Notes
Notes Introduction 1. The term “public accommodation” is a fluid one within the law and in general practice. This study examines three broad categories of recreational accommodations. The first is the most heavily impacted by state and federal civil rights statutes: public recreational facilities owned and run by municipalities or other governmental entities. Municipal swimming pools, state parks, and picnic grounds all fall under this category. In order to avoid desegregation orders, however, such accommodations at times leased their facilities to private individuals or organizations. For example, city managers often transformed public swimming pools into private swimming clubs. These private clubs, the second category, were most impervious to legal challenges. The third, and most numerous example in this study, are commercial recreational facilities. Amusement parks, for example, are generally owned by private individuals but are considered forms of “public accommodations ” because they are open to the general public. 2. There is a rapidly growing literature on the long civil rights movement. Representative works include Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, 4 (March 2005): 1–28; Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodward, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). For a critique of the long civil rights movement, see Sundiata K. Cha-Jua and Clarence E. Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, 2 (2007): 265–88. 3. See, for example, Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). In “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Jacquelyn Hall states, “The economic dimensions of the movement lie at the core of my concerns” (2). Martha Biondi, in To Stand and Fight, focuses on the economic goals of the “Black Popular Front.” Nikhil Pal Singh, in Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), criticizes civil rights scholars for reinforcing a “formal, legalistic view of black equality” (6). In her book Defying Dixie, Gilmore argues that the media’s focus on “school integration, access to public accommodations, and voting 236 Notes to Pages 3–5 rights . . . erased the complexity of a drive to eliminate the economic injustices wrought by slavery, debt peonage, and a wage labor system based on degraded black labor” (9). Finally, in Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), Nancy MacLean states, “The quest for jobs and justice, in turn, involved a more robust vision of equality than the legal change evoked by the phrase ‘civil rights’” (5–6). 4. Steven Hahn has been the most outspoken historian to critique the “integrationist framework ” in African American history. See, in particular, Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). Hahn argues that historians who use the integrationist framework “have privileged and lent legitimacy to African American struggles for inclusion and assimilation, for individual rights, and for citizenship, while at the same time regarding African American interest in separatism and community development, in collective rights, and in forms of nationalism as the products of failure and defeat, as somehow lacking in integrity” (160). 5. Both Robert E. Weems, Jr., and Susannah Walker argue that black businesses were undermined by integration. See Robert E. Weems, Jr., “African American Consumers Since World War II,” in African American Urban History Since World War II, ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 359–75; and Susannah Walker, “Black Dollar Power: Assessing African American Consumerism Since 1945,” in African American Urban History Since World War II, 376–403. 6. Like many scholars I have been deeply influenced by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences...
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