Businessmen reframed racial discrimination as a universal individual right to choose customers.

Evidence

On January 27, the Atlanta Restaurant Association ran a full-page ad in the Atlanta Journal. “We feel that as individual operators of our establishments,” the restaurant owners wrote, “we still have the freedom of choice to operate our businesses as we see fit—in the best interest of our customers, our employees and our families.” Recent talk of public accommodations legislation, in their view, was part of the “ever-increasing trend toward centralized control and regulation,” which “must stop before socialism is an accomplished fact.” In the end, they tapped whites’ growing sense that the civil rights movement was endangering their own rights. “This matter has transcended the consideration of civil rights alone,” the restaurateurs stated. “It now involves the basic right of an individual, any individual of whatever race, creed, or color, to engage in business.” That, they held, was sacrosanct. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 493

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: This shows the rhetorical pivot toward universalized individual-rights framing of segregation, exactly the reinvention the reader is tracking.
• XREF: connects to: Respectable segregationists framed exclusion of blacks as a symmetry of individual choice — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 372; White and black Atlantans defined racial harmony in fundamentally incompatible ways. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 492; Freedom of association was defined negatively as the right to exclude, not positively — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 373 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Nativists had to dress racial discrimination in the language of equality. #corroborates (0.85) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1920
• Corporations are reframed as a disenfranchised minority deserving rights #corroborates (0.80) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 336