Texas BBQ Trail and Civil Rights

Texas Eat 'Em
By Jim Shahin - Washington Post
“ Situated hard by the railroad tracks, it's a divey little joint with a low ceiling that, in its way, could still exist in the '40s, when owner Vencil Mares opened it. A thick cloud of cigarette smoke hangs in the air, almost defiantly against modern times. There are deer heads on the wall. A display of spurs on a slab of wood is suspended above the beer cooler.
The place is a throwback in other ways, too. The Taylor Cafe, as it is called, has two separate doors, one used by blacks, the other by whites. Two long Formica-topped counters run parallel nearly the length of the establishment. The evening I visited, blacks sat on one side, drinking beer mostly, whites on the other, drinking beer mostly.
No one is required to use a certain door or sit on a specific side of the room. "They just want to stay with their people," is the way Mares puts it.
To some ears, his words may sound racist. They're anything but. When Mares, who is 81 years old, opened the Taylor Cafe in 1948, his decision to allow blacks and whites under the same roof was nothing short of subversive. In the small Southern town of Taylor, segregationist laws prohibited the races from mingling. It wouldn't be until the 1970s that the public schools were desegregated statewide. The railroad tracks divided white from black. Mares opened right next to those tracks, skirting the border between the races, and he let them all inside. “

ï Taylor Cafe, 101 N. Main St., 512-352-2828. Go for the anthropological experience, stay for the turkey sausage.
-- Jim Shahin
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