Activist James Farmer eating at a southern lunch counter 1965
Jim Crow segregation laws required that blacks sit apart from white customers in restaurants. In her memoir, singer Diana Ross, who grew up in Detroit, remembers a trip she made with her siblings to visit relatives in Bessemer, Alabama, in the 1950s. “I dimly recall seeing signs on water fountains, in waiting rooms, and at movie theatres: WHITE, COLORED.” She goes on to say, “There were so many indignities black people endured," recalls Ross. African-American did not simply capitulate to Jim Crow conditions but employed what Yale political scientist Jim Scott calls “infrapolitics”--everyday forms of resistance. For example, blacks working the “coloured” window at white-owned restaurants gave away food or discounted the food sold to blacks.
