Jim Crow Still Holds Sway in Some Blue-Collar Bars : Blacks don’t protest being kept separate from white drinkers and diners. ‘It’s illegal as hell, but that’s just how it is’ in Old South.

When construction worker James White, 19, drops in at Pete’s Out In The Cold Bar, a neighborhood bar in a ramshackle part of town near the river docks, he enters through a side entrance used only by black customers.

“That’s just the way it is around here,” said White, a high school graduate who plans to attend college. “I can go to the front door, now. But no one is going to let me in. All I’ll do is get my feelings hurt. If you want service, you go around to the back room--that’s for blacks.”

At Pete’s Bar, and in nearly a dozen other mostly blue-collar, family-run lounges throughout New Orleans, the customs of yesterday still thrive today--blacks and whites drink and eat in separate quarters.

“You couldn’t get away with this kind of crap in New York or California,” said Tom Prell, an elderly white customer at George’s Bar, a lounge that serves blacks through a side window while whites drink inside. “But this is still the Old South down here. It’s the custom. It ain’t right, and it’s illegal as hell, but that’s just how it is.”

Although such segregation has been banned since the late 1960s by federal, state and local public accommodations laws, civil rights activists say Jim Crow still exists here, largely unnoticed and unchallenged.

“If someone were to file a suit or kick up a fuss, these kinds of bars would clearly be on the defensive and in all kinds of legal trouble,” said Ralph Cassimiere, a professor of black history at the University of New Orleans. “But the problem is that the kind of people who would willingly subject themselves to this kind of treatment from these places are not the same kind of people generally who will stand up for their rights and demand that they be let in and treated fairly. And, if you can’t get someone to complain, it’s hard to start any action against these kinds of bars.”

“It’s a little touch of South Africa right here in the United States,” said William Quigley, a professor of law at New Orleans’ Loyola University. “You’d think that we’d be on to other issues by now, that segregation would be a battle long since fought. But it isn’t, it still exists in thousands of little ways, and these old neighborhood bars that still get away with this kind of stuff are a prime example of that.”

The bars, principally situated in the declining neighborhoods of the city’s Irish Channel and East Riverside sections, just blocks from the giant wharves on the Mississippi River, are relics of a time when most of the residents of the area were white working people who lived along rigid racial lines.

Until the early 1960s, “Colored Only” and “White Only” signs still regularly appeared on bar, restaurant and grocery windows in these neighborhoods. “It was very common then to see blacks go up to a side window and place orders,” said Shirley Porter, director of Louisiana’s NAACP. “You could never, never get inside, so you didn’t even think about it.”

But, even though the Jim Crow signs soon came down and the black population of the Irish Channel and East Riverside sections surged from about 25% in 1960 to more than 65% today, the habits of the past changed slowly. “I wouldn’t come in here if they didn’t keep the blacks out,” said a heavyset man at the 801 Lounge in the Irish Channel, which has a side window used almost exclusively by blacks.

However, Herbert Cook, the owner of the 801 Lounge, said his side window is not to keep blacks out but only to keep the air conditioning in. “People don’t want to be coming and going out of here, from the heat to the air conditioning. When they’re inside, they want to stay cool, and, if they just want to stop and get something, the outside window is more convenient.”

Henry Theriot, owner of Pete’s Bar, agrees: “The colored come to my back window on their own, but only because it’s convenient. They’re the ones who do it. Hell, I even have a back room where they can come in and sit down, they have a table and everything in there, and a lot of them sit down and sign their checks there. I cash all of their little welfare checks for them.”

Theriot denied that he would ever prohibit a black from entering the lounge’s main bar: “You can’t get away with something like that any more, even if you tried,” he said. “They just like that back room better. And sometimes even a white person will go back there.”

But Prof. Cassimiere sees no point in arguing whether segregation still exists in some New Orleans bars. “Obviously, it does,” he said. “The question is what are we going to do about it.”

And he added: “That they can even try something like this and get away with it is astounding. That no blacks have ever complained is even more so. As offensive as this sort of custom is, though, it’s still kind of a case study in how people will do to you what you let them get away with doing.”