Restaurants that discriminate play Trump’s game
Imperial wizards and other pinheads once restricted access to restaurants based on skin color. Now a haughty restaurant in Virginia called The Red Hen has turned back time. It refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders because of dislike for her employer and her politics.
Those reveling in Sanders’ ejection should hold their applause. The Red Hen’s staff only proved that it stands for a brand of discrimination different from the one that turned restaurants into battlegrounds.
The fight to desegregate diners and cafes happened in big cities, the rural South and even in this region.
One instance that made headlines occurred the night the Harlem Globetrotters filled a 3,000-seat gym in Roswell, N.M. After the final buzzer, the Globetrotters planned to eat a late supper in the town they had just thrilled with their mix of comedy and basketball wizardry.
Suddenly, though, they weren’t talented entertainers in demand by the public. They were unwelcome black men.
A Roswell restaurant called the Chew Den denied service to one player and the team manager while the rest of the Globetrotters were en route to join them. After that, the team left town to find food and warm beds elsewhere.
The restaurant owner, Jack Chew, was quoted at the time as saying what happened with the Globetrotters was “an unfortunate misunderstanding.”
I phoned Chew to ask him about his restaurant’s rebuff of the black basketball team.
“That was a long time ago, before Martin Luther King died,” said Chew, who now runs a coin and gift shop in Roswell. “I’m 98 years old and ready to stop working. I don’t want to participate.”
His was the politest no-comment I’ve
received all year.
Chew, a Chinese immigrant who served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, is well-regarded in his adopted hometown of Roswell. The nasty episode with the Globetrotters in February 1962 is the only bit of negative publicity he has received in his long career as a restaurateur and shop owner.
But his claim that the Globetrotters were turned away from his restaurant because of a misunderstanding was the most common excuse for rejecting black customers.
That same alibi had been offered months earlier when a coffee shop at the Phoenix Hotel in Lexington, Ky., refused to serve five black members of the Boston Celtics. The Celtics were in town to play an exhibition game against the St. Louis Hawks.
Boston’s black players flew home in protest of the coffee shop’s bigotry. Two black players on the St. Louis team also boycotted the game in a show of unity with their on-court rivals.
In those times, even star black athletes risked their livelihood by speaking out against discrimination. So it was rare for a complaint against a restaurant to receive attention in the white-owned press. Rarer still was such a case reaching a courtroom.
An exception occurred when a restaurant in Washington state refused to serve pianist Hazel Scott, wife of New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. She sued.
An all-white jury awarded Scott $250. This was almost as big an insult as the restaurant employees telling her the color of her skin disqualified her as a customer.
These indignities and many more turned college students such as John Lewis and Diane Nash into civil rights warriors.
They and other young black men and women would sit down at white-only lunch counters to order a meal. Waitresses would tell them to leave.
As they sat tight, white thugs sometimes would beat the peaceful protesters or douse them with mustard and ketchup. Then police would arrive and arrest the black people who had been assaulted, saying it was safer to jail them than to confront a mob.
This painful history is lost on those cheering The Red Hen for denying service to Sanders.
Apologists for the restaurant say Sanders speaks for President Donald Trump, a politician so callous that he separated immigrant children
from their parents, then had the kids caged in detention camps.
But by kicking out Sanders, The Red Hen’s staff only affirmed its hypocrisy.
The restaurant’s owner and employees would rebuke a business that refused to serve a gay couple, a Muslim, a Jew or a black man. Yet they ousted a white woman because of her political views.
Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia, and many others risked their lives to end discrimination in housing, schools, voting booths and places of public accommodation, such as restaurants. Their work is a proud chapter in American history.
Trump’s politics of rage and division have taken the country backward in race relations. But those happy about one of his aides being denied service at a restaurant haven’t hurt him a whit.
They simply have sunk to Trump’s depths — all the while flattering him by imitation.