Abstract
This article illuminates what it was like for African Americans dining at majority-white restaurants in New York City before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Primary sources include: records of the Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan (the CCREM, an organization that investigated New York restaurant and housing sector discrimination in the 1950s), the personal papers of the CCREM’s secretary, contemporaneous newspaper accounts of restaurant discrimination, and 1950s travel guides for African Americans. This article argues that unlike southern cities, where Jim Crow laws clearly demarcated color lines in public accommodations, color lines in New York City restaurants were more ambiguous. Although African Americans were frequently discriminated against in New York restaurants, they were seldom refused service outright. Rather, the discrimination they experienced was more oblique—though no less benign—than in the South.
In May of 1960, the civil rights activist Ella Baker declared that lunch counter sit-ins such as the one at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s in February of that year were about “something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke.” 1 The Greensboro sit-in and other civil rights demonstrations, Baker explained, were “seeking to rid America of the scourge of racial segregation and discrimination—not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life.” 2
But what about that hamburger and giant-sized Coke? Lunch counter sit-ins were, as Baker noted, part of a broader civil rights agenda that sought full citizenship rights and equality for African Americans “in every aspect of life.” Still, there is something about eating and drinking that is both quotidian and transcendent. Eating is a visceral, primal act. As such, proponents of racial segregation might have viewed restaurants much like swimming pools—venues that had to be preserved as racially “pure” spaces lest intimate exchanges between the races occur. Eating together denoted fellowship, particularly to religiously inclined white southerners. One broke bread with those one cared about, those one deemed as equals. A master would not eat with a servant, after all. Dining together—especially in public spaces—could therefore call into question the entire logic of racial hierarchy under Jim Crow.
As food anthropologists have observed, choosing one’s public dining companions involves constructing and reinforcing identity and status. In their survey of scholarship on the anthropology of food and eating, Sidney W. Mintz and Christine M. Du Bois point out that “like all culturally defined material substances used in the creation and maintenance of social relationships, food serves both to solidify group membership and to set groups apart.” 3 The cliché of the socially stratified high school cafeteria epitomizes what Mintz and Du Bois describe. The “jocks” sit in one table, and the “geeks” in another. In so doing, the jocks and the geeks demarcate what social psychologists call “ingroups” and “outgroups,” establishing group identify through exclusion. This cafeteria segregation, moreover, has to be reenacted day after day to be reified and strengthened. 4 Sharing meals with those outside one’s group would disrupt and undermine the complex—though not always static or un-overlapping—high school caste system
Within the context of midcentury civil rights struggles, lunch counter and restaurant segregation helped facilitate and preserve racial hierarchies that activists sought to overturn. But being able to eat a hamburger and drink a Coke also represented a meaningful pragmatic victory. As historian Lizabeth Cohen points out, activists’ attempts to secure equal access to public accommodations for African Americans were about, “literally, a place at the table.” 5 The hamburger and Coke meant freedom to eat and drink wherever one pleased. But as historian David Stowe reminds us, it is necessary to “distinguish between different varieties of cultural politics.” 6 African Americans seeking entry to white restaurants, bars, and clubs, Stowe notes, may have seen themselves as participants of “conscious and intentional” politics. 7 Others, in contrast, were seeking “pleasure, not social significance,” even as they unintentionally challenged racial segregation. Some people really may have just wanted a hamburger and a Coke.
This essay, however, illuminates the conscious variety of cultural politics in chronicling one civil rights organization’s efforts to uncover and rectify restaurant discrimination in the city’s restaurants before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This organization, whose members called themselves the Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan (hereafter referred to as “the Committee”), practiced a deliberate cultural politics—one that might be termed a “politics of dignity.” 8 They were composed of an interracial coalition of middle-class, highly educated, non-confrontational volunteers who used empirical research methods to demonstrate the existence of racial discrimination midcentury New York restaurants, and then quietly lobbied restaurant proprietors to remedy discriminatory practices. What the work of this organization revealed—that New York City did indeed have a “race problem” in public accommodations, but one that was not quite like the southern variety—is the focus of this essay.
Attempts to desegregate southern eating establishments, much like efforts to desegregate schools, neighborhoods, and swimming pools, have been well documented by historians of the civil rights struggle. Historian Kevin M. Kruse details one particularly dramatic instance of southern white recalcitrance involving Lester Maddox, a restaurant owner turned Georgia governor from 1967 to 1971. 9 In response to three African-American ministers who pulled up to the parking lot of his Pickrick restaurant on July 3, 1964, intending to integrate the Atlanta fried chicken eatery, Maddox whipped out a pistol while his son wielded a club at the ready (“like a baseball bat”). 10 As a result of the Maddox family’s armed defiance, the Pickrick would not integrate until the following year, when the Justice Department threatened to fine Maddox for continuing to exclude African Americans. Rather than abide by the Civil Rights Act, Maddox gave up the Pickrick and leased it to two former employees. 11
The Pickrick, it should be noted, took place in a city not typically counted among those most hostile to civil rights. As Kruse points out, Atlanta’s boosters proudly billed themselves as “the city too busy to hate.” 12 Many white business elites, in fact, tended to support gradual desegregation. They believed that desegregation would promote commerce and make the city appear more cosmopolitan (not to mention enhance white businesses’ bottom lines with the addition of African-American consumers). But such reasoning obviously failed to resonate with Maddox. The future Georgia governor’s segregationist stance might have had something to do with the character and clientele of the Pickrick restaurant. The Pickrick was no fancy white tablecloth establishment. It was a cafeteria serving cheap, greasy fare to be eaten with one’s hands. It was not exclusive, except on the basis of race. But although the whites who ate at the Pickrick may not have been well heeled, they possessed whiteness, which still held some currency in the Jim Crow South. Upholding white supremacy and racial segregation might have been one way for Maddox to ensure that his customers kept that currency, and for his modest restaurant to maintain a semblance of exclusivity.
