In most respects, the Graetz family lived as though they were Negroes, but their white skin produced some unprecedented legal contortions. Because they always chose to sit in the upstairs Negro section of movie theaters, for instance, theater owners worried that to sell them tickets might bring down Alabama’s legal sanctions against establishments that “sponsored” interracial public meetings. (Those same laws made it technically illegal for Graetz to preach in his own church.) The theater owners’ solution was to let them in free.
