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Racial Discrimination in Pocatello
In the early 1900s, a small number of Pocatello businesses displayed "white only" signs outside their restaurant. In the wake of World War I, African American veterans organized protests against segregation in many northern cities. In 1919, several men from Pocatello’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church entered the Louvre Café and attempted to be served despite that businesses' policy of racial segregation. The men sued the restaurant for discrimination, but failed to win their case.
In many cities during the 1920s--a decade that saw great hostility against immigrants and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan--a number of rural black families in Idaho were driven from homes and farms. In general, however, racial discrimination was more subtle, with black families being made to understand that they would not be welcome in white neighborhoods.
Residents of Pocatello recalled that during the 1940s and early 1950s, there were many restaurants and other establishments throughout the city where African Americans were made to understand that they were not welcome. The city's YMCA maintained a "white only" policy until African Americans in Pocatello led a protest against the organization in 1952. While the handful of "white only" signs in Pocatello were removed by the mid-1950s, African American residents still understood that they lived in an informally segregated community.
SourcesJill K. Gill, The Civil Rights Movement in Idaho, Blue Review, https://thebluereview.org/civil-rights-movement-idaho/ Address of former "Cowboy Bar" determined by unrelated article in the IdahoState Journal, December 14, 1954
Pocatello, ID 0
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