasn’t changed, the word has gained an additional connotation in the American context. During the Jim Crow era, it was a common practice for municipalities to impose curfews on Blacks, requiring them to be off the streets or to even leave the city limits by a certain time, usually at sundown.
The term sundown town, denoting a municipality where Blacks were not welcome after dark, appears by 1936, when it appears in Janet Seville’s Like a Spreading Tree:
Few realize, too, that the “sundown” towns of white faces were a Negro may not be found after dark with safety are matched by Negro towns, South and North, where a white face is a novelty.
Even older is the phrase don’t let the sun go down (or set) on you. It appears by the 1890s. The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from the McKinney, Texas Democrat of 25 April 1895 that reads:
“Don't let the sun go down on you here to-morrow negro. Yours truly, White Caps.” This note [...] penned on the tent of some negroes.
Cap here refers to well capper, an oil field worker. I have not found a copy of the Democrat of that date to determine the wider context. But I did find a remarkably similar example from the Dallas Morning News of 13 May 1897 referring to the town of Savoy in central Texas after a group of black workers were hired to replace striking white workers. I don’t know if these are two separate incidents or if the OED got the date wrong:
Last night a miniature coffin was placed in the yard of their quarters. The coffin contained a hangman’s knot, some cartridges and the following note:
“Colored section boys: Don’t let the sun go down on you here Saturday night. If you do this is your fate. You give us the dodge Sunday night or you would have come up missing, so we will give you until Saturday night to leave. If you let the sun go down on you Saturday night here you will go to h—ll a glimmering. Bill and Caleb will get the same thing if they keep your any other n[——]rs any longer. We Will be there Saturday or Sunday night, so be prepared.
OLD TIME WHITECAPS.”
The parties committing the depredations are not known, but the whole affair is regarded with disapproval by the best element of the community.
And this report about Port Arthur, Texas appeared in the Detroit Free Press of 4 September 1901:
Not far from Beaumont there is a place called Port Arthur, which is settled by many people from Michigan, but particularly from the New England States, and soon after the town was established, a sign was found there reading: “N[——]r, don’t let the sun go down on you in Port Arthur.” There was considerable comfort in that sign for us southerners.
[The expurgation of hell is in the original, but the elisions of the N-word in these quotations are mine. The unexpurgated word appears in the original articles.]
So, the implementation of a curfew in the United States, even if not explicitly targeted at Blacks, carries with it a considerable amount of racist baggage.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2006, s.v. coverfeu.
Brunner, Karl, ed. The Seven Sages of Rome (Southern Version). Early English Text Society, O.S. 191. London: Oxford UP, 1933, 60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Getting Rich in Texas.” Detroit Free Press, 4 September 1901, 5. ProQuest.
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. curfeu n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. curfew, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018, s.v. sundown, n., sun, n.1.
Seville, Janet E. Like a Spreading Tree: The Presbyterian Church and the Negro. New York: Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1936, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Statutes for the City of London” (1285). The Statutes of the Realm (1810), vol 1 of 11. London: Dawsons, 1965, 102. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“White Cappers’ Work.” Dallas Morning News, 13 May 1897, 1. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Paul Sableman, 2013, Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.