HOTELS
Only six States expressly forbid race distinctions in hotels. But it may be assumed that the sixteen States which mention inns mean to include hotels.
In 1876 a Negro minister applied for a room at a Philadelphia hotel and was refused accommodation, though one of the guests offered to share his room with him. At that time there was no law in Pennsylvania requiring hotel-keepers to receive colored persons; but the Federal court[[262]] held that the clerk might be liable under the Federal Civil Rights Bill of 1875.
In 1898 one Russ applied for a license to open a hotel in Pennsylvania. In granting it, the court[[263]] took the occasion to express its view on race distinctions in the following words: “A sober, respectable, and well-behaved colored man or woman is entitled under the law of Pennsylvania to be received in any house of entertainment and be treated in the same manner as any other guest. It is time that race discrimination ceased in this State.... No one objects any longer to his [the Negro’s] presence in a public conveyance or place of entertainment; thus far the prejudice of race has been overcome; it is quite certain that the objection to his presence in a hotel or restaurant will also pass away as soon as his right under the law to be there is recognized in fact as it now is by the letter of the statute.... It would be vain to deny that some race prejudice still exists among us, but the law does not countenance it, and good citizens should strive to rise above it. We trust the effort will be made and that toleration and moderation will mark the conduct of both races.”
In 1896 the members of the Indiana University football team went to the Nutt House in Crawfordsville, Indiana, for accommodation. One of the members of the team was a Negro. The clerk refused to take the Negro in with the rest of the guests, but offered to let him eat at the “ordinary.” The Negro, being a minor, brought suit through his next friend, and the Indiana[[264]] court held that the Civil Rights Bill of the State could not be satisfied by separate accommodations.
There is no case of race discrimination in the hotels of Massachusetts that has reached the higher courts, but in April, 1896, the following resolution[[265]] was passed by the General Court of the State:
“Whereas, On the twenty-ninth day of January, eighteen ninety-six, the Reverend Benjamin W. Arnett, D.D., of Wilberforce, Ohio, senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, president of the board of trustees of Wilberforce University, and member of many learned societies, was refused entertainment at certain reputable hotels in the city of Boston, because he was a colored man, in spite of the statute laws against discrimination on account of color; therefore,
“Resolved, That the senate and house of representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in general court assembled, successors of those bodies which repeatedly elected Charles Sumner to the Senate of the United States, and for four years received messages from John A. Andrew, hereby express their severest reprobation of such discrimination and their firm conviction of the truth of the clause of the Declaration of Independence wherein all men are declared to be created equal; and it is further
“Resolved, That still more to be reprobated is the sentiment of any part of the public against any class of our fellow citizens whereby such discrimination is rendered possible, and that a vigorous campaign for statute rights by the persons most aggrieved will meet the hearty approval and coöperation of the two branches of the General Court.” This is very significant as showing the actual attitude of the hotels of Boston toward receiving Negroes. Whether the “vigorous campaign” was conducted one cannot tell; certainly no case appears to have reached the courts. And there is in Boston at present a Negro hotel.
The manager of the Lucerne Hotel in New York City in 1905, refused to lease a suite to a woman because she was a Jewess. It was a family hotel, containing small suites like those found in an ordinary apartment house, rented upon annual leases, transients not being solicited. The New York court[[266]] held that it was not a hotel in the sense that the manager must receive all applicants without regard to race or color. Of course, this case did not concern the Negro, but the same principle is involved.