1. Katzenbach v. McClung, (1964)
2. Facts: Ollie’s BBQ was a family-owned restaurant in Birmingham that seated 220 customers and was located on a state highway near an interstate highway. The restaurant received about $70,000 of food, mostly meat, in interstate commerce annually. However, it refused to serve African Americans inside its dining facility. They could only order take-out.
3. Procedural Posture: The restaurant brought this action [a sister action to Heart of Atlanta] to challenge the constitutionality of Title II of the Civil Rights Act as it related to restaurants. The District Court found that the Act provided no basis for relating the operations of a local restaurant to interstate commerce, and thus issued an injunction restraining the Act from being enforced against the restaurant, concluding that it would lose substantial business.
4. Issue: Whether such part of Title II of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in restaurants which serve interstate travelers or which serve food a substantial portion of which has moved in interstate commerce is constitutional.
5. Holding: Yes.
6. ∏ Argument: There is no basis for believing that racial discrimination in local restaurants has any affect on interstate commerce. Congress has merely created a conclusive presumption that it does, without making formal findings in the record that support such an assertion. The government should be required to show the connection to interstate commerce on a case-by-case basis. The volume of food served at Ollie’s BBQ prohibits such a finding.
7. ∆ Argument: Racial discrimination in restaurants has an affect on interstate commerce because it deters African Americans from traveling, thus reducing business overall.
8. Majority Reasoning: Although there were no formal findings made by Congress, the testimony contained ample evidence to support a finding that racial discrimination in restaurants had an adverse affect on interstate commerce. For instance, by deterring travel by African Americans, the whole business climate suffers for lack of customers. Also, discrimination puts an artificial restriction on the free flow of goods. The wide unrest over the discrimination has a depressant effect on local businesses making new investment and expansion unfavorable in such a depressed business climate. Following Wickard, local activities can be said to have a substantial effect on interstate commerce when viewed in “aggregation.” Racial discrimination is not merely a local problem. As an “aggregation” it is a nationwide problem. Thus, it exercises a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce. The lack of formal findings to that effect were not fatal to the Act because there existed enough evidence to conclude that Congress had a rational basis for “finding a chosen regulatory scheme necessary to the protection of commerce.” The Court needed to do no further examination to second-guess Congress’ judgment in the light of such evidence.
9. Concurrence Reasoning: Douglas was reluctant to base his opinion entirely on the Commerce Clause because he felt that the human rights issue at stake was more consequential than the commerce clause could justify. Thus, he would also support the reasoning under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment because it seemed a much more appropriate grounds for anti-discrimination protection.
10. Notes: Five years later in Daniel v. Paul, Justice Black was the sole dissenter against application of Title II of the Civil Rights Act to the Lake Nixon Club in Arkansas. The club had a snack bar that refused to serve African Americans, and a substantial portion of the food served at the snack bar had traveled in interstate commerce. However, Black felt that the Act would be justifiable if based on the Fourteenth Amendment, but he did not feel that there was an adequate relationship between this snack bar and interstate commerce. He was afraid that this finding would stretch the commerce power to regulate any “remote country place of recreation in every nook and cranny of every precinct and county” everywhere.
