In the 1850s Irish immigrants couldn’t sit at the lunch counter. “No Irish need apply.”
In the 1860s, native Americans couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (if they were fortunate enough not to have been slaughtered or sent to a concentration “re-education” camp).
In the 1870s, Catholics couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (anti-Catholic know-nothing nativism).
In the 1880s, Chinese immigrants (who tirelessly worked on the railroads) couldn’t sit at the lunch counter.
In the 1890s, people in unions couldn’t sit at the lunch counter.
In the 1900s, African-Americans (having escaped from slavery) couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (Jim Crow and “separate but equal”).
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In the 1910s, women couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (lacking voting rights and property rights).
In the 1920s, Jewish-Americans couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (anti-Semitism, nativism and the Ku Klux Klan)
In the 1930s, poor or homeless people couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (Great Depression / Dust Bowl).
In the 1940s, Japanese-Americans couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (internment camps: okayed by FDR).
In the 1950s, African-Americans couldn’t sit at the lunch counter or ride in the front of a bus or use the same restrooms as white people (continuing segregation in the South, despite Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 / civil rights movement).
In the 1950s, leftists and socialists couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (McCarthy’s witch hunts).
In the 1960s, long-haired kids couldn’t sit at the lunch counter.
In the 1970s, Vietnam veterans couldn’t sit at the lunch counter.
In the 1980s, professed “out of the closet” homosexuals couldn’t sit at the lunch counter.
In the 1980s, I was physically prohibited from entering a rally for “black power” at my own college, Wayne State University, solely because I was a white guy.
In the 1990s, preborn babies would never be able to sit at a lunch counter, having been deprived of their earthly lives by abortionist butcher “doctors” (allowed to legally murder because of a fiat decision by seven old men in black robes in 1973).
In the 2000s, Arab-Americans / Muslims couldn’t sit at the lunch counter (due to excessive post-9-11 suspicions).
And now in the 2010s, political conservatives (who are also very often pro-life and Christian or religiously observant Jews) can’t sit at the lunch counter. They are being hounded out of restaurants by obnoxious mobs of droning far-left troglodytes: egged on by boorish demagogues like Congresswoman Maxine Waters (who happens to be — irony of ironies! — an African-American).
And this list is by no means exclusive or comprehensive. I was just hitting some of the more notable “highlights.” How far we have progressed! It looks like we haven’t learned a damned thing in 170 years.
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Photo credit: Adam Jones (5-14-12). Diorama of Lunch Counter Sit-Down Protests at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee [Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license]
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