Why Gay Rights Are Good for Business

Over the next few months, however, whites discovered that the sit-ins hurt their businesses more than integration ever could. At the now-famous Greensboro Woolworth, where only 5 percent of trade came from blacks, overall sales in 1960 fell by 20 percent and profits by 50 percent. Elsewhere, too, “customers of both races” were abandoning downtown stores—and the loud protests surrounding them—for newly sprouted “suburban shopping centers,” the New York Times reported.

Within a year of the first sit-ins, as historian Gavin Wright has shown, businesses in more than 100 Southern towns and cities had agreed to drop racial barriers at lunch counters. Department store sales shot up in the places that desegregated, like Dallas and Atlanta. But sales sagged in Birmingham where the stores still segregated their counters.

To be sure, many other businesses across the South—especially hotels and restaurants—continued to bar blacks or limit them to “Negro-only” sections. But the sit-in movement sounded the death knell for segregation in public accommodations, which would be outlawed as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The measure was backed by several prominent national chains, including Woolworth, which had seen first-hand how much damage discrimination could do. “Woolworth will now be able to serve all of its customers in all its stores on a desegregated basis,” one official from the company exulted after the law passed.

We heard a similar sigh of relief from businessmen last week in Arizona, where opponents of the anti-gay bill included J.P. Morgan, American Express and Marriott. Had Governor Brewer signed the bill, they argued, Arizona might have lost the 2015 Super Bowl and its expected half billion dollars of revenue. The measure would also have made it harder to attract talented workers, business leaders said.

Democrats were quick to pounce on Arizona’s GOP governor, whose veto message highlighted the potential damage to her state’s economy. “Jan Brewer’s veto of this bill was not exactly profiles in courage,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “She specifically referred to her concern being economic.”

So what? The same concern swayed the white South against segregation, a half-century ago. With nearly a dozen states considering discriminatory measures like Arizona’s, we should celebrate—not denigrate—the economic argument against them. When money talks, bigotry walks.


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