who
to provide service to
I will provide services to those I want to
gotta' problem with it - call the police
On May 25, 4:50 pm, Bruce Majors <majors.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.american.com/archive/2010/may/progressives-jim-crow-and-se...
>
> <http://www.american.com/archive/2010/may/progressives-jim-crow-and-se...>Progressives,
> Jim Crow, and Selective Amnesia
>
> By John E. Calfee<http://www.american.com/author_search?Creator=John%20E.%20Calfee>Tuesday,
> May 25, 2010
>
> Filed under: Government &
> Politics<http://www.american.com/topics/government-and-politics>
> , Culture <http://www.american.com/topics/culture>, Public
> Square<http://www.american.com/topics/public-square>
> The Rand Paul episode reveals a drastic misreading of history and of the
> government's role in ending racial discrimination in this nation.
>
> Rand Paul is a physician who recently won a primary to become the Republican
> Senate candidate in the November election to replace Republican Jim Bunning,
> who is not running for reelection. Rand Paul is the son of Ron Paul, also a
> physician, who for many years has represented the 14th Congressional
> District of Texas. Like his father, Rand Paul (henceforth referred to simply
> as Paul) is a libertarian. Like most libertarians, Paul advocates a minimal
> role for government and harbors doubts about the value of such mainstays as
> Social Security, Medicare, the Department of Education, and the Federal
> Reserve. But unlike his father, Paul has spent very little time talking to
> the press on the record—far less than the typical successful Senate primary
> candidate. In one of his first post-primary press outings, a TV interview
> with liberal MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, Paul expressed doubts about the
> wisdom of an important element of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964,
> namely, the provision that ended racial discrimination in public
> accommodations such as restaurants.
>
> Press reports <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37597.html> indicate
> that Paul's basic argument was that we should beware of giving government
> too strong a role in running private businesses. This is true even when we
> wish to prevent racial discrimination—a goal for which Paul quickly
> announced fervent support. The media reaction was quick and somewhat
> vicious. Much of it argued that Paul had stumbled into an area in which the
> positive contribution of government, especially the all-powerful federal
> government, was simply beyond doubt and without a rational alternative. In a
> strongly worded editorial, for example, the New York Times declared
> that<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/opinion/22sat4.html>
> :
>
> As a longtime libertarian, he espouses the view that personal freedom should
> supersede all government intervention. . . . The freedom of a few people to
> discriminate meant generations of less freedom for large groups of others.
> It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow,
> neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market.
>
> The suggestion is that Paul is grossly ignorant of the simple fact that
> government action was necessary to end the notorious "Jim Crow" system,
> which from the late 19th century through more than half of the 20th century
> had suppressed blacks in the South by maintaining racial segregation in
> public institutions such as schools and hospitals, as well as in private
> facilities such as restaurants. Paul himself quickly stated that he
> supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act and would have voted for it at the time.
>
> 'Jim Crow laws' were indeed laws, i.e., requirements that persons and
> businesses and government agencies must practice racial discrimination or
> face civil or criminal penalties.
>
> The Times editorial and other media pronouncements have perpetuated a
> drastic misreading of history and of government's role in ending racial
> discrimination in this nation. This history is far more nuanced than is
> widely assumed. At the center of the Jim Crow system lay the "Jim Crow
> laws." They were indeed laws, i.e., requirements that persons and businesses
> and government agencies must practice racial discrimination or face civil or
> criminal penalties. In other words, government had bolstered discrimination
> instead of suppressing it. For example, the famous 1896 Supreme Court
> decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed "separate but equal"
> treatment in railroad travel and eventually in other spheres such as public
> education, was about whether an 1890 state law in Louisiana requiring
> segregation was constitutional. The court said it was.
>
> The Jim Crow system did not start in the South. It first arose in the North
> (although the term dates only from the early 20th century) as a way to deal
> with free blacks, including ex-slaves. After the Civil War ended slavery in
> the South, some politicians rallied poor whites and newly freed blacks in
> support of economic populism, while others sought different forms of
> accommodation that stopped well short of systematic, state-enforced racial
> separation. It was only in the last two decades or so of the 19th
> century—especially in the 1890s—that the Southern states enacted laws to
> force a level of segregation that had not arisen spontaneously, creating the
> rigid legal apparatus that some people still remember from the first half of
> the 20th century. Far from forming the vanguard of segregation, businesses
> tended to lag, with the railroads particularly notable for their persistence
> in maintaining a substantial degree of integration until forced by law to
> halt their practices.
