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631

(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Note: Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.

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Chapter 29. Social Segregation and Discrimination 631
would offer to white persons. Actually, many stores, hotels, and other
establishments refuse service to Negroes without excuse unless someone
asks the police or courts to take action. Occasionally they even have signs
up: ^Whites Only.” Even when the police and courts take action, the
practice may be kept up, since the fine is usually small and the probability
of being called before the law a second time also is small. Much more
frequently employed than a direct violation of the law are the indirect
devices of discouraging the Negro from seeking service in these establish-
ments 5
by letting him wait indefinitely for service, by telling him that there
is no food left in the restaurant or rooms left in the hotel, by giving him
dirty or inedible food, by charging him unconscionable prices, by insulting
him verbally, and by dozens of other ways of keeping facilities from him
without violating the letter of the law.’^^
In addition to residential segregation and managerial refusal of services
as techniques of effecting institutional segregation in the North, there are
other means that should be mentioned. A voluntary organization, whether
for civic, religious, political, economic, or associational purposes, will most
often simply not invite Negroes to membership, even though they meet all
other requirements. No state attempts to restrict the membership or service
policies of voluntary associations. Even semi-public associations in Northern
states with civil rights laws—such as the American Red Cross, the United
Service Organizations, charities, universities**^—grossly discriminate against
Negroes. A fourth device is for individual whites to insult or stare at
Negroes in restaurants or other public places where the management does
not restrict service to them.
This all leads to a fifth, and equally important, cause of segregation: vol-
untary withdrawal of Negroes into their own group. This cause operates in
the South, too. It is impossible to draw, the line between voluntary with-
drawal and forced segregation, and the latter is practically always con-
tributory to the former, indirectly if not directly. The effects—in terms of
cultural isolation and lack of equality of opportunity—are the same. In fact,
the voluntary withdrawal often goes further than the demand for segre-
gation on the part of the whites. Many Negroes in the upper and middle
classes make it a policy to abstain as far as possible from utilizing the
Southern Jim Crow set-ups in theaters, transportation, and the like, or
from entering places in the North where they know that they are not
welcome.
Institutional segregation and discrimination in the Border states is
roughly between that of the North and that of the South. In some things,
the Border is closer to the South and in others it is more like the North.
In a few things, the Border is even harsher than the South: “In Baltimore
and Washington, D. C., for example, there is more rigid segregation and
rejection of Negro patronage in the large department stores than anywhere

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