KKKoatesville, We Hardly Knew Ya
From the comments section of today’s Inky story on the last lynching in Coatesville, circa 1911:
Coatesville was as bigoted as any similarly small city in Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s, so what happened there in 1911 is no more surprising to me than it would have been had it happened in the south.
The schools were segregated, insofar as possible, until the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision. The two movie theaters were segregated as well until a Jewish family opened an integrated movie theater in the ghetto around 1955. How long after the Silver opened that the Palace and the YMCA-owned-and-operated Auditorium remained segregated I don’t recall.
Coatesville was an embarrassment to its decent inhabitants. Jews were still being beaten on the streets in the 1950s. Lukens employed but one Jew before 1954 and repeatedly refused to hire even the Jew who won the college engineering scholarship Lukens itself sponsored. This was a sorry, racist town through the 1950s. I can’t say I much miss what it was then.