Other, earlier efforts to desegregate restaurants and lunch counters in southern cities were less sensational and more successful than at the Pickrick. The Greensboro sit-ins, which began in February of 1960, ended when the city’s Woolworth’s finally began serving African Americans in July of that year. Such demonstrations at eating establishments took place throughout the South and both before and after Greensboro. Before Greensboro, civil rights activists staged a sit-in at an ice cream shop in Durham, North Carolina, in 1957, and similarly in 1958, the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council demonstrated at lunch counters and restaurants in that city. After Greensboro, lunch counter sit-ins spread to other towns in North Carolina and throughout the South, in cities like Nashville, Jackson, Richmond, Lexington, Natchez, Clarksdale, Dallas, and Savannah, as well as in states outside of the South, including Ohio, Illinois, and Nevada. 13
That segregation in public accommodations was institutionally sanctioned and a salient part of daily life in southern cities before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is well known. Accounts of civil rights activism in places like Greensboro and Birmingham—reinforced by powerful, iconic images of four impeccably dressed African-American college students seated at the Woolworth’s lunch counter and peaceful protestors being subjected to fire hoses, police batons, and attack dogs in Birmingham—are also familiar. But what about lunch counters and civil rights activism in northern cities? How did they compare with what we know about the South? In the last two decades, historians have also chronicled racial discrimination, segregation, and civil rights activism in the North. Scholarship by Thomas Sugrue and Martha Biondi has also explored the color line in education, housing, and public accommodations in cities like Detroit and New York. 14 Even so, the extent and character of racial discrimination and segregation in everyday life, particularly in restaurants, has been subject to considerably less historical inquiry than those of the South. How did African Americans in northern cities experience dining in majority-white restaurants before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and how did civil rights activism to ameliorate discriminatory treatment in eating establishments take shape in the North?
African-American dining experiences in the North, this essay argues, were distinct from those in the South, but certainly not in ways that made race irrelevant. By examining the experiences of a group of civil rights activists in New York City between 1950 and 1954—several years before publicized instances of lunch counter sit-ins in the South—one finds that while African Americans routinely encountered discrimination and segregation in northern cities, it would be inaccurate to characterize the racial milieu there simply as a Jim Crow above the Mason-Dixon line. In the South, the institutionalization of Jim Crow arguably facilitated clear-cut color lines in public accommodations. Not so in postwar northern cities like New York. There, the color line was more ambiguous. There was even a pretense of relative racial egalitarianism in the form of state anti-discrimination statutes pre-dating federal civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. Perhaps because of a lack of institutionalized separation of the races, African Americans in New York were not typically denied service outright as in Greensboro, but the service they received was frequently inferior to that of white diners. This unpredictability of treatment in public accommodations, in turn, called for strategies that differed from those of the Greensboro Four or the three ministers who attempted to integrate Lester Maddox’s Pickrick cafeteria. Rather than staging lunch counter sit-ins, New York civil rights activists came up with different strategies to rectify discriminatory treatment, such as deploying “testers” to eating establishments and holding private meetings with restaurant proprietors.
An investigation into African-American dining experiences in midcentury New York City is particularly illuminating because New York was racially diverse, and perhaps the most socially progressive city in postwar America, a place where African Americans might have had a chance at equal treatment in public accommodations. Given its diverse population, there was certainly opportunity for integration in postwar New York, and especially in Manhattan, where more than one-fifth of the borough’s two million inhabitants was designated as “non-white” in 1950. 15 The Census counted nearly 8 million people residing in all five of New York’s boroughs in 1950, with 10 percent being “non-white.” 16 African Americans who had migrated from the Deep South since Reconstruction and twentieth-century black immigrants from the West Indies—particularly Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Haiti—made up the majority of this “non-white” population. 17 Of all the boroughs, Brooklyn had the greatest concentration of black New Yorkers in the mid-twentieth century. 18 (Despite claiming Harlem and having a high percentage of black inhabitants, Manhattan counted fewer African Americans overall than the Bronx and Queens. 19 ) Black New Yorkers residing in Harlem and in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant tended to be poor or working-class, while middle-class and affluent blacks were more likely to live in the St. Albans section of Queens. 20 As the sociologist Nathan Kantrowitz noted in 1973, upwardly mobile blacks frequently moved to Queens from Manhattan and Brooklyn. 21
In addition to its racial diversity, New York City was subject to New York State’s relatively forward-looking anti-discrimination laws, which were passed in 1872, 1938, and again in 1952, when the New York State Assembly expanded the authority of the State Commission against Discrimination (an agency previously in charge of just employment discrimination) to include bias in restaurants, hotels, and other public accommodations. 22 The 1952 law, moreover, was relatively aggressive, especially considering that it passed 12 years before the federal Civil Rights Act. Enforcement of previous iterations of New York’s antidiscrimination laws required local district attorney’s offices to file civil or criminal suits against offending parties—action that was rarely taken when businesses challenged the discrimination charges leveled against them. 23 Under the strengthened 1952 statute, New Yorkers could report complaints directly to the State Commission against Discrimination. According to the New York Times, the agency could punish violations of the law with a “cease and desist order, publication of the names of the offenders, and finally, issuance of a restraining order by the court.” 24
Given these anti-discrimination laws and, in particular, New York City’s reputation as one of the most socially progressive cities in the country, some people, especially northern whites, assumed that New York’s public accommodations were exempt from the race problem plaguing southern cities. As early as 1925, Oliver H.P. Garrett, a white reporter who wrote for New York and Boston newspapers, maintained that blacks should have had little problem obtaining restaurant service, theater tickets, or hotel rooms in New York City. 25 Garrett claimed that those who were unable to do so were recent migrants from the South who were unaccustomed to New York’s relative racial egalitarianism, and still too diffident to assert their rightful access to the city’s public accommodations. 26 Many African Americans might not have shared Garrett’s sanguine views in the 1920s, but by midcentury, even some black New Yorkers may have taken their ability to dine in their city’s restaurants for granted. In a 1951 speech before the Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan, Olivia Pleasants Frost, the organization’s secretary, noted that “there were many persons, both white and Negro and some civic and welfare groups too, who believed that this problem did not exist or who minimized the extent of it.” 27 Investigations by Frost and other activists of the Committee, however, proved them wrong.
The Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan was a volunteer organization that investigated discrimination in New York restaurants and in the city’s house sector. 28 (This article focuses on the Committee’s work with restaurants.) The group enlisted black and white volunteers to patronize restaurants and pose as prospective homebuyers and renters. Its volunteers visited various sites and recorded their experiences, noting whether discrimination had occurred, and the nature of the discrimination they discerned. The Committee would then draft proposals with recommendations to offending businesses, urging them to remedy their practices. Committee members were well connected to numerous other civic organizations, and by 1951 they had amassed the support of twenty-three constituent groups—mostly civic and church organizations. 29 The American Association of University Women, American Jewish Congress, Japanese-American Citizens League, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Spanish American Youth Bureau, Uptown Chamber of Commerce, Urban League of Greater New York, American Legion (Willard Straight post), New York City Civil Liberties Union, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews were some of the diverse organizations associated with the Committee. 30 Individuals that the Committee identified as “sponsors” included NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and New York restaurateur Vincent Sardi, Jr. 31
As such bold-faced affiliations might suggest, members of the Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan represented middle-class constituencies. They were also highly educated –most had gone to college, and many held advanced degrees. 32 Members were schoolteachers, public relations consultants, homemakers, literary editors, photographers, salespersons, biochemists, personnel directors, social workers, attorneys, and social scientists. 33 They were regarded, and probably regarded themselves, as pillars of the community. The New York Times, which was likely staple reading for Committee members and their ilk, was full of encomiums for the organization. Lauding the organization for using “personal education and persuasion” to rectify discrimination rather than “exposures and crackdowns on transgressors,” the Times also announced its unqualified approval of the organization: “We congratulate the committee on what it has already done and hope the next ten years will show an even greater measure of success." 34
Women outnumbered men in the Committee, and members were both black and white. For African Americans in the Committee, personal experiences may have motivated their decisions to get involved with the organization. According to the daughter of one Committee member—Olivia Pleasants Frost, the organization’s secretary quoted earlier—personal experience with patent racism during a stint as a federal employee in Washington, D.C., may have prompted her mother’s activism. 35 While she had suffered discrimination at various times during her life, Frost was particularly affected by one racist encounter while working in Washington. As Frost’s daughter recalled, her mother once had a white colleague “with whom she had worked very cordially by phone, but whom, upon meeting her in person, refused to speak with her after that point.” 36 This experience may have impressed upon Frost the importance of working toward ameliorating racial discrimination after she left Washington and settled in New York. 37
Frost’s personal biography is also illuminating for what it reveals about the membership of racially mixed civil rights organizations in the urban North in the early 1950s. A sociologist, administrator, research consultant, and relentless civic volunteer with a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College, a master’s from Columbia, and a doctorate from New York University, Frost was accomplished by any standard, and even more so given the constraints of race and gender in the early decades of the twentieth century. 38 But in some ways, Frost, who died in 2009 at the age of ninety-three, was not uncommon among midcentury women who belonged to the urban African-American elite. As historian Paula Giddings points out, a greater proportion of African-American women in the 1940s and 1950s graduated from college than African-American men, and they attended African-American colleges at higher rates than white women at white colleges. 39 African-American women earned about 25 percent more college degrees than African-American men in 1940, and they made up 60 percent of all graduates at African-American colleges, compared to 30 percent of white women at white colleges in 1953. 40 At midcentury, African-American women were also more likely to be employed in professional and semiprofessional work than African-American men, and they represented a greater proportion of the African-American professional workforce than white women in the corresponding white labor force. 41 Olivia Frost made her professional and civic contributions in such a milieu.
