Watching Ken Burns’ Jazz, I’m heartbroken over the stories of racism that the early jazz pioneers had to deal with. Of course, it was a different time, generations removed from when I was born.
Did anyone in that era dare to break racial lines? Suppose a café owner in Jackson who reckoned that one man’s dollar was as good as the next man’s dollar, and allowed black and white patrons? Perhaps a tailor in Shreveport who didn’t care whose clothes he tailored, so long as they paid the bill?
Did racism cut both ways? Could a white fellow who had a taste for Miss Bessie’s chicken, only available on the “Darkie” end of town, go to Miss Bessie’s Table and buy a meal? Did it ever happen?
Also, did [Catholic] parochial schools in that day & age take kids of both races? Was the Vatican color-blind in those days?
It was all much more complicated than a simple black/white division.
The best example is the most famous one: the bus system. Both blacks and whites could ride the buses. The blacks could even sit up front. BUT. If a white got on the bus, any black sitting up front had to move to the back of the bus. It was Rosa Parks’ refusal to get up and move that created notice.
Many businesses operated in some variation of this. Balconies were reserved for blacks in movie theaters, e.g. Stores would serve both, but whites took precedence. Some doctors, although certainly not all, would see black and white patients but maybe at different times or days.
The point to remember is that the culture moved to serve whites. Whites could always go to the black part of town. Whites decided how much service blacks could get. The Woolworth’s sit-ins occurred because blacks could shop at the stores but not get served at the lunchcounters. Why? Because whites wouldn’t eat there if blacks were served. So your hypothetical café owner might at some times and places be allowed to serve everyone but probably be told to quit or go out of business.
It’s a pathological case study of expectations honed to a fine edge. Very Darwinian, too. You adapted and survived or failed to notice a nuance and perished.
And, perhaps counterintuitively, segregation was less of an issue in the smallest, most backwater towns. Although, as Expano said, whites would get preferential treatment. For that matter, if you were a stranger - black or white - and walked into a small town store or cafe, you could expect to be viewed suspiciously.
There weren’t a lot of black Catholics in the South, and the amount of integration depended a lot on the individual bishop. Joseph Ritter, for one, ordered Catholic schools in the Indianpolis diocese desegregated in 1938. Ritter later came to St. Louis and desegregated those schools in 1947, and added hospitals to the list. In St. Louis there were several parishes specifically for blacks. Ritter eventually merged those with nearby white parishes.
I’m not sure if this is what you’re looking for, because it’s not a private actor, but all federal military facilities were desegregated by 1952 under Executive Order 9981, promulgated by Truman in 1948.
The Jim Crow laws were laws not just mores. No business owner could ignore them, even if they wanted to. Here is a list of some of the Jim Crow laws by state, if your business did not fall under the laws in your state, then you were free to not discriminate.
My mother tells stories of ‘62’-'63 bus tours with her college chorus. Their chorus had one black member.
They traveled throughout the south and would pull in at any random cafe for meals. She says only once did a cafe owner attempt to offer a different level of service to their black member. The entire chorus got on the bus and left rather than patronize that establishment.
Supposing they ate 3 meals a days on their six week tour, that is a lot of businesses that were happy to serve their group as equals.
Actually, my mileage probably won’t vary. If a large, racially-diverse group visits any business these days they’re going to be treated equally. Anybody smart enough to run a successful business is also smart enough to treat customers as equally as they seem to treat each other, especially in the service industries. It’s like the old “when in rome …” adage, except for them it’s “when romans visit …” (never actually heard anybody say that, but it nicely captures all the attitudes I have witnessed).
There were some school districts in Arkansas that desegregated before the difficulties in Little Rock in 1957. In 1954 and ‘55 the school districts of Hoxie, Charleston and Fayetteville, Arkansas were integrated. There were other school districts in the south that integrated before they were legally required to. Broadly speaking they were probably integrated for two reasons. First, administrators could read the writing on the wall and knew they’d have to integrate at some point in the future. Second, even if separate but equal isn’t equal you still have to have two sets of buildings, teachers and administrators to maintain which ends up costing a lot of money. The University of Arkansas’ Schools of Law & Medicine integrated in 1948.
I read something similar about a black church group in the 50s going somewhere by bus. The owner of a gas station didn’t want to serve the group sandwiches until the group threatened to leave without filling their tank up at his station.
This is the problem with anecdotal information. I could easily find hundreds, thousands, of stories of blacks being turned away from service in the Jim Crow South.
