Bermuda’s 1959 Theatre Boycott was a pivotal event.
The protest against segregated seating in cinemas, launched on June 15 by the Progressive Group, struck a fatal blow against racial discrimination in two short weeks — something that various parliamentary committees and commissions had failed to do over the years.
Minus the closing of theatres by owners on day nine of the Boycott, the first sign of victory came from hoteliers, who on June 28, announced they would “accept reservations for dining, dancing and entertainment from local residents without discrimination.”
High-end restaurants in Hamilton followed suit the next day, and one day later, theatre owners announced that cinemas would reopen on July 2 and patrons could sit anywhere they liked.
There was praise all around for the dramatic change.
A statement from the then anonymous Progressive Group members said: “We are appreciative
of the fact that the hotels, restaurants and theatres are desegregated. The people of Bermuda are to be thanked, indeed congratulated for the striking display of solidarity shown since June 15th. The day should become for Bermuda what Emancipation Day was for the world.”
But the struggle for equality was far from over.
Discrimination
Blacks were welcome in hotel nightclubs and restaurants, but not for overnight stays. Some restaurants were still refusing to serve Black patrons.
In August 1960, the dust from the boycott having long been settled, The Bermuda Recorder reported the experience of two visiting couples, one White, the other Black, who had gone to the upscale Penthouse restaurant on Front Street for lunch.
Both couples left with a bitter taste in their mouths when told the restaurant did not serve Blacks. The tourists were on a taxi tour and asked their driver to suggest a place for lunch.
The driver told the Recorder: “I honestly believed they had stopped this business of discriminating.”
Two weeks later, the case of a Black American family who had booked a five-day stay at Castle Harbour Hotel hit the headlines. The couple, travelling with their 10-year-old son, were being assigned a room when the hotel manager intervened, telling them, “in no uncertain terms that Negroes were not acceptable as room guests,” the Recorder reported.
After a two-hour standoff, the family agreed to an offer of accommodation at the Princess Hotel in Hamilton. In an attempt to seek redress from the hotel, the couple met with Bermuda tourism officials, MP E.T. Richards and the US Consul General.
The next month, a similar incident took place involving 15 passengers, most of them Black Bermudian college students, but also Black Americans.
They were denied accommodation at Castle Harbour after their New York-bound flight was forced to return to Bermuda.
The Royal Gazette reported that White passengers on the same flight were given rooms, which led to some Black hotel staff walking off the job.
Kenneth Richardson, a student at Howard University, said the White passengers were checked into rooms, “but they told us it was the policy of the hotel not to accept coloured people.”
The Black passengers declined the hotel’s offer to dine in Castle’s restaurant, electing instead to be
transported to the Bermudiana Hotel in Hamilton.
Castle’s manager John Fischbeck described the situation as “very unfortunate.” He told the Gazette: “We have 2½ floors closed for renovation and it is sometimes hard to accommodate people at short
notice. There was some confusion as to whether meals only were wanted or whether accommodation was required. We were quite prepared to serve meals.”
Legal wrangling
As Bermuda grappled with a changing racial reality, a parliamentary Joint Select Committee was considering a motion, proposed by E.T. Richards in March 1957, to abolish the 1930 Hotel-Keepers Protection Act.
Lawyer Mr Richards, later Sir Edward and Bermuda’s first premier, called for the act to be abolished and replaced by a law that would make it illegal, and punishable by a hefty fine and imprisonment, for a hotelier to refuse accommodation to anyone on the grounds of race, creed or colour.
He told Parliament of “the embarrassment, insult and humiliation suffered in Bermuda by Negroes, Jews and other non-Caucasian races by virtue of the policy of racial discrimination enforced by hotel keepers and others.”
Sir Edward had first-hand knowledge of this injustice. In Richards’ biography Peaceful Warrior, author J. Randolf Williams wrote that Barbados premier minister Sir Grantley Adams had to be put up at
Government House, and the Government minister with whom he was travelling accommodated at Richards’ residence, because they could not stay in a White-owned hotel.
This happened nine days before he placed his motion before Parliament, but there were similar incidents involving Caribbean leaders whose flights landed in Bermuda in transit.
MPs, the majority of them White, gave the usual reasons for maintaining the status quo—it would harm the tourist trade. Their proposal of a Joint Select Committee was a tried and true delaying tactic.
However, in December 1960, a majority report recommended that racial discrimination in hotels and restaurants be outlawed. But when the report was debated in Parliament in January, MPs voted to exclude hotels from the bill.
There were heated exchanges in both the lower and upper Houses between White and Black members. Black physician Dr Eustace Cann, a member of the Legislative Council (now the Senate), said: “The coloured people want a legal guarantee that no one shall humiliate them in public with the aid of the law. We must be sure this does not happen again.”
He was incensed when White LegCo member Frederick Misick called for the words “race, creed and colour” to be removed from the bill.
In the end, White MPs won the day. The bill that was signed into law in March 1961 applied to restaurants only. Two months later, Joseph Rego, owner of the Arcade Restaurant, pleaded guilty to a charge of refusing to serve a Black patron. He was fined £25.
The Hotel-Keepers Protection Act was revised in 1967. In 1969, one year after Bermuda’s first election under universal adult suffrage, Parliament passed the anti-discrimination Race Relations bill.
Members of the Opposition Progressive Labour Party voted against the bill, arguing it did not go far enough. The Race Relations Act was eventually repealed and has been replaced by the 1981 Human Rights Act.
