Bryant Simon — For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality - with Benjamin Talton — at the Wharf

Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging—and who doesn’t.Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.For Customers Only is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren’t only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about—provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.Bryant Simon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of History and the academic chair of the honors program at Temple University. He is the author most recently of The Hamlet Fire: The Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, as well as Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. He is a regular guest on the History Channel and a contributor to outlets like the New York Daily News, Washington Post, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Simon splits his time between Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore. Simon will be in conversation with Benjamin Talton, the executive director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Professor in the Department of History at Howard University. He is the author of The Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality and In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics, which won the 2020 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association. He is the coeditor of Black Subjects in Africa and Its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.