In contrast to Colbert I. King’s screed in the Post, which I write about here, Thomas Sowell’s column in today’s Washington Times tells the real story behind the segregation that Rosa Parks was fighting.
Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn it was government that created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.
These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit — and you don’t make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about.
It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.
It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn’t care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote.
In other words, it wasn’t just racist whites that segregated the races; it was racist whites using the power of the state to force a result that they could not have obtained through the free market. Thanks to judges who eviscerated the 14th and 15th Amendments of any meaning, blacks in the South had been denied any real political power and it was exceedingly simple for them to be denied whatever rights remained.
In fact, racism was bad for business and the streetcar operators knew it:
The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. Private owners of streetcar, bus and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts.
So much for the image of the evil businessman huh ? The resistance of businessmen to the racist demands of their white patrons is what required the intervention of the law.
Initially, segregation meant that whites could not sit in the black section of a bus any more than blacks could sit in the white section. But whites who were forced to stand when there were still empty seats in the black section objected. That’s when the rule was imposed that blacks had to give up their seats to whites
Legal sophistries by judges “interpreted” the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equal treatment out of existence. Judicial activism can go in any direction.
That’s when Rosa Parks came in, after more than half a century of political chicanery and judicial fraud.
And its a good thing she did. The Washington Post is reporting today that Rosa Parks will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, the first woman and only the second African-American to receive this honor. For standing up against the power of a law that was so manifestly wrong, its an honor she deserves. One only hopes that more people would read Sowell’s column so that her true legacy is not forgotten.
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