Years after racial discrimination in public places was banned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham’s parents owned a segregated bar in South Carolina.
POLITICO got a copy of Graham’s new memoir, My Story, which is set to be released this Wednesday. In the book Graham fondly recalls growing up working in the family bar.
“Times being what they were, most of our customers were white,” Politico quotes Graham as writing. “My folks sold beer to anyone of legal age, but I’m sorry to say, for many of the years my parents operated the bar, black people were expected to drink the beer they purchased from us off the premises.”
Graham acknowledges that the practice ended “much later than it should have” in the 1970s, and he tells the story of how his father saved a black woman from being harassed by a racist patron by cracking him over the head with the young Graham’s bicycle helmet.
Living at the bar known as the Sanitary Cafe was “a great way to grow up,” Graham said, even though his “parents would probably lose custody of their children today if they let them behave as independently and as rascally as I did.”
[h/t Mediaite, featured image via Getty]
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