#lunch counters

Lunching at the drug store

I’ve often noticed how the history of some institution or object does not quite mesh with the nostalgic haze that eventually envelopes it. To a significant extent this is true of now-vanished drug store soda fountains, many of which became places for lunches as well as for sweet fountain treats before they vanished.

Independent soda fountains date as far back as the 1810s. Decades later some…

While I was walking around on Wednesday, I noticed a restaurant in what looked to be a restored Woolworth’s. It looked big and interesting, and the menu looked really promising. The biggest attraction was the huge lunch counter along one wall.

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to take me to the Woolworth lunch counter in Richmond. It was one of the last Woolworth’s in existence, stashed in the corner of a strip mall called Willow Lawn. I was tiny, but I recall good food and friendly people. So the idea that someone had invested in reproducing such a counter was pretty interesting.

I decided to pop in for breakfast. It was only after I ate that I noticed the historical marker right outside. The store was, in fact, the key site in a series of sit-ins, led by now-Congressman John Lewis, then a student at nearby Fisk University. The sit-ins resulted in the desegregation of lunch counters in Nashville, and made Nashville one of the first southern cities to desegregate its counters. (You can read a couple of amazing accounts of this story here and here.)

The space is breathtaking. Set over three floors, it’s huge. The lunch counter must be 50 yards long. The whole thing feels incredibly authentic, right down to the floors. It’s only missing the shop floor displays behind the counter.

Sadly, the food was awful. It turns out that the restaurant has only been open for about two weeks, so we’re going to give them a pass, and hope that it improves. The proprietor runs a couple of other Nashville places, and has a great track record, so I’m sure he’ll sort it out.

But I really admire the idea.

In an earlier post, I quoted John T. Edge from Potlikker Papers talking about how food brings southerners together, even in the face of our history. Woolworth on 5th brings that idea to life, and invites us to experience it for ourselves. I hope it’s a big success. I wish I had time to get back for lunch or dinner, or to visit the cool looking cocktail bar upstairs.

More on Day 3 to come in a separate post.

Further reading: 

The Tennessean on Woolworth on 5th. The owner explains his concept.

Black History Month. 28: Looking back, the fight for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s era usually zeroes in on dramatic moments—Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus, kids being escorted into Little Rock’s Central High, little Ruby Bridges leaving school in New Orleans, marchers crossing the bridge in Selma, and so on. One of those moments came on Feb.1, 1960 when four teenagers, freshmen from North Carolina A&T, sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, and tried to order some food. A statue now stands in their honor on the NC AT&T campus—

Their courage started a months-long struggle that finally led to the desegregation of lunch counters in Greensboro. It also triggered comparable “sit-ins,” as they were called, in cities across the south, such as Nashville.

In May 1963, a sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi turned violent. The famous photograph below shows losers pouring things on the protesters. What it doesn’t show is that some of the protesters were beaten up, while the police (and quite probably some FBI agents in sunglasses) stood by and watched. Nor does it show that just a couple of weeks later, Medgar Evers, the local NAACP leader, was murdered by the White Citizens Council.

But why the focus on lunch counters? Many people under 40 may have never even seen a lunch counter, except in old photos. Let’s just say that in 1960, the world was a very different place.

Back then, for most Americans, “going shopping” meant going downtown. Strip malls (called “shopping centers” back then) were emerging in suburban areas. Enclosed shopping malls were just beginning to appear. But downtown, shoppers could go to the big department stores, like Penney’s or Montgomery Ward or Sear & Roebuck, as well as local stores such as Macy’s, Dayton’s, and so on. They could also go to so-called “dime stores” (or “five and dime”) like Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, Newberry’s and so on. This was the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, but you would have seen about the same thing anywhere—

Shopping downtown wasn’t necessarily easy. There’s a reason that the malls became so popular so quickly, and put the downtown stores out of business. In many cities, going downtown first meant driving round and round the blocks in search of a parking spot. Then it required walking, and probably a lot of walking, from store to store, perhaps spread out over several blocks.

Naturally, people got hungry and thirsty. There were no fast-food places like McDonald’s downtown. Obviously, there were restaurants and small, diner-like places. But most of the stores themselves had lunch counters. It was the fast-food of the day for downtown shoppers. These counters (or “luncheonettes”) served sodas and ice cream, and everything from cold sandwiches & chips to burgers & fries, and sometimes even hot sandwiches like roast beef with mashed potatoes & gravy.

But across the south, lunch counters were only for white folks, even though they were often serviced by African Americans. Lunch counters were designed so that you’d have to sit next to people you didn’t know. And in the south, white people were horrified at the prospect of having to sit next to a black person. 

So the lunch counter presented a double indignity: first, there was the sheer inconvenience of going downtown to shop and then not being able to buy refreshments because of your skin color; then add to it the in-your-face reminder that the white population had so much contempt for you that they didn’t dare drink from the same water fountain, sit next to you in any public place such as a lunch counter, and couldn’t even bear using the same toilet as you to flush away their bodily wastes—that even your poop wasn’t as good as their poop.

Imagine going to the mall today and being told that you can’t eat at the food court. Your money was good enough when you were buying that cute little shirt at Hot Topic, but when it comes to grabbing a plate of orange chicken from the Panda Express? Sorry, we don’t serve your kind. Yet that’s what African Americans faced under Jim Crow. Access to food was enough, but it was always more than that. It was about the simple human dignity of being able to sit down for a Coke after a long afternoon of shopping.