I can’t really find an example right now, but I’ve seen conservative tellings of the civil rights era that were along the lines of the following:
“Restaurant owners and other business owners in the southern states wanted to be able to accept black patrons (because they were businessmen after all, and the only color they cared about was green), but because of Democrat Big Government, they weren’t allowed to”
The way I recall it is that this premise was then used in support of an equivalency between Jim Crow laws and Civil Rights laws, i.e. “First they were prohibited from taking customers that they wanted, and now they’re being forced to take all customers, even ones that they don’t want”.
I’m sure this is bullshit, but honestly I don’t know enough about that part of American history to refute it, and it kind of does make intuitive sense that a restaurant owner would want as many patrons as possible. So can one of you more knowledgeable folks here debunk it?
Jim Crows didn’t force businesses to not serve or hire black patrons, it allowed them the option of seperate service which they voluntarily did
Here’s a black American describing what ordering from a white restaurant was like
Brief overview of life as a black American working for white businesses and families
Jim Crow was based on the “separate, but equal” clause which said, on paper, black Americans still had to be given service as long as the quality was on the same level as white Americans. It’s basically the opposite of an outright ban on non serving non whites, it technically is supposed to enforce serving black Americans
Can you imagine some dumbfuck chud in 2075 being like
Cake decorators wanted to serve gay customers but they weren’t allowed to. They didn’t care about rainbow, all they cared about was green
“Most people going to say the heart of the matter was the rights of black people,” he says. “The real heart of the matter was, now wait a minute, the federal government can’t come in and tell us what to do. We’re a local business.”
These people got treated with kid gloves and still complained when the government would have been entirely justified in :pit:ing them
Washington should have sent tanks down south and purged the rot, as should have been done since 1866.
But that would only happen in a weird alternate universe where the US federal government passed the CRA out of principle, not just because Jim Crow was increasingly becoming a liability.
that’s also a reason conservatives think laws shouldnt exist to enforce equality: “why would a business owner turn away money just because someone is black?”
uhh because they are committed racists you dumbfuck. plus the loss of business is likely negligible.
I would also bet that they did a business calculation of “well white customers have more money, and most white customers are racist and don’t want to eat/shop in proximity with black people, so therefore if I open up to black customers I would lose an amount of white patronage so large that it would either cancel it out or even become a net loss, so it’s not worth it.”
They could have, and that calculation makes sense, but, i doubt most did. I think for them rascism was its own reward
Yeah. It’s a mistake to think :porky-happy: doesn’t consume some of his own ideology.
Absolutely fucking not. This is unironically one of the easiest things to refute. In Greensboro, Woolworths and SH Kress reps showed up to meetings at A&T and UNC because they were legally required to, stated repeatedly that they absolutely refused to integrate, laws or no, and then literally paid the Klan to show up to sit ins.
