As you know, (you might not know, but then if you don’t, you won’t be able to answer this question) Jim Crow laws existed in the south years ago and provided for seperate but equal accomodations for blacks and whites. When you see the old pictures of restrooms labeled white and colored,this is the legacy of Jim Crow.
My question:
Were these laws instituted with the intention of keeping blacks out of white facilities, or were they written to force those who would exclude blacks to provide at least some kind of facilities for them?
In other words if I had a restaurant, would the law force me to have a colored restroom so my white patrons wouldn’t have to sit on a toilet which a black man has sat upon? Or, would I be ok if I let everybody use the main bathroom, but need to provide a colored one if I wouldn’t let black patrons use my regular restroom?
I just love it when you can answer an “or” question with yes. Back then there were often (and I can remember getting scolded for drinking from the “colored” fountain) dual facilities. What was amazing was how quickly the bulk of them disappeared. Everywhere in Texas in 1960 - absolutely gone by 1964 (yeah, there might have been some escapees, but the change was rapid).
My father can recall taking a bus trip through Texas in the late 1950s or early 1960s and seeing three facilities in many places - White, Colored and Mexican. I always wondered who insisted on that.
Interesting way of looking at it. The film Blaze showed a way this could be turned on its head:
An angry unemployed Black man with an M.D. degree complained to Earl Long (governor of Louisiana in the 1950s) that Black doctors could not find any work. Long wanted to alleviate the problem of racism but couldn’t overturn the system all at once. So Long visited a state hospital and complained to the director that he was shocked—shocked!—that white doctors and nurses were forced to treat black patients in violation of Jim Crow laws. He demanded that the hospital hire black doctors & nurses immediately. When the director began to say that he didn’t know of any, the young black doctor interrupted him by handing him a big stack of résumés.
I think “separate but equal” was an attempt by segregationists to cover their collective asses. It is obvious that the true intention was to keep blacks out of facilities used by whites - and put them in their “place”.
The “seperate but equal” clause was something of a legal fiction. I seriously doubt any “colored” bathroom, waterfountain, school, streetcar, or busbench was as well maintained as a “white” one in the south.
“Seperate but equal” was established in “Plessy v. Ferguson” (1896) and overturned in “Brown v. Board of Education” (1954) - its fascinating to read both decisions.
(1896) http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=search&court=US&case=/us/163/537.html
(1954) http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=search&court=US&case=/us/347/483.html
Sorry if the links don’t work here, they should if you cut and paste.
As for the specific of your question - every state and local area had their own statutes…Where I live in Texas, there were city laws governing the exact nature that segregation took until 1961. You could get some 50 year old law books from any “Jim Crow” state to get into the specifics.
As far as “Mexican”, there were no formal statutes defining a “Mexican race” (Mexicans were legally "whites of Spanish extraction - even if fully Indian or Mestizo). So that would be under the discretion of the owner. And along the border - to avoid an international incident - Mexicans were almost always considered “white” for purposes of accomidations. Further into East Texas - there was no supposrt for such “diplomacy”. But in El Paso for instance, the a Mexican could actually get cited for using “negro facilities”.
I’m not denying racism didn’t exist for them…see “Hernandez v. State of Texas” (1954)
OK. So Mexicans couldn’t legally use the Colored facilities, but whites didn’t want them using their facilities, so they set up three… I get it.
I once had a job phoning up people who had recently been released from hospitals in a nationwide hospital group and asking them how they felt about their stay there. I remember one woman in Texas whose major complaint was that she had to share a room (and therefore a bathroom) with a woman who was “not of my class” i.e. a Mexican woman.
beatle is right. It was a two-fold intent. There were people who wanted to simply exclude all blacks, but the SC had ruled in Plessy v Ferguson that they couldn’t do that, but that they could segregate the races. So both of your reasons played a part. Of course, separate never meant equal, so the “excluding blacks” was the main purpose, but avoiding further court intervention was a high second.
Well this is what I gathered from living in West Texas.
If a wealthy lady from Mexico came to the border to shop in an American department store - noone would probably tell her to take her business elsewhere…especially if she was light skinned and well dressed.
But an ordinary bracero worker’s wife wouldn’t be welcome…so “class” was a big part of it. There was a distinction made between “Mexicans” (poor, dark skinned) and “Spanish-Americans” or “Latins” in popular word usage.
It was very complicated. Here there were also near riots in WWII because black soldiers from the north stationed in the area couldn’t comprehend why they were barred from places that Mexican-Americans could use - it was as if they were “doubly segregated”.
I remember reading in Baseball’s Great Experiment (the story of Jackie Robinson and the integration of the leagues) the reactions of some of the first black players who were playing in the North for the first time in their lives. In many cases, they found it even worse to play in the North than in the South, because in the South they could always count on there being a “colored” hotel, restaurant, bathroom, or whatever where they would be welcome. In the North, they found themselves denied lodging, denied food, and being hounded out of bathrooms, and there wasn’t a “colored” facility in sight to turn to. Sometimes you had to sleep on the bus or relieve yourself by the side of the road.
I don’t know if the Jim Crow laws were “written to force those who would exclude blacks to provide at least some kind of facilities for them,” as you were asking. But segregation did sometimes have that effect, whether it was intentional or not. In the North, where Jim Crow did not reign, blacks did sometimes find themselves excluded completely.
Jomo Mojo your point brings up a concept I’d love to see get implemented. Every person who considers another race or people to be inferior or unequal should be denied any innovation, invention, medicine or medical procedure created by a person of the offending race. Sorry if I’m a bit off-topic.
"Laws forbidding the intermarriage of the two races may be said in a technical sense to interfere with the freedom of contract, and yet have been universally recognized as within the police power of the state. State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389. "
Whoa.
This in a Supreme Court opinion. A hundred years ago, it was accepted that the government could tell us who we could or could not marry???
News flash, man. They’re still telling us who we can and can’t marry. No same-sex marriages, restrictions on marrying first cousins, limitations on the number of people one can be married to at one time. We accept this level of intrusion; indeed, many people demand it to protect the sanctity of marriage and the future of the human race.
Me, I want them to just butt out! (except for marrying your sibling or parent or grandparent. Or aunt or something. That’s just weird).
PK likes bourbon