News Release

GOSHEN — The Goshen College Film Production program will present the premiere of its documentary “Goshen – A Sundown Town’s Transformation” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 21, at The Goshen Theater.

The event is free and open to the whole community. There will be concessions available. A panel discussion sponsored and moderated by the Goshen Community Relations Commission will follow the film.

“Goshen – A Sundown Town’s Transformation” explores Goshen’s past as a racially exclusionary Sundown Town and how the community is finding ways to acknowledge this history and move forward. There have been thousands of such communities in the U.S., but Goshen is among the first to make a bipartisan declaration regarding “a past to stand against.”

For most of the 20th century, starting around 1900, Goshen was a “sundown town,” meaning African Americans were, by social and cultural means, excluded from living in Goshen or even staying overnight there.

On March 17, 2015, after unanimous support from the Goshen Ministerial Association, Community Relations Commission and mayor, the city council addressed Goshen’s lamentable legacy by adopting “A resolution acknowledging the racially exclusionary past of Goshen, Indiana, as a ‘sundown town.’” The resolution concludes: “It happened, it was wrong, it’s a new day.”

The short-documentary was made by Goshen College sophomore film production major, Silas Immanuel, as a Maple Scholar’s project advised by Goshen Professor of Communication Kyle Hufford.