The Langley City Council is authorizing a citizen-led commission to investigate the Village by the Sea’s possible history as a “sundown town.”

During a meeting Monday, Councilmember Craig Cyr brought the painful topic to the city council’s attention. The University of Washington launched an initiative to research all kinds of racial issues across the state, which includes sundown towns.

Sundown towns were places where people of color were not welcome after dark, though they might be expected to work in the community during the day, as was the case in Kennewick, the state’s most notorious sundown town, according to the University of Washington. Before the National Fair Housing Act of 1968, Black community members were not allowed to live in many towns and suburbs in the state, and some places operated with unofficial sundown rules.

In partnership with Eastern Washington University, UW has formed the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project to identify racial restrictions buried in property records. The project has compiled a map of suspected sundown towns based on census data from 1970. Red dots on the map indicate places where there were zero Black households – both Langley and Coupeville.

“These may have been sundown towns, especially if they were within commuting range of jobs and existing Black neighborhoods,” the project states.

In comparison, Oak Harbor had 48 Black households in 1970, according to the map.

After Langley’s formation of the Dismantling Systemic Racism Commission in 2020, Cyr met a tribal member who told him they were bullied, harassed and assaulted if they were in Langley after dark years ago. Cyr encouraged that person to tell the newly formed DSR, but they refused.

Cyr praised the DSR for its hard work removing story poles not carved by an Indigenous artist and establishing policies and training regimen for staff and the community. He asked if the city would be open to hearing from anyone who was directly victimized, or anyone with generational knowledge of Langley’s reputation as a potential sundown town.

“The answer is yes, but are we expected to pay for their pain and suffering?” Councilmember Harolynne Bobis asked, adding that when she ran for city council, she was told by a former mayor that there were only five permanent African American residents in Langley. Bobis, who was elected in 2021, is the first person of color to have a seat on the city council.

Cyr went on to say that he recommended that the DSR look into Langley’s possible history as a sundown town.

Bobis recalled that when she moved from California to Washington State, driving through Oregon, a former sundown state, left her traumatized.

“I felt that the whole time,” she said. “I didn’t feel that in Langley.”

She wondered how the DSR can help the council with creating housing, employment and recreation that’s more readily available to people of color.

Councilmember Gail Fleming asked Cyr what he hoped to achieve, to which he responded, “more oxygen, more light, less darkness in the history of Langley” and the council needs to know about victims of this sundown town reputation, if it existed.

Meredith Penny, the city’s planning director, said as part of Langley’s comprehensive plan update, the city is required by the state to address racially disparate impacts in housing, and part of the first step in the guidance from the state is looking at the history of exclusion. Members of the DSR have been reaching out and doing interviews.

“But there’s so much more history and information that we’re not going to be able to gather in this timeframe, that I think an ongoing process would be helpful,” she said. “So once we understand our history better, the idea is then that we look at ways to undo any policies that have contributed to that exclusion.”

Other communities have specifically mapped HOAs where people of color were not allowed to purchase homes and determined if the areas became more diverse over time. In Langley, Penny hasn’t been able to identify any plats that had that language in them, and she hasn’t found any past ordinances that were explicitly exclusive.

“My understanding is that it’s probably a lot of those more informal types of practices, Realtors not selling to people of color, that type of thing, that might have gone on,” she said, adding that she appreciated this topic coming forward.

Cyr acknowledged that the investigative process could take a year or two. The council unanimously voted to direct the DSR to do the research, modifying its 2025 work plan.