Civil Rights: Discriminating Taste

Richberg's Cafe on U.S. Highway 11 in Enterprise, Miss., served customers Southern style: blacks entered and ate at one end of the establishment, whites at the other, with a partition in between. That type of separation was outlawed in 1964 by the public-accommodation section of the Federal Civil Rights Act, which applied to the cafe because substantial quantities of food and beverages served came from outside the state. But such new-found laws were not about to move Proprietor A. W. Richberg. When the Federal Government sued, Richberg simply renamed the cafe's white section "Dixie Diner Club" and added bylaws promising "the creation of an atmosphere conducive to the development of connoisseurs of discriminating taste and epicurean pleasures." The name was all that Richberg changed.

One recent visitor described Rich berg's today as a "rusty-spoon." Customers still take "epicurean pleasures" by ordering seven hamburgers for $1 while waiting for their cars to be greased and oiled outside. The sleazy dining room is decorated with a rack of used shotguns and rifles, draped with a six-foot belt of machine-gun blanks. The counter area is brightened with stacks of knives, machetes, auto parts and a shelf of used pistols.

A district court upheld the Dixie Diner's chub status, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit called the name change a "cynical canard." Said the three-judge panel: "To hold that it was an exempt club would make a mockery of the club exemption, pervert the congressional purpose, and legitimize a mere stratagem. Courts need not be so naive."

The judges shredded Richberg's bylaws, which they labeled "transparently meretricious." As for the club's mem bers, they said, "in the interest of fellowship they have held no meetings; in pursuit of culinary excellence, their food is the same as in its pre-club days; and in their concern for efficiency, they have turned over all profits and operations to one man." Of that man, the judges concluded: "Richberg wants us to believe that he was cuisine-conscious but not pigment-minded."