Remembering a Different Kind of Fight to Deny Service

Last Updated on February 12, 2022

The death of a well-known South Carolina restaurateur earlier this week recalled a different kind of fight over a businessman’s right to deny service to certain customers.

There are numerous memes circulating on Facebook that seek to compare a modern hot-button topic, the question of whether businesses should be allowed to refuse service to gay couples based on the business owner’s religious views, to segregationists who didn’t want to serve people of a different color.

A prominent South Carolina restauranteur who passed away earlier this week went to court in the 1960s over the issue of desegregation. In 1964, Bessinger, apparently taking a page from Governor George Wallace, stood in the door of one of his restaurants to prevent a black minister from entering. Bessinger didn’t mind selling his food, via takeout, to blacks, but allowing them inside was a different story. Civil rights attorney Matthew Perry sued Bessinger; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him unanimously.

Wallace, you may recall from your history textbooks, stood at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963, to block two black students who were accompanied by a court order for integration. It was his defiance of the desegregation mandate that brought him to national prominence.

Talking about the case to a reporter for The State newspaper in Columbia in 2000, Bessinger said he didn’t regret the past:

“It is really a constitutional right — whether a man has the right to run his business without governmental interference.”

If you happen to be a segregationist, you may well support Bessinger’s unapologetic stand. At the same time, if you compare that notion to the Christian business owners who want to refuse service to gay couples, you may start to feel a bit of déjà vu, especially when you add in the detail that Bessinger distributed “pro-slavery tracts” at his headquarters in West Columbia and called America’s slavery of the pre-Civil War era a “Biblical slavery” that was kinder and different than other forms of slavery.

It’s proof that religious beliefs and different interpretations and application of scripture can lead to different points of view and different levels of motivation for behavior.

What’s most striking, though, might be the quote from a University of South Carolina professor who says Bessinger’s defiance was actually a help of sorts to the overall civil rights movement:

“The more Bessinger drew a line in the sand, it actually enabled the movement here to get traction.”

Is that what we’re going to see happening more and more often as businesses attempt to decide who they will and won’t serve based on religious views of homosexuality and homosexuals themselves? If so, the irony will be that the doggedness of the anti-gay movement will have a direct hand in undermining their own goals.