Born Olivia Pleasants in Asbury Park, New Jersey, in 1915, Frost’s mother died at an early age, and Frost was raised by her Howard-educated physician father. 42 She matriculated at New York’s Hunter College during the Depression, earning a degree in 1936. 43 At the time that Frost attended Hunter College, it had the largest enrollment of any women’s college in the world. 44 Nicknamed “the poor girl’s Radcliffe,” Hunter was known for its rigorous academics and for its concentration of top graduates of New York City public schools. 45 Hunter’s African- American student body in the 1920s and 1930s was modest, but considerably larger than that found at any of the Seven Sisters. 46 The activist and lawyer Pauli Murray, a Hunter alumna five years ahead of Frost, recalled that Hunter’s African-American enrollment in the late 1920s numbered about one hundred on the campus of five thousand. 47 Although Murray lamented “the general invisibility of Negro students at Hunter and the scant attention given to Negro life in our courses,” Hunter did expose many of its graduates, Murray and Frost included, to worldly ideas and experiences that may have imbued them with a sense of efficacy and political purpose. 48
The Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan was just one group among Frost’s lengthy list of commitments from the 1940s to the 1970s. 49 Following Hunter, she undertook scholarly and social endeavors that concerned racial inequalities (and she also married and had three children). Having trained as a sociologist in graduate school, Frost wrote a Columbia master’s thesis on Harlem real estate markets and a NYU dissertation on the effects of training programs on young, low-income African-American men. 50 She applied her research expertise and interest in empiricism to the projects of numerous civic organizations, working with the New York Urban League, the Harlem Mortgage Improvement Council, the New York City Youth Board, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Bedford-Stuyvesant Youth in Action, the NAACP, and a number of women’s benevolence associations. 51 By the late-1960s, Frost had established her own research consulting firm, Olivia Frost Research Associates. The firm assisted community-based organizations and nonprofit institutions with planning, execution, and assessment of social programs in New York’s African-American communities. 52
Frost’s frenetic civic involvement epitomized what might be called a “life of committees.”
53
This life of committees provided Frost with a rich network of like-minded, middle-class friends and acquaintances in a way that churches often functioned as centers of social life for African- American and white women active in their local congregations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.
54
As Frost’s daughter recalls: “Most of my mother’s friends in the black middle-class community were also involved to some extent in organizations like the NAACP.”
55
Interracial civic organizations like the Committee on Civil Rights in Manhattan also presented opportunities for social interactions between African Americans and whites in an otherwise racially segregated midcentury New York.
56
Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in the borough of Queens, Frost’s daughter remembers: Our schools were almost entirely black, and the community we lived in was self-contained, including a wide spectrum of black professionals such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc., as well as working class people. The only whites I saw were my mother’s acquaintances who were active in civil rights.
57
For Frost and her colleagues in the Committee, commonalities of class and education, as well as a shared dedication to egalitarianism, appeared to have cut across racial lines and facilitated their civic collaboration.
Frost and her colleagues in the Committee’s executive board concentrated their efforts on restaurant discrimination because they believed that “full and free use of public eating places by minority groups [would be] a first step in [the] goal of complete integration, and that this [could] pave the way for changes in present housing practices.” 58 On a broader, organizational level (as opposed to personal motivations), the Committee’s decision to investigate restaurant discrimination owed in large part to its members, sponsors, and partnering organizations’ desire to manage New York City’s international reputation in the realm of race relations. The United Nations headquarters on New York’s East Side had just been built (construction on the building took place between 1949 and 1950), and the Committee was concerned about how U.N. delegates from African countries might be treated in New York restaurants and public accommodations. Discrimination against African diplomats and other people of color affiliated with the U.N. would have been an embarrassment to the city and the country as whole. It would have undercut American claims of democracy and cultural supremacy over the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, as the work of historians Carol Anderson, Thomas Borstelmann, Mary Dudziak, and Brenda Gayle Plummer has suggested. 59 Committee literature stressed that restaurants, especially those located near the U.N. headquarters at Forty-Second Street and First Avenue, would become “showplace[s] for the rest of the world.” 60 Committee members sought to ensure that no diplomats would be met with racial discrimination in the putative touchstone of democracy.
With this in mind, the Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan went about designing and executing plans to test New York City restaurants’ receptiveness to black diners. An investigation of all restaurants in the city would have been infeasible. In 1954 (four years before the CCREM was established), there were 7,088 eating and drinking establishments in Manhattan alone. 61 And in 1958, there were 22,000 food and drink establishments in New York’s five boroughs. 62 (To put this in perspective, it would have taken an individual more than 19 years of dining at three different establishments per day to have sampled all of New York restaurants in 1958.) The Committee ultimately decided to limit their restaurant survey to East Side establishments in midtown Manhattan. They chose a swath of 150 blocks from Fifth Avenue to the East River and from 34th Street to 59th Street—an area in the vicinity of the proposed United Nations headquarters at Forty-Second Street and First Avenue. 63 This section of Manhattan also included a heavy concentration of eating establishments, some of which the Committee described as the “swankiest and most elegant” in all of New York. 64 For their experiment, the Committee whittled the neighborhood’s 771 “restaurants proper, luncheonettes, drug stores, cafeterias, bars and grills, cocktail lounges and night clubs,” down to 62 restaurants. 65
Once they had selected these establishments, Committee members devised strategies for uncovering and attempting to rectify discriminatory practices. Their strategies differed from lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro and other southern cities in the early 1960s, and also from the picketing that characterized the “Don’t Shop Where You Can’t Work” campaigns in New York and other northern cities in the 1930s. The Committee’s modus operandi was first to identify whether discrimination existed, then compile information on the nature of that discrimination, and finally, to politely present their findings to restaurant proprietors and appeal to them to remedy any problems. These steps were taken privately, without the fanfare of sit-ins, picketing, and other public demonstrations. The establishments that the Committee selected for its investigation, moreover, tended to be more upscale than the drugstore lunch counters where southern sit-ins took place. (Whereas lunch counters might have been one of the few places of public accommodation where poor and working-class whites could still claim privileges of whiteness in southern cities, those spaces were less contested in New York City. 66 ) All of these strategies make sense when one considers the socioeconomic backgrounds of Committee members. As the biography of Olivia Pleasants Frost suggests, Committee members tended to be highly educated and upwardly mobile—characteristics that might have informed their adherence to low-key civil rights activism. And in a period of intense red-baiting, it is likely that Frost and other Committee members were disinclined to participate in highly visible, confrontational protests that might have discredited their efforts and made them targets of anti-Communist sentinels.
