And Then, In 1850, Some Friends Got Together and Created a Social Custom Requiring the Return of Fugitive Slaves from Free States
I've been traveling, and missed an extraordinary May 21 editorial in the New York Times critiquing Rand Paul's bumbling responses to questions about racial justice. Take a moment to read the whole thing -- it's short -- and see if it doesn't leave your mouth hanging open. But here's the astonishing heart of the thing:
Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order.
It is a theory of liberty with roots in America’s creation, but the succeeding centuries have shown how ineffective it was in promoting a civil society. 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.
So the problem in the Jim Crow South was that lunch counters privately refused to serve black customers in unsegregated facilities; the issue at hand in the century after the Civil War was the"freedom of a few people to discriminate." And government power abolished Jim Crow, which has suddenly become a set of social customs that existed outside of law.
But of course, the American history of racial oppression and brutality is a history of government. The founding document of the republic privileged slavery as a lawful institution, and government served that institution for another seventy-eight years after that. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free all American slaves; it freed slaves in states engaged in rebellion.
Even when the 13th Amendment finally abolished chattel slavery, de facto slavery continued under the auspices of government, as the Freedmen's Bureau and the federal army occupying the South used vagrancy laws to drive former slaves back to the control of their old masters. (ADDED LATER: See also the repudiation of Special Field Order 15, one of the great betrayals in American history.)
After the abandonment of Reconstruction,"redeemed" southern governments rebuilt structures of oppression through law and the institutions of government. Jim Crow laws were laws; the regime of racial segregation was not simply a set of social choices. That guy standing in the schoolhouse door? He was a governor. Why is that so hard to figure out?
Nor was this use of state power in the service of racial oppression merely a story of southern state and local government. As president, for example, the great Progressive Woodrow Wilson harshly segregated the agencies of the federal government.
But in the pages of the New York Times, racial oppression is a private act, and government is progress embodied.
It was only government power that established and maintained slavery and Jim Crow, neither of which would have been created by a purely free market.