With the various legal and moral imperatives to desegregation, what did people and companies with “Whites only” and “Colored only” facilities do with them? Did there tend to be a couple of major trends (i.e. majority remodeled, majority dismantled) or were responses very individualized. For those businesses who refurbished them, is there any indication of widespread resistance on the part of white people to using the formerly “colored” facilities? Washrooms specifically inspired the question, but any type of “separate but equal” facility other than schools would be germane.
This is at best an incomplete answer to your question. But a lot of older buildings in the south have neither remodled nor refurbished the segregated bathrooms - they’re still there. For instance, the bus station in the Georgia town where my parents live has two identical sets of bathrooms, symmetrically situated on either side of the waiting room.
Is there widespread resistance to using the formerly “Colored only” bathroom? Not as far as I’ve observed - I for one can’t tell which is which. The women’s rooms are exactly the same size and the fixtures are all the same; they were identically grungy and unappealing, this being a bus station. If there was ever a qualitative difference, it isn’t there now.
I have never lived in that town, though, so I haven’t actually studied patterns of peoples’ use. It sounds like an interesting project.
Some facilities were just appropriated for other use, and nowadays people can’t tell that they ever were the “colored” buildings, etc. Often it just looks like a duplicate – two restrooms instead of one. In my hometown in Georgia, for instance, there used to be two high schools – one white and one black. By the time I got there, the schools were integrated but both facilities were still in use. Because the volume of high school students hadn’t changed with integration, both buildings were still necessary. But the “colored” high school had become the facility where you went for 9th and 10th grade, and then the bigger, nicer “white” high school was where you went for 11th and 12th grade.
There are lots of other facilities around that seem ordinary until you figure out their past. The theater in my hometown had a separate entrance in the back that led to the the balcony, where blacks had to sit. Now it’s just a back door.
Go into an old government building that hasn’t been renovated for decades, like a county courthouse, and you’re likely to see a chilled water fountain and another one that is a simple porcelain bowl with room temperature water. Without signs over them today, they just seem to be two water fountains. Forty years ago, the chilled water fountain probably was labeled “whites only.”
I don’t know for 100% sure (as i wasn’t in MD back in segregation days), but I have been told that there is a beach on the north side of the western end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge that once was the designated “colored” beach. Every time I have driven over the bridge in the summer, it appears at a quick glance that there are none but African-Americans there. FWIW, it seems to be a good location.
JCHeckler, Highland Beach, about five miles south of Annapolis on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, is the community you’re thinking of.
It wasn’t designated the “colored” beach in the way we normally think of it happening in those times. Normally when something was designated “colored” it was by whites who had control of the area and set aside a substandard portion of an area to be used by non-whites.
Highland Beach, was founded by a son of Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave turned abolitionist publisher.
RE: Highland Beach: Cool! I didn’t know that, and it’s good history. Your quote says “the year before” …before what? (The link gave a Washington Post survey).
Frederick Douglass is one of my favorite historical Marylanders.
Your OP excluded schools, but I’ll chime in anyway. The black school in my town (in Texas) is now the central receiving warehouse. Some of it is used for cosmetology and some of it is used for “alternative” education (the trouble kids). The gym is sometimes used as a community rec center. Notably, the community it is center to is a minority neighborhood.
What is sad is what happened to the black teachers. Most of them were discharged as surplus employees. The white teachers had better certification and seniority. Many of the black teachers did not have teacher’s certificates while most of the white teachers did. It seems that the school found uses for the building, but not the people.
I don’t know the answer to the OP, although I suspect the rooms got diverted to other uses, but I just wanted to chime in and say that as a child in Pensacola, Florida, I remember going into the Sears store there and seeing not only four bathrooms, but four drinking fountains, appropriately labelled. Apparently not only were Blacks and Whites not supposed to drink from the same fountains, but Men and Women weren’t either.
Drum God said
Can you give a cite? I don’t mean to be obstinate, but if you close down the black schools and send all those kids to white schools, you still have to have an equilvalent number of teachers. If they fired many/most black teachers, they would have to hire new white ones to fill the gaps? Is that what happened?
If you find four bathrooms in an old bus station in the southern United States, what will you find in post-Apartheid South Africa? There were more dividing lines there … WHITES ONLY, COLOUREDS ONLY, BLACKS ONLY, ASIANS ONLY, and so on. Would a public facility, like a small train station, have eight or ten bathrooms to separately accomodate these groups?
Car #948 is a beautiful 1926 trolley from Atlanta, which now lives at the Shore Line Trolley Museum in Connecticut.
http://www.bera.org/cgi-bin/viewcar.pl?car=948
There’s some screw holes in the two middle seats, but the sign has been removed after some debate after the restoration; it said “Colored”. It’s in the exhibit room at Sprague now, making people wince.
I was at first impressed by the number of libraries around Birmingham, a city that wasn’t all that big until recent years. Then I found out why: there were originally two separate systems.
In the early eighties there was a move to cut costs and concentrate resources by closing some of the smaller libraries and improving service at the remaining branches. Then it dawned on someone that the crappiest branches were of course the ones in the black neighborhoods.
They put a halt to that plan, and in the few cases where there’s been consolidation, it’s been where a new branch is built to replace one white and one black library.
Nearest to me, an originally white branch that’s closed is now a union hall. I’ll have to ask around to find out what the nearest black branch is now.
I was at first impressed by the number of libraries around Birmingham, a city that wasn’t all that big until recent years. Then I found out why: there were originally two separate systems.
In the early eighties there was a move to cut costs and concentrate resources by closing some of the smaller libraries and improving service at the remaining branches. Then it dawned on someone that the crappiest branches were of course the ones in the black neighborhoods.
They put a halt to that plan, and in the few cases where there’s been consolidation, it’s been where a new branch is built to replace one white and one black library.
Nearest to me, an originally white branch that’s closed is now a union hall. I’ll have to ask around to find out what the nearest black branch is now.
I remember when I was in New Orleans seeing two public swimming pools next to each other near the zoo. Both seemed in working order, though they were closed for the winter. Almost certainly once for white and blacks?