The Committee’s circumspection was reflected in the particulars of its plans for investigating restaurant discrimination on Manhattan’s East Side in 1950. First the group assembled a cadre of 153 volunteer testers—68 African Americans and 85 whites—with women outnumbering men. 67 These testers were divided into same-sex or opposite-sex “minority teams” of two African Americans and “control teams” of two whites each. 68 The Committee made certain that all testers “were of pleasing appearance, quiet in manner, and well, but not ostentatiously, dressed.” 69 To ensure that other nuances would not affect diner treatment, the Committee also chose testers who were “quite homogeneous in socio-economic level,” and “in general social behavior.” 70
The Committee then assigned both a minority and a control team to each restaurant, and the pairs were instructed not to convey any indication of shared affiliation or acquaintance. Each pair of African-American testers was also told to arrive at restaurants before their white counterparts so that if whites received preferred tables, it would not have been because whites had arrived earlier.
71
All testers were instructed to arrive at restaurants between 6:30 and 7:30
Their questionnaires revealed that no African-American team had been refused service outright, but many had received inferior service. None of the East Side restaurants discriminated against white diners, but the Committee concluded that 42 percent of the establishments had discriminated against African-American testers. 78 The Committee reported that “analysis of instances of discrimination by type of restaurant revealed no association with restaurant size, foreign vs. American ownership, number of customers at the time of testing, or geographic section within the survey area.” 79 The only discernible pattern of discrimination was the price point of restaurants.
The Committee divided the surveyed restaurants into three price points, and found that 14 percent of restaurants in the low-priced category discriminated, compared to 58 percent of medium-priced establishments, and 53 percent of restaurants in the high-priced category. 80 It was frequently those restaurants with hosts and headwaiters that discriminated. 81 (It was unclear whether those restaurants employed African-American servers and hosts.) To account for this pattern of discrimination, the Committee’s survey coordinators speculated that “perhaps discouraging black patronage is part of a more general emphasis on preserving an exclusive atmosphere in such restaurants.” 82 If the Committee was right, then restaurant exclusivity was defined less by race in low-priced establishments in New York City than in the Greensboro Woolworth’s or Lester Maddox’s Pickrick cafeteria in Atlanta, suggesting, perhaps, a particular tenacity to preserve white privilege for all classes of whites in the South.
The Committee found that discrimination in New York’s East Side restaurants could be manifest in a number of ways. When confronted by African-American diners, those restaurants exhibiting bias displayed “evidence of confusion at the appearance of the Negro team or of hesitation about admitting them, such as a hasty conference between headwaiter and waiter, [and] shifting of waiters.” 83 These restaurants then tended to assign African Americans to tables in “undesirable locations.” 84 African-American testers were seated near kitchens, bathrooms, swinging doors, and in locations that made them least visible to other diners—in back corners, on balconies, and in separate dining areas. Once seated, African-American teams might be met with “rudeness,” and they received either slow, inattentive service, or exceedingly fast-paced service. 85 Black diners were also told that certain menu items were unavailable even though white couples were able to order the same requested items. The Committee reasoned that such duplicity and hurried service were “apparent attempt[s] to get Negroes out of the restaurant[s] as quickly as possible.” 86
Restaurants also served African-American patrons meals that were not up to the standards of those served to white diners. Testers reported food items were adulterated, in various stages of decay, and excessively salty or spicy.
87
African-American diners were also charged more than whites for the same food items.
88
In a 1951 speech to the Committee, Olivia Pleasants Frost described the discriminatory treatment she and her partner experienced at two restaurants: In one instance, we were taken to seats in the back of the restaurant behind a partition used to stack supplies, right beside the kitchen, while the control team was allowed to select their own seats since the restaurant was only half full. In the other instance, we were led to a table in the very rear next to the pair of swinging doors leading to the kitchen where waiters and service men from different sections had passed by. . .The control team in this test was led to a table in the front of the restaurant even though they entered after we did.
