Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Historically Jim Crow policies ensured that black owned and operated restaurants remained separate economically thriving business in black neighborhoods in cities like Baltimore. For working-class blacks, these eateries enabled them to collectively relax and recover from the stress of racial politics. In large part, many of the eateries flourished due to the Jim Crow laws and customs that restricted the public dining options of African Americans beginning in the late nineteenth century and ending with the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ended the principle of “separate but equal” and effectively began the slow death of Jim Crow segregation laws and many black owned and operated restaurants.
