Actually, it was crammed down a lot of people’s throats against their will. I rode that bus not in Mississippi, but in Louisville, Kentucky - and not in 1954, but in 1974 (by the way, I was a white girl, coming on a bus from a white neighborhood into a formerly mostly white school - that didn’t keep the loons from throwing rocks). The 1964 Civil Rights Act wouldn’t have passed had it not been done in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination (much like the homeland security acts that got passed in the wake of 9/11). It was seen as a legacy to Kennedy.
Lots of white people supported Civil Rights legislation, and lots of them opposed it, and not just in Mississippi. There were highly contentious Civil Rights marches in Chicago, for example.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten Lyndon Johnson’s quote after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act: “We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation.”
So why was legislation necessary at all (which I believe was the point of the Ron Paul thread)? If the popular movement was enough, why was there even an issue to be decided by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Why was there a need for a Voting Rights Act of 1965? Why was interracial marriage still an issue by 1967, when Loving v. Virginia reached the Supreme Court in 1967.
You can argue that legislation is unnecessary, that change is inevitable, but what’s your timeline for that? A decade? A century? A millenium?
Yes, it was crammed down a lot of people’s throats. But those people who didn’t like it weren’t a majority, except in some places.
The civil rights laws might have been passed as a legacy for Kennedy, but Kennedy himself never pushed civil rights. It wasn’t passed in the face of overwhelming opposition, it was passed in the face of vociferous but minority opposition. And that opposition had been dwindling for decades, there’s a reason the civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s instead of the 1920s.
If enlightened government officials passed the civil rights laws despite majority opposition, why didn’t they do so back in the 20s, or back in 1890? Because back then almost all government officials were racists by our standards. And why were they racists? Because the country was racist, and the voters elected racists.
So what changed? Well, by the 1960s racism was a lot weaker, and even white people who didn’t want Negroes moving in next door didn’t think it was fair to deny them the right to vote. It’s not like people are either racist or non-racist, there’s all sorts of levels of racism. And by the 1960s Jim Crow laws were embarrassements. And remember that while segregation was supported by lots of voters in the south, that didn’t include black people, who couldn’t vote. If you included blacks, suddenly segregation and Jim Crow are a lot less popular.
Who said legislation was unnecessary? I’m saying the legislation was broadly popular, not that it was unnecessary. Most people are against murder, that doesn’t mean laws against murder are unnecessary.
Despise America? I think you realize that this is the best there is at the moment. But that’s not clear. What country is more just than the US? I await a reasonable answer.
I think there are at least a couple dozen countries that are within the same ballpark. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, and so on. Which you prefer is a matter of taste.
The problem with eradicating Jim Crow laws was that they were a regional phenomenon. It may indeed be true that a majority of the country was coming around to support equal treatment and civil rights for blacks and other minorities, but that shift in attitudes would not have brought social change to the whole nation on its own, because a majority in the South still supported discrimination. Civil rights legislation and court decisions were necessary to kick-start the social transformation of the South.
I think this is unrelated, though. Lynchings went down every decade, ever since the 1880’s, while blacks were climbing in prosperity and education. The government was simply following the will of the people. Social attitudes were changing rapidly. Ironically, this had nearly zip to do with the baby boom, whose peeps were not really important or organized until late in the decade, and even then not very influential. Rather, I believe it was an outgrowth of the 1940’s and the unity brought on by wartime sufferings and combat.
These days, it’s hard to recall because a black underclass has formed, often opposing their own education and embracing a somewhat… haphazard life as government quasi-dependants. This did not emerge until Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, which split black America in two.
Already quoted right in the post you are complaining about.
The same quote as above. Do you even read what you write, or is it copy-and-pasted from somewhere?
You are of course ignoring my point that getting better fed is becoming more like the US for such places.
That’s the entire core of your argument. You can’t claim that a tyranny is just as good as freedom without simultaneously implicitly claiming that the opinion of the oppressed doesn’t matter. This is classic apologist rhetoric; claiming that, say, slavery in the Old South was just a different value system, which pretends to be a tolerant position while in reality it takes the side of the slavers and dismisses the desires of the slaves.
Bad example. Lunching started going down dramatically after the Civil War, then jumped up dramatically in the 1890s with the passage of the Jim Crow laws. They declined after that (although not steadily – they stayed about the same when the Klan re-formed), but rose again in the 1960s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lynchings-graph.png
As James Loewen pointed out in his books, race relations didn’t simply go from “rotten” during the Civil War to “gradually better and better” in the time afterwards. They got significantly worse for quite a while in between, after a bright period after the War. And you can’t discount the actions of a very few powerful people in going against the supposed will of the people and making things worse for a long period after – Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the US government during his time in office, and it took decades to reverse that action.
If you are referencing my question about other countries as just as the US:
Which of these provides freedom of speech to the level we do. I know it’s not Britain or Canada or Germany. France, IIRC, has a list of official names for children born there. I don’t know about the others. I’m not slamming those countries. But anyplace that can gag you for speaking your mind is lacking a basic tenet of ‘justice’.
I had no idea the mid-day meal was so affected by these events!
Huh? Kennedy didn’t push for Civil Rights? His reaction to the Birmingham Children’s March, off the top of my head, would say otherwise.
We are STILL reeling from the political schisms that the Civil Rights act caused - it made Southern Democrats into Republicans, changed the nature of both political parties, brought about Nixon’s election in the “Southern Strategy.”
I would say that America without slavery is probably a better society than an America with slavery.
Its not that America is the ideal you should strive for. Different strokes for different folks and all that but there are SOME universal truths neh?
Apartheid might have worked well for some people in South Africa but I think most people would agree that despite all the problems associated with removing apartheid, South Africa is a better osciety today than it was back then.
Slavery worked very well for most of civilized history but I think we can agree that the world is probably a better place without it.
Women walking around dressed like whores might not seem like progress to some people but objectively isn’t the notion of equal rights (or at least soemthing close) for women an objective good?
I’m not claiming things were always rosily-more-perfect every year, but the decade-by-decade figures show vast improvement. Nothing in life is ever a solid march to glory, but there’s no denying the economic and social improvements for blacks, particularly in the supposedly racist and stodgy 50’s.
Secondly, I wouldn’t use Loewen as a support for anything mroe important than an umbrella stand. And then only if he was dead and stuffed first. He’s always half-full of his political or social biases and it’s better to just use another source, sincethere’s no knowing how far selective he’s being. I was mildly suprised when I first read his book (keep in mind, I was barely doub,le-digits) and outright pissed when I realized jsut how selective he’d been in his arguments and evidence.
Care to run that by us again?
OK, before we go any further, let’s correct this mistake. A mistake that everyone else in this thread seems to have accepted. RP did not say that the Civil Rights Act was not necessary. He said the one provision (out of 10) that applied to Private Property was unconstitutional. So, even in his “extreme” view, we would have struck down the Jim Crow laws, but allowed private businesses to discriminate.
I think that with legal segregation gone that private segregation would not be too far behind. Sure, there would be a few holdouts, but I think they would be in the minority. With the integration of sports and entertainment (that happened pretty much without government help in the private sector), it would be a small leap to imagine the rest of public accommodations following suit.
I trust you’d be perfectly content to live in Nazi Germany or Taliban-era Afghanistan, then. Everything’s interchangable, after all.
Blows mine too. I read about the marriage thing recently. It’s so alien to my everyday life that I wondered if the numbers were interpreted funny. I haven’t heard any criticism of them though.