89
In 1950, the Committee publicized its findings. Through members’ social and professional connections, the Committee was able to distribute its survey results to media outlets, restaurant associations, and restaurant employee unions. 90 The Committee also collected pledges guaranteeing equal treatment in restaurants from restaurant associations (including the New York State Restaurant Association) representing fifteen hundred restaurants and from unions representing seventy thousand workers. 91 Only one-third of the East Side restaurant owners who had received these fair practices pledges, however, signed and returned the resolutions. 92 But the Committee did not give up on the East Side restaurants. One year after its first survey, it deployed more testers to the restaurants that had discriminated against African-American teams in 1950. 93 From this second round of testing, the Committee concluded that 40 percent of these restaurants had remedied their discriminatory practices since having been tested the previous year. 94 Committee members then conducted interviews with East Side restaurant owners whose establishments continued to discriminate. While some proprietors denied charges of bias, others pledged to rectify discriminatory practices. 95 The Committee’s pursuit of these offending restaurants continued, as members conducted more tests and interviews with proprietors of restaurants whose “good faith was in doubt.” 96
Two years after their initial restaurant survey, the Committee conducted yet another round of testing of East Side restaurants in midtown Manhattan. This time, 272 testers dined at 93 restaurants using the same methodology as in the 1950 survey. 97 After reviewing testers’ completed questionnaires, the Committee concluded that discrimination in East Side restaurants had dropped to 16 percent. 98 The Committee found, moreover, that in all but 7 percent of the restaurants surveyed, white diners “paid no attention or signified approval” of fellow African-American guests. 99 Exclaiming that their “goal of ‘no discrimination’ [was] in sight,” the Committee declared that these results indicated that “the community [was] ready for changes in practice.” 100 While this may very well have been the case, it is also conceivable that the Committee may have oversold whites’ alacrity to integrate in order to bolster their case to restaurant proprietors.
Furthermore, the Committee’s pronouncement of reduced discrimination may have only applied to certain restaurants—the ones that they had tested—rather than all East Side establishments. Many of the restaurants in the 1952 survey were the same as those tested and retested two years earlier. A sizeable proportion of these restaurants were likely to have mitigated or remedied discriminatory practices directly as a result of the Committee’s follow-up visits; a more accurate survey of the neighborhood would have dispatched teams to previously untested restaurants in 1952. And in spite of their optimism about their latest survey results, Committee members conceded that African-American New Yorkers were “so conditioned to rejection in many restaurants” that they remained reluctant to patronize higher-priced East Side restaurants, even after 1952.
101
As one unidentified African-American man lamented in Committee literature: Every time I’m downtown I see invisible signs on the door of every restaurant, saying “Negroes, Keep out!” I make up my mind to have a good meal, and I walk for blocks, looking at every eating place I see, and wondering…And then I get cold feet and end up at a cafeteria—or else get a sandwich in a drug store.
102
Two years after their second review of East Side restaurants, the Committee launched an investigation of restaurants on the West Side from 44th Street to 55th Street and Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue. 103 Noting that this section of midtown was one “which many Negroes find more convenient than the East Side,” the Committee selected fifty-one restaurants for their 1954 survey. 104 One hundred and seventy testers—eighty-one African Americans and ninety-nine whites—were recruited for the project. 105 As in earlier experiments on the East Side, no African-American diners were refused service outright, but 16 percent of the West Side restaurants—the same proportion as East Side establishments in 1952—exhibited some form of discrimination. 106 African-American testers reported being “unduly rushed,” “served rudely,” and having received “undesirable” seating assignments, sometimes only after hosts and waiters had suspiciously conferred with one another. 107 These slights led the Committee to conclude that restaurant discrimination largely consisted of “trying to place Negroes out of sight of other diners,” as had been the case with their first East Side survey in 1950. 108 And as with their comments accompanying findings from East Side surveys, the Committee urged African Americans to dine at offending West Side restaurants, and to request more desirable assignments if they were led to unsatisfactory tables. This was “one effective way of breaking down this pattern [of discrimination],” the Committee assured. 109
The years leading up to and following the Committee’s work saw numerous instances of racial discrimination in New York City restaurants. Incidents of racial discrimination were reported all over the city in the postwar years—from Brooklyn and the Bronx, to Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Greenwich Village. In 1945, for example, a NAACP lawyer sued a luncheonette in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn in 1945. In an episode reminiscent of racially charged exchanges in the Deep South, the suit accused a luncheonette employee of denying service to three African-American dockworkers, threatening the trio with vulgar language and violence: “We don’t serve n— in here. And if you coons don’t get out, I’ll take a knife and split your heads[!]” 110 That same year, an African American sued O’Gara’s Bar and Grill East on 138th Street because the restaurant’s bartender refused to serve him, declaring, “We don’t serve Africans here.” 111 (These two examples defy the Committee’s finding that lower-priced eateries were less likely to discriminate, but they were also exceptional.) Two years later, two African-American entertainers—Canada Lee and Ellabelle Davis—successfully sued two different New York City establishments.
