Neither Welcomed,Nor Refused

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.