It’s the 1950’s in Resume Speed, Alabama or KKKville, Georgia. If I owned a diner, would I have to segregate it by law? If I said “FU” to the locals, could I be prosecuted for allowing blacks to eat at my place wherever they wanted ? I’m not asking about attitudes at the time,I’m asking what the actual laws were.
thx - E-S
I seem to recall the laws did not apply to lunch counters. In the first attempts to desegregate lunch counters, the police did not arrest the protesters, since they were were just sitting peacefully at the counter. They also did not require the store to serve them. The protests spread and when the became violent, the police came in.
So you probably could integrate your lunch counter. But you’d also lose all your white business.
Or not. There are the well-publicized incidents in Birmingham and Little Rock, etc. but ever hear of the great integration riots of Atlanta, or Huntsville, AL for that matter? No, you didn’t because they never occurred. Please cite where folks all over the South went out of business because they served black people lunch or rioted because they started attending the same schools. Broad brush much?
Not to mention the lovely “KKKville, GA” slur in the OP. And of course, there was absolutely zero segregation elsewhere in the country. Sammy Davis, Jr. was more than welcome to stay at the hotels in Vegas where he performed with the Rat Pack in the late 50s/early 60s. And where was one of the biggest disturbances related to school desegregation? Was it … wait for it … Boston? And, lest we forget, Rodney King was beaten to within an inch of his life in … was it Mississippi? No, wait … Tennessee? Oh, no, it was … Los Angeles.
I don’t know if you could be prosecuted, but I do believe you’d lose the business of most, if not all of your white patrons. Especially in smaller towns, where community pressure kept people “in line” in their own way. And, many people truly believed that whites and blacks should be separated.
For anyone to say that racism and segregation wasn’t worse in the south during this time period is being disingenuous at best. I’m not so sure that it’s painting with a broad brush so much as it’s being realistic about attitudes in this region during the 50’s.
In general, state-level segregation laws during the Jim Crow era dealt only with intermarriage, public transportation, schools, prisons, and state parks. You can see a good summary of each state’s laws here. (Change the state in the URL to view states other than Georgia.)
Beyond that, there were local ordinances, which are more difficult to catalog. The web site alludes to some of them, but is not comprehesive. Many local ordinances did require segregation in restaurants, so to answer your question, you would need to check with the friendly local officials in your, ah, hypothetical town.
Claire Beauchamp, I apologize if I offended you, or any southerner. It’s just that, for the time period I’m asking about, the south was an easy target and where the story I want to finish is located.
Resume Speed, “State” and KKKville, “State” are common epitaphs for my friends and I; if it offends you, please substitute the state of your choice…
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I noticed a bestseller (fiction) that describes the white residents of a Mississippi town in the 1950s as “despising” the black women who worked for them as their nannies. That just sent a cold chill up my spine.
I can’t imagine there being that much difference in the people in West Tennessee where I grew up and the people in Mississippi. I kow that the black women were not hated. I knew too many of them and knew how my mother felt about them and other white women in the town and how both groups treated each other even though there was a general segregation.
I do know that here in Nashvilee there were riots and civil unrest after Martin Luther King Jr. died and we had to have curfews and everyone had to be inside early for maybe a couple of weeks. Also, I think we had trouble bad enough to warrant tanks going down the streets.
There was a bomb in one of the elementary schools. And we did have a lot of protests about busing. But the schools were already integrated by the time that I got here, so I can’t speak to that. I asked to teach in an integrated school. There was a lot of white flight to the suburbs and to private schools. Many of the private schools were sub-standard.
When I was growing up, when all went to the same theater, but the black people sat upstairs.
Pardon me for cutting my usual diatribe short. All of Nashville is in mourning tonight. One of our most loved citizens has been murdered. Former Titans quarterback Steve McNair was killed within a short distance of the stadium. I think that Steve McNair did as much to bring the races solidly together here as any man I’ve known. Everybody loved Steve.
You are absolutely right about that. I grew up in rural Louisiana and I am probably one of the youngest people around who lived through formal segregation (I am 36). I had a black nanny named Lola who practically raised me from a toddler until I went to college and I still traveled to visit her in the nursing home as much as I could as an adult. Her room was filled with pictures of me and my brothers at every age alongside those of her biological family. That describes the situation on its own and we felt the same way and that was far from unique even if outsiders don’t understand it. She only died two years ago in her late 90’s with her mind still as sharp as a tack. I miss her.
Also don’t forget in small towns, they care less about what the big government does than in bigger cities.
Here, like most places now has no smoking in public buildings. I can think of 3 stores that the employees smoke in quite regularly. The local sheriff is famous for taking a convicted murderer out of jail long enough to drive some heavy equipment through town. He was the only person in the county with the right license and ability to do so. Also, in the dry county next to us, some stores are known to keep liquor in the back for regulars.
In the 90’s, I knew of a town that heartily endorsed black people leaving town before the sun set.
Legality really depends on the local authorities desire to enforce the laws.
Don’t be ridiculous. How about you citing some examples of white-owned stores in the south prior to 1950 that did allow whites and blacks to eat lunch in the same counter.
Were all whites in the South hard core racists? Of course not. But the society insisted that the races were kept separate and people didn’t start questioning that until the 1950s and later. Even those who didn’t hate Blacks generally felt the two races were best kept separate. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights movement that these people – whose belief was instilled in childhood and who actually believe segregation was good for both races – began to see otherwise.
There were whites in the South who believed in racial equality, but they were marginalized and impotent.
And the society that set up after Reconstruction made it quite clear that Blacks were not to be treated as equals with Whites. In the worst of it – say from 1890-1910 – many attempts to desegregate or for Blacks to achieve any sort of equality did lead to riots by whites.
Note that the lunch counter desegregation battles began at a Woolworth’s, a national chain store with stores in the North and South. Woolworth did not segregate lunch counters in the North, but did so in the South. Why? We have already established that there was no law requiring a segregated lunch counter. Why did Woolworth do so? The most obvious answer is that they feared financial repercussions (they were a business). And the most obvious one would be that white customers wouldn’t use the lunch counter (I doubt they feared an organized boycott, but rather whites just choosing to eat elsewhere when they saw Blacks at the counter).
As for examples of white race riots, how about this from the New Georgia Encyclopedia:
I see from looking further into that article that my assessment is, if anything, conservative. It is quite possible that an integrated lunch counter in 1908 Atlanta could be vandalized or worse.
To think that the worst of racism was in Alabama or Mississippi (or only in the South, for that matter) is to be pretty naive about the nature of the issue a century ago.
What exactly does “Resume Speed” in this context mean? After searching I see it used about various states, but nothing that quite explains the apparent racist meaning.
Speed traps were a stereotypical way of harassing “outsiders” in small Southern towns.
Epithets