Lee, a boxer-turned-actor, was barred from the midtown restaurant Swiss Inn—an incident that elicited some publicity when some of Lee’s CBS radio coworkers picketed and boycotted the restaurant. 112 Following the boycott, Swiss Inn settled Lee’s discrimination suit, donated $250 to his favorite charity, and issued an apology both to Lee and “the colored race.” 113 Similarly, the opera singer Ellabelle Davis was awarded $500 for discrimination at a West Side restaurant in 1947. 114 A year later, a number of violent beatings of African-American patrons in Greenwich Village restaurants were reported, leading a number of civic groups including the American Veterans Committee, Civil Rights Congress, American Jewish Congress, Tenants and Consumers Council, and the American-Italian Labor Alliance, to distribute anti-discrimination posters to some five hundred Village-area restaurant proprietors and to threaten restaurants refusing to display the posters with boycotts. 115
Cases of discrimination continued to be documented throughout the 1950s, and after the efforts of the Committee of Civil Rights in East Manhattan. As the Committee’s experience demonstrated, however, these instances of discrimination did not always manifest themselves in outright refusal of service or dramatic beatings of perspective patrons. Discrimination could be more oblique, and correspondingly, more insidious. A 1958 case in which the New York State Commission against Discrimination received a complaint from the NAACP charging a popular Bronx steak house with discrimination is illustrative. 116 In that incident, the Alex Henry Steak House on Courtland Avenue informed a black couple that the restaurant was booked solid until November of 1957. 117 But when the NAACP recruited a white couple to make the same request at the Bronx steak house, that couple was able to secure an August reservation with a $10 down payment. 118
Surprisingly, the color line even imposed constraints on African-American life in Harlem, the symbol of black New York. 119 Occupying the space between 110th and 155th Streets, and Eighth, Park, and Lenox Avenues, Harlem also hosted many white visitors and business proprietors. 120 In the first-half of the twentieth century, Harlem attracted whites who frequented its legendary jazz clubs. So-called “slumming” excursions to Harlem became popular during Prohibition, and the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Small’s Paradise became popular destinations for white jazz tourists. 121 Audiences flocked to these clubs to hear and watch top African-American performers like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Adelaide Hall, Cora Green, Cora “Truckin’” LaRedd, Ethel Waters, Earl “Snakehips” Tucker, Aida Warde, Josephine Baker, and Florence Mills. 122
But while African-American performers and white audiences inhabited the same rooms on Saturday evenings, places like The Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn were not racially integrated spaces. Although the two high-profile clubs were located in Harlem, they excluded African- American guests. 123 As the historian Lewis A. Erenberg observes, such policies “reinforce[d] the inequality of the Harlem experience.” 124 African Americans were barred from the Broadway clubs, and if they were admitted to white settings outside of Harlem, they frequently felt pressured to exhibit their best behavior, lest they become representations of alleged black impropriety and sexual excess. 125 Whites, in contrast, felt no compunction about letting loose in Harlem. After all, when they went out, they were not expected to represent the entire white race. As Erenberg points out, whites could jaunt uptown to Harlem for some “fun adventure, and the aura of nighttime sin,” and then return home, reputation intact. 126 The ephemeral, nocturnal nature of Harlem pleasure trips also meant that white slummers bypassed Harlem’s considerably less appealing daytime poverty. 127 And even during the day (or after a night of clubbing), whites could satisfy their cravings for barbeque and “soul food” in black-owned restaurants without having to worry about whether they would be turned away or discriminated against. 128
Patterns of racial segregation and discrimination seen in postwar New York were also found in other northern cities with sizeable African-American populations. 129 Like New York, many northern cities were located in states with anti-discrimination laws banning racial bias in public accommodations. (Twenty-four states had passed such laws as of 1959. 130 ) But as in New York, discrimination in restaurants and other public accommodations was documented in virtually every major American city. The public accommodations color line in New York and a number of other northern cities was variable and murky relative to the Jim Crow South, however. In 1960, the majority-white news agency United Press International (UPI) conducted a survey of restaurant discrimination in various northern cities and discovered as much. 131 The survey, which appeared to be devoid of an overt political agenda, included interviews with white restaurant owners and NAACP spokespersons from Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Los Angeles. 132 From those interviews, the UPI concluded that African-American diners “face[d] a varying ‘color line’ that bar[red] them from some restaurants and fad[ed] away completely at others.” 133 As the Committee on Civil Rights and East Manhattan observed in its investigations of New York restaurants, the UPI’s survey of eating establishments in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit found that more formal, higher-priced restaurants were more likely to discriminate than casual dining spots—a phenomenon which, as noted earlier, distinguished these northern cities from the South, where even drugstore lunch counters refused service to African Americans. 134
Restaurant investigations by the UPI, and more specifically, the Committee on Civil Rights and East Manhattan, reveal that the public accommodations landscape in postwar New York and other northern cities could be tricky to navigate for African Americans. There was more uncertainty about color lines in public accommodations in northern cities than those below the Mason-Dixon Line. Racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans were, of course, very much a part of life in the North, but they were not legally inscribed as in the South. This meant that although African Americans in northern cities frequently received unequal treatment in public accommodations, they were not expressly barred at even high-priced, exclusive restaurants in places like the East Side of Manhattan in the early 1950s.
