Funny you should mention this. Around here, nearly every 7-11 has a “No loitering” sign out front. I’ve always assumed that they’re concerned about unruly teenagers hanging around out front and scaring off other customers.
It’s worth noting that the owner of private property can enforce a “no loitering” rule.
If the 7-11’s sign refers to the store’s own private parking lot, for example, they are perfectly within their rights to ask that people not hang around.
What exactly do you define as Southern towns? All of the older parks around New Orleans still have two sets of water fountains left over from segregation. Of course, anyone is now free to use either one…the signs have been completely removed from most of them, although there is one set at Mel Ott Park in Gretna, Louisiana where you can still see the painted over signs that say “Whites” and “Coloreds”. Those signs weren’t painted over until the mid 1970s and the rule was probably enforced until the late 60s.
Things were different depending on where you were. I know of some small country towns in Louisiana where there was never any segregation (at least after the slaves were set free). A man I used to work with was the product of a white mother and a black father. He was born in the 1930s in a small town about 50 miles outside of New Orleans and there was absolutely no prejudice or oppression among the locals. If they had been 90 miles away in rural Mississippi, there probably would’ve been a hanging just for marrying a white woman.
Well, I think I referenced small Southern towns, but anywho. To be a bit more precise, how about (surprisingly?) just about all Southern towns outside of Birmingham, Atlanta and New Orleans, heh, and even including signficant portions of those.
Look, most people aren’t idiots, even in the south. Back in the day, you knew a black man or woman, or a Latino(a), or a Native American or an Irish American, whatever minority, who behaved like everyone else or worked hard or whatever and was a good peep, you weren’t going to spit at him and organize a lynching just because of his ethnicity. That did happen, but not all over, which I think is the suggestion of the OP, and a bunch of historians and afternoon specials. Sweet jeebus, I was there!!! I have never personally known a klansman! As I related in another thread, when I, my mother and sister actually witnessed a klansman attack a African American in Cedartown, GA decades ago, we went straight to the police station and reported it, and followed it up the next day. Mom was pissed. So screw the broad brush.
Ok…“Skylab” didn’t really give much of a clue. 
My grandmother was born in the 19teens and was scared to death of black people…I think it was more of a fear of the unknown. She lived in Algiers Point (New Orleans on the Westbank of the Mississippi) most of her life and there were no black people in her immediate neighborhood until the late 80s, except for the next door neighbors. They were respectable people and once she got to know them, she didn’t view them any differently than the rest of the neighbors. I played with their grandson as a child. Other than the neighbors and an elderly lady who cleaned her house, she had never had any contact with any other black people. There were still corner stores back then and she never really had much reason to leave the neighborhood.
However, if any other black person was loitering outside of her house and they didn’t belong next door, she would’ve been (probably irrationally) in fear for her life and would’ve called the police, and the NOPD would’ve picked the guy up for loitering.
Since the neighborhoods were still pretty well segregated, it only took a split second to realize that this person wasn’t from the family next door and didn’t belong in the neighborhood. If a white guy was hanging out, he could’ve been any of the hundreds of white people living within a few blocks (of course, she probably would’ve called the police anyway, but that’s a different story).
You were? Is this the answer to the question i asked you?
You were in Alabama in 1865? You were alive in the period 1890-1910?
May i congratulate you on your longevity.
Well thankee, little feller. Please explain to us unwashed masses the immediate nuances of the Magner Jimmy Carter based upon your extensive readings from other equally well-read fellers who weren’t there.
I believe the claim was a general one – “vagrancy laws were used in small southern towns to control the black population.” Absolutely nothing you have said refutes this claim.
Note that the claim was not – “Within the lifetime of every single now-living person and to this very day, all southern whites and the towns they living mandate race-based separation of toilet facilities, drinking fountains, segregated residences, banning of interracial relationships, racist terrorism and murder, membership in the KKK, and daily lynching.” If it had been, then, yes, your purported personal experience would have refuted that.
So, is your position that the whole of the public awareness of the civil rights movement and the conditions that spawned it is based on unfair stereotyping by intellectual elites? The American south was exactly the same as the rest of the country in terms of its legal and social treatment of the race issue and any perception that things differed in any substantial manner between north and south is the result of damned Yankee propaganda? Is that it?
Look man, I’m from a small southern town too and I didn’t get offended or think he was using a “broad brush” He simply wrote, “blacks in southern towns.” It wasn’t a broad brush because didn’t specify that it was the reason for loitering laws in every southern town. It was simply an example. All he needs to back up that statement is to prove that loitering laws existed to target blacks in at least two southern towns. I don’t find that hard to believe. He made the language particularly weak to avoid having to defend it.
I’ve never seen any kind of cross-burning, etc or any serious action against blacks in my town, but I don’t believe that it was never used, especially in the civil rights era in larger towns like Selma, etc.
Look, you might as well face it. Although the south that we may have grown up in (I don’t know how old you are) was different that the common picture, it doesn’t mean that it never existed. There was some nasty shit that went down, and I’m sure you still know a lot of nasty people (I do).
I was coming in to say this. It renders all the hijacks moot. The OP was talking about a no loitering sign on a private business on private property. It is their right to state they don’t want anyone hanging out on their property that is not there to conduct legitimate business. Anyone who would be arrested for not leaving would be arrested for defiant trespass (or whatever it is called in your state) not loitering.
Right, but the OP didn’t say where in/on the bank the sign was posted. If the sign was posted outside the bank, and the bank was facing onto public sidewalk, the bank doesn’t own the sidewalk and has no right to control who stands there (unless there’s some special law about banks that i’m not aware of). The OP was also asking specifically about loitering laws, implying that the main concern was about those laws as they apply to public, rather than private property. I don’t think the discussion of those laws has been a hijack at all.