I can’t really find an example right now, but I’ve seen conservative tellings of the civil rights era that were along the lines of the following:
“Restaurant owners and other business owners in the southern states wanted to be able to accept black patrons (because they were businessmen after all, and the only color they cared about was green), but because of Democrat Big Government, they weren’t allowed to”
The way I recall it is that this premise was then used in support of an equivalency between Jim Crow laws and Civil Rights laws, i.e. “First they were prohibited from taking customers that they wanted, and now they’re being forced to take all customers, even ones that they don’t want”.
I’m sure this is bullshit, but honestly I don’t know enough about that part of American history to refute it, and it kind of does make intuitive sense that a restaurant owner would want as many patrons as possible. So can one of you more knowledgeable folks here debunk it?
Absolutely fucking not. This is unironically one of the easiest things to refute. In Greensboro, Woolworths and SH Kress reps showed up to meetings at A&T and UNC because they were legally required to, stated repeatedly that they absolutely refused to integrate, laws or no, and then literally paid the Klan to show up to sit ins.