To be sure, there were certainly instances of blatant racism in public accommodations in New York, even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For instance, in Brooklyn’s New Lots Avenue, an enclave of Italian and Jewish Americans, enmity over the 1965 riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles was still palpable, as signs warning, “You may take Watts, but you’ll never take New Lots!” “N—— keep out!” and other racist slurs were plastered over the windows of New Lots Avenue stores. 135 This example of racial antagonism, as well as acrimonious contests over territory (housing) and resources (schools and jobs) between white ethnics and African Americans in places like the Canarsie section of Brooklyn (and most notoriously, in South Boston in the early 1970s), revealed working-class white ethnics’ truculent defense of a white privilege that was perhaps more tenuous than that held by more affluent Protestant whites. 136 But aside from the assorted patently racist signs like those found in New Lots Avenue, establishments in New York did not hang the state-sanctioned “colored” and “white” signs that more clearly demarcated color lines in public accommodations in the South. The ambiguous, ad hoc nature of race in New York’s public accommodations was reflected by the existence of guides to businesses that accepted African-American patrons; the most prominent of these guides included the Negro Motorist Green Book and Travelguide. Not incidentally, both of these handbooks were first published and disseminated in New York City. 137
African-American New Yorkers, and later, African Americans nationwide, adapted to the constraints of the color line by referring to the Negro Motorist Green Book and Travelguide. These guides listed restaurants and other businesses that had a history of serving African Americans without discrimination, providing, as the Travelguide advertised, “Vacation & Recreation Without [sic] Humiliation.” As the civil rights leader Julian Bond remembered about his parents’ use of the Green Book: “It was a guidebook that told you not where the best places were to eat…but where there was any place.” 138
The Green Book was the brainchild of Victor H. Green, a Harlem mail carrier who was inspired to publish the handbook after discovering similar guides used by Jews excluded from anti-Semitic restaurants and clubs. 139 Green used his postal contacts to compile a list of New York restaurants and hotels that welcomed African Americans, eventually expanding the Green Book to encompass all sorts of businesses nationwide (as well as those in Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda), including gas stations, doctors’ offices, beauty parlors, barber shops, night clubs, drug stores, tailors, and auto repair shops. 140 The postal worker-turned-publisher printed about fifteen thousand copies of the eighty-page guide (1949 edition) annually. These copies could be obtained for one dollar at various places, including Esso stations, one of the few national gas station brands that had African-American franchisees. 141
Travelguide was similar to the Green Book, but slightly longer at 128 pages (1956 edition). Notably, it was also published in New York City and sold for a dollar ($1.25 for those purchasing it from abroad). 142 In pitching their publications to African-American travelers and consumers, both the Green Book and Travelguide alluded to the hostility that African Americans might encounter without such guides. The simple—if ominous—message on the cover of the Green Book was: “Carry the Green Book with you. You may need it.” 143 Travelguide, meanwhile, featured a lengthier message to readers suggesting that its editorial staff lamented the very existence of the guide as a resource for adapting to segregated and discriminatory circumstances: “The time is rapidly approaching when Travelguide will cease to be a ‘specialized’ publication, but as long as racial prejudices exist, we will continue to cope with the needs of a changing situation, working toward the day when all established directories will serve EVERYONE [original emphasis].” 144
The use of the Green Book and Travelguide in New York and other northern cities points to a way in which segregation and discrimination in postwar New York might be distinguished from southern cities. It was not that discrimination in public accommodations was more benign in New York and other northern cities. Rather, it was that color lines were not always explicit in the North, and so it was necessary to decode racial boundaries with tools like the Green Book and Travelguide. In its 1949 edition, for example, the Green Book listed thirty restaurants in Harlem, nine in Brooklyn, four on Long Island, and nine in suburban Westchester County that welcomed African -American patrons. 145 (This was not an exhaustive list, of course.) As African-American memoirist Earl Hutchinson Sr. reflected about his experience driving through large swaths of the country during a move from Illinois to California in 1955, with the Green Book by his side, “You didn’t need the ‘Green Book’ to travel through the South. You knew that you couldn’t eat in a roadside café or stay overnight in a roadside motel. The book was primarily for travel in the North and West.” 146
The Green Book’s and Travelguide’s New York City origins also reflected the constraints of race on African-American consumption in America’s largest city before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (also the year in which the Green Book ceased publication). In some ways, postwar New York had its own Jim Crow. In a 1963 article on “Negro Segregation in the North,” the New York Times reported that “segregation is as much a fact of life [in the North] as it is in the South.” 147 The paper observed that, “almost invariably the color of [“the Negro’s”] skin determines where he goes for school and how he makes his living.” 148 But this observation was qualified, as it should have been. The Times added that in spite of similarities between North and South, “discrimination [in the North] is unquestionably less pervasive outside the South.” 149 The paper quoted Calvin Banks, program director of the NAACP, who related: “There is a willingness in the North, generally speaking, to face problems of discrimination that is missing in the South.’” 150 Banks was right. New York State had, after all, passed the anti-bias law explicitly banning discrimination in restaurants and other public accommodations in 1952, and major restaurant associations signed earnest antidiscrimination pledges with the Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan.
Along with Banks’s reassuring nod to the relative progressiveness of the North, the New York Times also affirmed that “the Northern and Western Negro, particularly in major cities, can generally eat in the same restaurants as white persons, stay in the same hotels and seek his amusement and recreation in the same places.” 151 But as this article has tried to show, such a general pronouncement of racial egalitarianism at restaurants, hotels, and places of leisure was incomplete and too self-congratulatory. Perhaps because it catered to African Americans seeking specific and reliable information about where to go given the limitations of race, the Travelguide provided a more accurate appraisal of what African Americans would have likely encountered in New York City (and New York State). In its section on New York State, the 1956 edition of the guide included a candid introductory note about what African Americans would expect to find there. The guide acknowledged the state’s progressive civil rights laws, noting that there were “full and equal privileges and treatment in places of public accommodation” in New York, and that violation of these laws was subject to “civil and criminal penalties.” 152 But Travelguide was careful to include this caveat: “Places of public accommodation may not advertise they practice discrimination.” 153
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the two anonymous JUH reviewers, as well as Daniel T. Rodgers, Mary Maples Dunn, Benjamin Coates, Benjamin Fagan, Daniel Geary, Melissa Milewski, Matthew Rubery, Lisa Siraganian, and especially Christine Stansell, for reading previous drafts of this essay. I am also enormously grateful to the late Olivia Pleasants Frost for speaking with me in 2003, and to her daughter, C. Olivia Frost, for supplying additional information about her mother.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.