The essayist and barbecue aficionado Calvin Trillin wrote that African-American-owned Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue was the only integrated restaurant in midcentury Kansas City, as it was so good that white people couldn’t stay away.
Like jazz clubs, barbecue restaurants seem to have been frequently “integrated” in that they were black establishments where white people often liked to go. I don’t know if that really counts as being “ahead of the curve” in terms of genuine integration, though.
Don’t know if it was a law at the time, but I had a childhood friend whose mother grew up in central Missouri, and her school had a white entrance (front door) and a colored entrance (back door, through the boiler room) in addition to white bathrooms and drinking fountains (in the building) and colored ones (outhouses and a tin cup attached to a pump). The lunchroom was similarly segregated as well. ETA: She had graduated from high school around 1940.
An aside: This same friend’s dad was in the Navy in WW II, and he said there were gay men in his platoon; everyone knew who they were and nobody cared as long as they did their work. Someone else said, “Oh, yeah, they were the guys who were skinny and had high pitched voices” and I replied, “No, it was because they were dating each other.” :rolleyes: And no, they didn’t hit on the straight guys either. :smack:
That white people were willing to go to them in an environment where being seen on a black-owned property could be a very shameful thing means that they were taking a stand, whether they realized it or not.
Actually such restrictive covenants haven’t been enforceable in court since 1948, and they were technically private contracts, not actual laws.
They were an issue in William H. Rehnquist’s 1986 nomination to become Chief Justice: Opponents Quiz Rehnquist on Race Covenants
And yet Levittown, PA stayed all white until 1957.
Restrictive covenants managed to keep smaller communities all white for decades after that. Laws don’t change reality as fast as people think they do.
It wasn’t necessarily “taking a stand”, and it wasn’t always shameful.
From our modern perspective, it looks like they were proud progressives.
But back in the 40’s, it wasn’t so special. There were a few areas of life where “mixing” was allowed—but only because everyone involved knew and obeyed the limits.
Going to a black jazz club didn’t necessarily mean that you were showing your social conscience and fighting for civil rights.
White people could go to the colored side of town, and listen to black music for an evening, or eat funny foods…but they would not let a black sit with them at the same table.
Similarly, in sports: whites could root for the black guy, but even after he won the championship, they would make him use the back door. (Jesse Owens in the 1932 Olympics)
The world was a weird place. The freedom and rights of an individual–which we take as the basis of our society today-- were irrelevant back then. The individual was supposed to conform to the social order.
Yeah, “taking a stand” for racially-egalitarian white people back then would have meant allowing black customers into your white restaurant, not the other way around.
This essay gives a pretty good account of how Houston ended segregation. It wasn’t a matter of law:
Student activists at historically back Texas Southern University had backing from conservative black businessmen. Houston Powers That Be were haunted by a “race riot” in the early days of the century–and wanted the city known as a good place to do business. The nightly news featured police dogs & fire hoses turned on protesters throughout the South–that was not the image Houston businessmen wanted to project.
So the PTB organized a selective media blackout. TSU students requested service at downtown lunch counters–and were served. Step by step, restaurants & hotels were desegregated. (Judge Hofheinz wanted big league baseball–surely Willy Mays should be welcome at the finest Houston hotels!) I lived outside the city; on trips downtown we noticed a few “extra” lunch counters in some stores–they were the former black lunch counters. The whole thing was a stealth operation–which gave rabid segregationists no warning.
This page from our Museum of Fine Arts includes information on some earlier progress:
John Biggers was head of the art department at TSU–and a very fine artist.
The Museum had been open to blacks only on Thursday evenings. It’s still open late on Thursdays–the day when there’s no admission charge. But anyone is welcome…
It took a long time for state trial courts to begin fully following the holding in Shelley v. Kraemer. Moreover, the Shelley court was only asked to rule on the request for injunctive relief - that is, an order requiring the Shelleys to vacate the home. They did not rule on the constitutionality of a judgment for money damages against a seller, the threat of which largely had the same effect on the seller that an injunction would have had on the buyer. It wasn’t until 1953 that the constitutionality of that sort of enforcement was settled, and again it would have been some time before state trial courts started fully following the law.
Interesting. I wonder if the owner could have made it blacks-only – refusing to serve white customers – would that have been legal under their Jim Crow laws? Or if he had added a ‘whites entrance’ – around the back, and had whites-only tables – the wobbly ones, near the noisy kitchen. Would that have been legal?
Actually, I can guess what would have really happened: if the frequent & strict inspections by the city health department, city electrical inspector, city zoning board didn’t convince the owner to change his policy, then the whole building would have started on fire some night, and the city fire department would have been inexplicably slow to arrive.
There were no laws that would have allowed this. There probably weren’t any laws that banned blacks at white restaurants in Kansas City, either. That’s the point I’ve been making.
Whites may have been discouraged from going to black businesses, but they could legally go anywhere. They had what we might call a white privilege.
Back in the 50’s, IBM was planning to build a plant in one of the southern states. When the first draft of the plans came before some review board to make sure they were up to state spec, somebody asked where the Colored rest rooms were going to be. IBM said they thought they’d just skip that and not have segregated bathrooms; they were told that was unacceptable, so they built somewhere else.
They also adopted a General Order (or whatever they call them…) to not discriminate based on race, gender, nationality or religion several years before the Civil Rights act was signed.
How did “social custom” work. Ok, got it, black had to give up seat for white. But what if the Black person is also a member of another class. You were supposed to stand while a lady sits, if the black person was female and the white male, which custom was supposed to be violated? If the black was obviously disabled? Elderly?
I ask because I remember reading in one book about a black man who was an Army officer who went to his hometown on leave. He would often wear his uniform when walking down the high street, and describes with some satisfaction the fact that enlisted white guys on leave had to salute him and say “Sir!”.
It may do you credit that you just don’t get it. Skin color trumped everything.
Probably true, although there were comparatively only a tiny number of black army officers. And what happened when he went back to civvies? I’ve also read many examples of post-WWII incidents in which black veterans in uniform were treated exactly as they were before the war. Much of the impetus towards 50s and 60s civil rights movements came from the treatment back veterans received when they returned.
Unlike railroads airline travel was never segregated (at least on the planes themselves, airport facilities could be a different story. Granted given how rare & expensive air travel was compared to today that issue wouldn’t have come up much. Ocean liners weren’t segregated either, thought many African-American celebrities preferred French liners because they got better service.
Specific example: Rosa Parks. She was female, and middle-aged, but wass expected to get up to give her seat to a young white man. Her refusal, and the subsequent Montgomery Bus boycott, led to desegregation of the bus system.
Wasn’t that staged in the first place? She was active in civil rights long before.
NO, it was not staged!
You’ve been hearing (and believing) revisionist history – possibly from Fox News. Like people saying the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.
After WWI, too. And during WWII, German POWs in the South were treated better by some Southerners than the black troops who were wearing U.S. military uniform: http://www.worldwar2history.info/Army/Jim-Crow.html
As shown in 42, Jackie Robinson was sometimes asked to use segregated airport facilities.