On July 24, 1945, Charles Toney and his then girlfriend, Ann Palmer, walked to the elegantly appointed Capitol Theatre, a 2,500-seat art deco style movie theater on West 3rd Street in downtown Davenport, Iowa. The movie was The Valley of Decision, based on the book of the same name, starring Gregory Peck, Greer Garson, and Lionel Barrymore. In it, a young maid falls in love with the son of her employer, a steel mill owner, while the mill’s workers go on strike. Their love story is set against the fallout of striking workers fighting the mill ownership.
After the movie, Charles and Ann walked nine blocks, then stopped at the Colonial Fountain, a small ice cream shop on Twelfth and Harrison Streets. They sat together in a booth in the back of the shop. “Sat there for a long time,” Charles Toney later said. “So I told Ann, let’s move up where they can see us better.” After sitting for the second time, he got the attention of the owner, a woman named Dorothy Baxter. Toney said, “hey, we haven’t been served. Are we gonna be served?”
“No, you’re not gonna be served,” Baxter bluntly replied.
Toney asked why, and she said plainly, “because of your color. I don’t serve people of your color in here.”
“Don’t you think you’re making a mistake,” he asked.
“No.”
Toney said he would sue for refusing service, to which Baxter responded, “go ahead and sue me.”
Filing Suit
Toney later said he “couldn’t wait for the courts to open up the next morning.”
The next morning Toney visited the county attorney, Clark Filseth, to file charges. Filseth asked, “you got a magazine don’t you.” Toney was publishing the first black magazine in the country, The Sepia Record. “I said yeah. He said, don’t you think its gonna hurt the magazine. I said yeah, but I don’t give a damn.”
Filseth agreed to file the case. Toney told him plainly, “you have to.”
The trial took place just more than a week after the incident at the Colonial Fountain, in the court of Magistrate John P. Dorgan on August 3. Toney was not “pleased or impressed” with his court appointed representative, Assistant County Attorney William Brubaker, and called on one of his wife’s family friends, S. Joe Brown, an attorney from Des Moines, Iowa, and an organizer of the Des Moines NAACP.
The jury was comprised of five women and one man, all white.
Baxter testified that she did not refuse service because the Toneys were black. She said maybe her “condition” made her irritable. She was pregnant, she told the jury. S. Joe Brown responded, comically, “Well, did Mr. Toney have anything to do with that?” She said no, then admitted “I didn’t serve him because he was black.”
In his closing argument, Brown asked if blacks were second-class citizens. “If you of the jury think it is all right for a Negro to be drafted, to fight for his country and the preservation of the liberty we prize,” he said, “and to make the supreme sacrifice, and then to return and be told that he cannot enter such a place as Mrs. Baxter operates and be served like other people, then you will have no alternative but to find this defendant not guilty.”
After four hours of deliberation, the jury returned split. The judge declared a mistrial. The case would start fresh four days later, on Wednesday, August 8. The new jury had the same makeup—five white women, all homemakers and one white man, a retired carpenter.
The Retrial
The testimony was much more straightforward and impassioned this time. Baxter not only admitted to refusing service on account of color, but angrily told the court that she was opposed to the civil rights law, always would be, and that blacks and whites should never be intermingled in public places. “If the Toneys wished to accomplish something they should establish an eating place or restaurant for Negroes only.”
This time, the jury deliberated for only ten minutes. The judge fined Baxter ten dollars, plus an additional $30.75 in court costs.
Charles Toney considered the verdict an “outstanding victory for democracy.”
Just the Start
In Davenport, the Toneys every move was now under a microscope, their case well documented in local papers. Not long after, Charles Toney stopped into Bishops Cafeteria, a restaurant on 3rd and Main. A white man came up to him, and asked if he was Charles Toney. “Yes, why,” he responded nervously.
“I just wondered, are you gonna eat here?” the manager asked. Toney said yes. Surprisingly, the man responded: “I’m the manager, and I want you to have a pleasant meal.”
Toney said defiantly, even to a seemingly friendly voice, “I will, if people like you won’t bother me.”
“Everyone in the cafeteria had their eyes glued on me and my wife,” he later recalled. “I was worried abut picking up the wrong knife, wrong fork. It was embarrassing to try to eat a meal with 150 people looking at you.”
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