Mall Question
So if black students in the 60’s were able to sit at a lunch counter and be refused service, what is the legal difference between that and 16 year olds going to the mall and just sitting there? If it is trespassing (being young and in the mall on a Friday night), why wasn’t it trespassing when black students did in Woolworths? Because it seems to me that a private enterprise like the mall can refuse to sell to the kids (as if the mall itself actually sold anything), but that they cannot ban them.
Legally and historically, am I getting this wrong? I have gone back and looked at some of the Greensboro sit-in information, but there doesn’t seem to be any coverage on why they could not be removed. And if that is the case, how can the mall call the police and ask that one of these kids be removed, if they choose not to go? If North Carolina police couldn’t do it to black students in 1960, I’m not sure how this can fly.
Seems like discrimination masking under the politics (policy) of fear.
LG: Lunch counters could have removed blacks on the same basis as the mall is discriminating against teens, but the publicity would have been a huge problem. The same is true of the mall. But, as with African-American protesters, the onus has to be on the police and/or security guards. The teens’ behavior has to be exemplary — no cursing, no striking back, just plain old civil disobedience of the sort used by anti-war protesters.
If they want to make such a statement, I suggest they link arms at 5 p.m. Friday in the food court and start singing “We Shall Overcome.” And I’m only half kidding.
Actually, there is a difference (hope you don’t think I’m nitpicking); in the 1950s statute law in most Southern jurisdictions mandated segregation; therefore at least in theory the Woolworth’s owners were following the law.
What you are seeing now is an attempt by private property owners to enforce a partial ban on a certain category of people during certain hours. It is made more (I can’t think of the right word here–jet lag) problematic by the fact that what they are doing is banning minor children without parental supervision.
There are a wide variety of precedents both for and against that in civil cases (remember when Happy Harrys only used to allow two teenagers in the store at once?), so it is unclear whether they would win or lose in court.
The best way to attack it, ironically, would be to find some particular merchants in the mall who did not support the ban. The ban would have to be done by mall management with a majority approval of the stores; but certainly some would not have wanted it. You would be on much stronger grounds there.
However, teens who wanted to follow Al’s strategy above would have to be prepared to be arrested (and they would be, at least at first).
Lunch counters did start posting No Trespassing signs and notices that the management or owner had the right to choose the people he wanted to do business with and certainly many kids sitting at Woolworth or Kress counters did get arrested on various charges. Separate but equal was the order of the day, and the sit-in kids were pushing back on the Jim Crow in effect for public accommodations. I don’t think that anyone is saying that the mall kiddies can’t be in the mall to buy stuff, they can’t be in the mall to simply congregate, which is different. I’m fairly agnostic on whatever people want to do with the mall kiddies, but the mall kiddies do not have the same stakes as the sit-in kids in North Carolina.
I’m a little uncomfortable with the premise. Lunch counter protests “played an important part in spreading the civil rights movement to a larger audience and dramatizing segregation at a time when many, especially in the North, were not fully aware of its scope.” (wikipedia)
These mall rats, on the other hand, seem to suffer from too many rights. Not too few.
Steve: You are right, of course. I guess I was thinking more of Delaware, where the law did not mandate segregation and it was not practiced universally, but a lunch counter downtown was still practicing it until 1963. You’re also right that the teenagers would have to accept being arrested. I forgot that nobody since the ’60s has grown up with civil disobedience.
Yes PEAEFUL DEMO LIKE THE STUDENTS OF Lincoln University blocking the ticket booth at the Rialto theater or the owner of the Prinz Dinner refusing service to a Black man who turned out to be none other than Judge Sidney Clark
Jason –
For once, I couldn’t agree with you more. I would venture to say that the only oppression the teenagers roaming the malls have had to face is being forced to drive a Kia instead of a BMW.
I thought you were wining and dining the Mrs. Geek this weekend…
busted! you are a sham and would never represent the Hottest Blogger with dignity!
poor woman
Umm… It’s not the weekend any more. Delaware Real Hottest Blogger can wine, dine and post outlandish stuff, all in the same day.
The various civil rights acts defined lunch counters — and diners and hotels and all sorts of commercial ventures into which anyone could walk — as public accommodations. The bar was set rather high to deny public accommodation status — such as renting a room in your private home — to prevent business owners who might have wished to discriminate from being allowed to do so under the law.
The stores in the mall — along with the halls and bathrooms — certainly fall under the definition of a public accommodation. The question is: can a public accommodation discriminate against people based on age? Some certainly can: bars can, and must, discriminate on the basis of the legal drinking age.
I agree, I can do that
but youuuuuuu, youuuuu mister are no DHB!
shame
and crap, I went an entire 20 minutes today before I broke my promise not to post or comment!
I have no one else to blame but you for this