BOOTBLACK STANDS
In the year 1901, Basso, a bootblack in the basement of one of the business houses of Rochester, New York, refused to serve Burks because the latter was a Negro. The law of New York, as has been seen, requires full and equal accommodations in hotels and “other places of public accommodation.” The question, therefore, was: Is a bootblack stand a place of “public accommodation”? The municipal court of Rochester, in which Burks brought suit, gave judgment for him, thereby answering the question in the affirmative. The county court reversed the decision. The appellate division reversed the county court and sustained the municipal. The court of appeals[[274]] reversed the appellate division thereby sustaining the county court, saying: “A bootblacking stand may be said to be a place of public accommodation, like the store of a dry goods merchant, a grocer, or the proverbial ‘butcher, baker, and candlestick maker’; but that is very far from placing it in the same category with the places specifically named in the statute. Inns, hotels, and public conveyances are places of public accommodation in the broadest sense, because they have always been denominated as such under the common law. Bath-houses and barber-shops are not to be regarded as included within the statute under the general phrase, ‘and all other places of public accommodation.’ There is no more relation between a bootblacking stand and a public conveyance than there is between a theatre or music-hall and a bath-house or barber-shop. There is, it is true, a superficial resemblance between the occupation of the barber and that of the bootblack, in the sense that both minister to the personal comfort and convenience of others; but the same argument could be extended far beyond the limits necessary to demonstrate that not ‘all other places of public accommodation’ are included by relation within the category of the things specifically enumerated in the statute.”