At best you can make the statement that some exceptions always existed. You can probably say that as time grows nearer to the present more exceptions could be found. But the customs in the South were widely adhered to. And they were customs rather than law, as the link that puddleglum gives shows. You have to look hard to find any law concerning food service. There is at least one, from South Carolina:
Look at how restricted it was, just to railroad restaurants. And no date is given either for its passage or its removal. Custom was sufficient.
It is worth noting that it wasn’t just in the south. My wife lived in a town in southern New Jersey, a part of the state south of the (extended) Mason-Dixon line. She says the schools there until the late 40s (my wife arrived there in 1950 and they had only recently desegregated).
I haven’t check this out but I have heard that the Catholic parishes in LA (or at least in New Orleans) desegregated their schools before they were required to.
Regions with little to no black population also would probably not functionally be segregated. The small town in south western Virginia where I grew up, certainly in the era in which parts of Virginia were segregated, wasn’t really functionally segregated. The simple fact was we had no black people, seriously. We had like one black family with children, and maybe a few older people that you didn’t see much. It doesn’t make sense to have a segregation regime built on custom to establish itself when there is no one to segregate.
Now, I certainly am not saying the whites in my town were racially progressive, they weren’t. But the small handful of restaurants in town simply didn’t deal with enough black people to matter. None of the local whites was going to quit eating at a restaurant because one black person every 3-4 months passing through stops in for food.
The thinking that lead to the racial segregation custom was that you didn’t want black and white societies mixing, whites didn’t want blacks “taking over” things that the whites wanted to use and etc. So you had restaurants that either did not serve blacks at all or served them in segregated seating etc. In a small town where no one credibly has fears about any large scale intermixing, the concern is just not there.
I remember some black American researcher in I think it was Virginia who was refused service at some diner. The next day he went back to the same diner in “ethnic dress” claiming to be some diplomat or the other (who had been educatedcin the US hence the accent) and apparently the owners and patrons were falling each other to welcome him.
That wouldn’t shock me. That might also be part of the reason that tour bus mentioned upthread mostly had no problem with its one black chorus member. Again, while my small town simply was too racially homogeneous for me to know a lot about the Jim Crow era (despite living through the end of it), I do know that a local black person and a “out of town visitor” would be looked at differently. I think part of it goes back to that “anti-mixing” desire, there is no real concern about some foreigner or someone from out of town setting up roots and blurring the racial lines.
Transportation was always more segregated by law as opposed to by custom. The earliest Jim Crow laws, in the 1880’s and 1890’s, applied to railroads, and were later extended to buses and streetcars.
Left to their own devices, railroads would not have segregated. Most operated nationwide or regionwide and regarded Jim Crow requirements as a bothersome intrusion. The Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railroad was so annoyed by Mississippi’s 1888 Jim Crow RR law that they challenged it in federal court as an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce, but they lost.
Restaurants and retail establishments, by contrast, self-segregated by customer demand. If a restaurant attempted to serve a mixed clientele without separation, white people, who had most of the money, would stop eating there. This was less possible in the realm of transportation, where there were fewer competitors. There were occasional restaurant segregation laws–Birmingham, for example, had a restaurant segregation ordinance in effect from 1944 to 1951–but these were more an attempt to preserve segregation against the civil rights movement rather than to impose it where it was not already happening.
South Jersey is a bit of a weird situation in that its extremely rural and pretty much isolated from the rest of NJ, especially the further south you go. In the Salem County and Cumberland County areas, you might be hard pressed to distinguish the area from rural North Carolina for instance. You’d never guess if you drove 20 miles north, you’re right in the heart of Philadelphia.
Here’s an article about school desegregation in the South Jersey. I recall a teacher of mine stating that the school district I attended growing up was one of the last holdouts in the state, apparently not desegregating until either 1949 or 1950. This was in Salem County where a lot of the holdouts were located. My school district didn’t make the article, but I do see my undergrad college, Rowan University, known then as Glassboro Teachers College, didn’t desegregate its living facilities until 1944.
The Confederate States welcomed two diplomats from Haiti during the Civil War. If I remember correctly, they were treated no differently than any other representatives of foreign nations.
I don’t have any convenient cites, but I’ve read that places like smithys, livery stables, and lower-class taverns were functionally desegregated. I do know that the railroad station in Norcross, Georgia had “white” and “colored” waiting rooms, but the platform itself was nonsegregated; Joel Chandler Harris spent an afternoon there, listening to stories told by black fieldworkers. He used many of these stories for his second book of Uncle Remus stories. Apparently there was nothing objectionable about a white man spending a few hours in the company of black men (although I’m sure the farm workers called him"Mister Harris", while he called them “Willie” and “Sam”.)
Like everything to do with race in the South, it was complicated.