On this dayJan 22, 1953
U.S. Court of Appeals Rules Restaurants Can Bar Black People in Nation’s Capital
On January 22, 1953, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that restaurants in Washington, D.C., could continue refusing service to Black patrons.
Three years prior, 86-year-old civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell began a lawsuit against Thompson’s Restaurant, located a few blocks from the White House, which had denied service to her and several colleagues because they were Black. Mrs. Terrell invoked a set of laws outlawing racial discrimination in restaurants and other places of public accommodation that had been passed during Reconstruction following the Civil War by Washington, D.C.’s newly elected biracial city government.
When in the 1870s the federal government retreated from the promise of racial progress ushered in by the Reconstruction era, it did so not just in the former Confederate states but also in its own capital. Congress abolished the city’s locally elected biracial government and replaced it with a federally appointed commission. Segregation became deeply entrenched in the District, and these anti-discrimination laws—though never explicitly repealed—stopped being enforced.
During the Jim Crow era, white Americans across the country who were committed to racial hierarchy considered it important to uphold racial exclusion in the nation’s capital. After Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo in 1944 became chairman of the congressional committee responsible for overseeing the District, he told an audience, “I wanted this position so I could keep Washington a segregated city.”
In ruling against Mrs. Terrell on January 22, 1953, the U.S. Court of Appeals declared that the District’s Reconstruction government had lacked the authority to pass laws banning segregation, claiming only Congress had the power to do so. It also held that even if the Reconstruction government had held such authority, the laws could not be enforced because they had been disregarded for over 80 years.
However, Mrs. Terrell and her legal team appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and five months later, on June 8, 1953, the Supreme Court decided unanimously in her favor, holding that the Reconstruction-era anti-discrimination laws were still valid and thus segregation in District restaurants was illegal. This ruling only applied to Washington, D.C.; it would take over a decade, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for segregation in public restaurants to be outlawed across the United States.
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