On the one hand, the report of it sets off alarms and bring back vivid memories from my young activist years. Then most restaurants, especially in the South, were racially segregated. And it took long hard months of protests (that had really started on a small scale years earlier) to begin to break through and open up this part of public space to nonwhite Americans.
Soon after, when a major Civil Rights bill was moving through Congress, one of the toughest, longest fights over it focused on the provision that would make “public accommodations:”(especially restaurants, lunch counters, stores and hotels) open to all regardless of race, religion, gender, etc. And those of us who supported it were thrilled when this provision was voted in.
Rising comedian Dick Gregory managed to wring rueful jokes out of all this:
“We tried to integrate a restaurant, and they said, `We don’t serve colored folk here,’ and I said, `Well, I don’t eat colored folk nowhere. Bring me some pork chops.'”
And: “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months. When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”
So when the great Civil Rights Act was finally passed in the summer of 1965, one of its first and most visible impacts was the opening up of “public accommodations” to hungry customers of all shades and denominations.
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