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Were southern business owners supportive of getting rid of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s, as conservatives of today claim they were? (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

"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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.