"I've got two kids out there," he pleaded. "They haven't had a good meal all day, we're all exhausted and we can't find any place to sleep."
Sims proposed paying double the normal rate, but was still rebuffed and his family spent the night in the car. A few years later, his story made it into the Congressional Record when lawmakers were debating legislation to rid the country of institutionalized racial discrimination. It is now the centerpiece for a chapter about the experiences of African-American tourists in a forthcoming book by a Utah historian.
In May, University Press of Kansas is to release Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations by Susan Rugh, an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. "Rugh's study recounts how postwar prosperity and mass consumption - abetted by paid vacation leave, car ownership, and the new interstate highway system - forged the ritual of the family road trip and how that ritual became entwined with what it meant to be an American," according to the book's press notes.
But it was not an experience available to all Americans.
"It was an uncertain, even fear-filled, experience because blacks never could be sure that they would find a place to sleep and eat on the road," Rugh writes. "Indeed, African-Americans often feared for their safety, even their very lives, as they traveled the dark highways of the Deep South."
These humiliations were collected by local NAACP chapters and forwarded to the national office, which brought them to the attention of members of Congress when they were considering landmark anti-discrimination legislation.
Their letters helped convince federal lawmakers that segregation violated American principles and led them to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned the discrimination black travelers faced, according to Barbara Welke, a professor of law and history at the University of Minnesota. Rugh first learned of the letters, now archived at the Library of Congress, from Welke.
The new civil rights laws helped business owners who did not wish to segregate, but felt compelled to do so, to stay in business.
"Motel owners feared that if black customers stayed there, their white customers would stay away," Rugh said. "A particular point of contention was the pool."
"This was supposedly the Golden Age of American family vacations, but it was not so for black families," Rugh said.
By the 1930s, African-Americans began building a travel infrastructure complete with guidebooks, which came into maturity by the dawn of the automotive tourism in the 1950s. These guides, which outlined places black motorists were welcome, were essential travel companions, even outside the South.
In the 1940s in Salt Lake City, Roy Wilkins, who would become NAACP's executive director, was denied a place to stay. Ogden was the only Utah city where black travelers could reliably find places to stay and eat, Rugh said. And in Nevada, sailor Shirley Day was on his honeymoon when a coffee shop refused to serve Day and his new bride. Day, who had been a prisoner of war in Japan and lost a brother in Nuremberg, summoned police, only to hear officers claim city codes prevented them from doing anything.
"People were turned away from buying ice cream cones for their children. It made travel a humiliating experience and they didn't like being humiliated in front of their children," Rugh said.
"There was a rising class of educated black Americans who didn't want to stay on the other side of the tracks," Rugh said. "They had the money to stay where middle-class white people stayed. They had the money, but all the money in the world wouldn't buy Ralph Sims a place to stay."
Instead, it took federal intervention and widespread recognition that segregation was bad for the country as a whole.
bmaffly@sltrib.com
