“Lost Laws” to “Eat Anywhere”: D.C. v. Thompson and the Road to Brown

On January 27, 1950, a woman invited three friends to lunch. Eighty-six-year-old Mary Church Terrell asked William Jernigan, Geneva Brown, and David Scull to meet at Thompson’s Cafeteria, a few blocks from the White House, at 14th Street and New York Avenue, NW.1 As they presented their trays to the cashier, the manager at Thompson’s, one of a national chain head­ quartered in Chicago, told the group they would not be served (only Scull was white). “Why not?” asked Jernigan. “Because we don’t serve colored people here,” replied the manager. Terrell pressed. “Is Washington in the United States? Doesn’t the Consti­ tution of the United States apply here?”2 Thompson’s would not budge and Terrell’s party found itself back on the street. But the would-be hostess had something better than a bowl of soup with friends. Terrell had a case. Challenges to hydra-headed Jim Crow flared across the nation. America was two classes. One enjoyed the best offerings of transportation, public schools, and public accommodations. The other suffocated under generations of custom and law, enduring inferior treatment and shunted to the margins. In chambers of state and local governments and federal courtrooms, ripples of resistance to segregation were loosed. Largely hidden from public view by more widely covered segregation clashes, one civil rights battle— over the right to eat anywhere in the nation’s capital city—was fought long and fiercely. Within the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, some judges strained to preserve the city’s entrenched custom of seg­ regation and others pressed for its extinction. When Terrell asked John R. Thompson Co. for racial equality, she could not have known she had sparked the Supreme Court case— District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co.—that would help set the course for justices about to decide Brown v. Board of Education.