>
> The Jim Crow system did not start in the South. It first arose in the North.
>
> Thus by the 20th century, the Jim Crow system was vastly diminished in the
> North but had become thoroughly embedded in the South—through government
> action—despite the incentives of many business owners to reap the economies
> of scale and consequent profit from treating all customers alike. The
> central elements of this story plus much more were described in The Strange
> Career of Jim Crow<http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Career-Jim-Crow/dp/0195146905>,
> published in 1955 by the celebrated historian C. Vann Woodward. Later
> described by Martin Luther King as "the historical bible of the Civil Rights
> movement<http://c/Documents%20and%20Settings/joy.pavelski/Local%20Settings/Tem...>
> ," The Strange Career of Jim Crow had an extraordinary intellectual impact
> on the history profession (as I discovered as a graduate student in American
> history in the late 1960s). It should give pause to anyone who is ready to
> assume that government power is bound to do good when it reins in business
> for social purposes, but I fear that Vann Woodward's masterpiece has
> exercised too little influence in recent years. (Clay Risen provided a
> good retrospective
> assessment<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/07/17/strange_ca...>
> of Strange Career.)
>
> One might ask why it was that in 1964, a century after slavery and the Civil
> War had ended, there was still pervasive discrimination by fiat in most of
> the South.
>
> Thus Paul's instinctive doubts about government as the solution to most if
> not all racial problems are rooted in American history even if he did not
> cite that history in recent interviews. But one might ask why it was that in
> 1964, a century after slavery and the Civil War had ended, there was still
> pervasive discrimination by fiat in most of the South. I suspect the answer
> lies not in the minds of restaurant owners and their customers, but in
> voting rights.
>
> The end of the Civil War and the overwhelming Republican victory in the 1866
> election ushered in the Reconstruction Era, in which southern blacks gained
> the vote with the support of federal martial law, which kept white
> intimidation of blacks in check. But Reconstruction began to lose force
> after the 1868 election, and martial law was gradually relaxed in many
> states. In the 1876 presidential election, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes
> won by a single electoral vote, but the popular vote in three southern
> states was bitterly disputed. A commission created by Congress to adjudicate
> the disputed election eventually awarded the decisive electoral votes to
> Hayes. But this result—the "Compromise of 1877"—entailed a political deal
> between northern Republicans and southern Democrats whereby Hayes was
> allowed to become president in exchange for pulling the remaining federal
> troops from the old confederacy. As a result, the disenfranchisement of
> southern black voters through intimidation and discriminatory legislation
> was enabled to continue apace and was essentially complete by the 1890s.
> This left blacks powerless to head off the Jim Crow system of pervasive
> mandated segregation.
>
> The historic role and power of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was to affirm and
> enforce the right to vote for blacks in the face of entrenched bureaucratic
> resistance and the constant threat of violence. Proving counter-factuals is
> impossible, of course, but it seems safe to say that government-enforced
> racial discrimination in the South would not have lasted long after the 1965
> act took effect. After all, segregation by mandate had largely ceased to
> exist in the North, where black voting rights had long been respected to at
> least a tolerable degree—and blacks comprised a far smaller proportion of
> the electorate in the North than they would in the South after 1965. Black
> enfranchisement, a principle on which all libertarians would surely agree,
> arguably trumped narrower measures such as the public accommodations
> provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
>
> One particular political party should recall, painful as it is, that when
> people spoke for decades of the 'Solid South,' they referred to a reality in
> which Democratic politicians could be counted on to keep blacks from voting
> in the states of the former Confederacy.
>
> The Rand Paul brouhaha over governments and racism should subside quickly if
> anyone pays attention to the very mixed history of the relationship between
> government and racism. But four useful things should come of this episode.
> First, anyone who ...
>
> read more »
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