The Justice Department's charges against Cracker Barrel sounded familiar to me: Black customers at many of the company's restaurants were steered into segregated dining areas and often received inferior service, including being forced to wait to be seated while white customers came and went.
That's the way things used to be in the little Georgia town where I was born and raised. Most of the town's residents were black, but all of the downtown business owners and employees were white. Some businesses deigned to sell their products to black customers; some didn't. The few white-owned restaurants that served blacks forced them into segregated areas.
Otherwise friendly and reasonable townsfolk enforced this Southern apartheid with no apparent thought or conscience. For example:
Back in the '70s, a city friend was passing through town and arrived early for a visit. He decided to bide his time in the downtown pool hall. But when he walked in, he saw a hand-scrawled sign saying "Members Only."
As he turned to leave, the cheerful woman behind the counter called out to stop him.
"Aw, don't pay no attention to the sign," she said. "That's just to keep the n------ out."
The town was the scene of some ugly racial incidents once its black residents finally began to win their right to vote, to attend decent schools, and to work and shop without being discriminated against. But for the past 25 years or so, the community has been peacefully and successfully integrated in most important respects.
People live, work and eat side by side. Integrated crowds cheer the public high school's excellent football team and theater troupe. The annual civic festival is a genuine celebration of integrated bands, floats, vintage cars and beauty queens. The scene is pleasantly disorienting for former residents who hadn't been home since the bad old days. Even many of the parents and grandparents lining the streets to glimpse their young relatives must be startled by the racial evolution they have lived through.
If my little town can get things right after generations of racism, what excuse do Cracker Barrel executives have in 2004? They agreed this week to end the discriminatory practices detailed by the Justice Department (without admitting wrongdoing, of course), and they promised to develop a mandatory diversity training program for their employees. But employees get their signals from employers. In working to create the atmosphere of an old-timey Southern restaurant, Cracker Barrel executives should have taken care to avoid re-enacting the blatant racism that most of the true South has moved beyond.
