Today’s Best of the Web has a bit of fun with Thomas Sowell’s “Rosa Parks and History”. Dr. Sowell, seeking to emphasize that racism in public transportation was a relatively late Jim Crow development, writes that “racially segregated seating on streetcars and buses in the South did not go back for centuries”, prompting James Taranto’s cheeky, “Maybe Because Streetcars and Buses Weren’t Invented Yet”.
Leaving such byplay aside, though, the column makes a key point about the causes and cures of racist practices.
Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which 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.
Then Southern legislatures began passing laws making segregated seating compulsory. Charles W. Chesnutt’s fine novel, The Marrow of Tradition, published in 1901, includes a scene in which the novel law is enforced for the first time against a Negro doctor. But, as Dr. Sowell notes, blacks were not the only opponents of this state action.
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.
These tactics delayed the enforcement of Jim Crow seating laws for years in some places. Then company employees began to be arrested for not enforcing such laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with jail if he didn’t comply.
None of this resistance was based on a desire for civil rights for blacks. It was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of thisaffront. . . .
People who decry the fact that businesses are in business “just to make money” seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
In other words, an unregulated economy did not generate the unfairness against which Rosa Parks protested. Rather, governmental disregard of the principles of free enterprise made it possible to a white racist majority to impose its prejudices on the owners of transit lines, who were forbidden to maximize profits and contract freely with their customers. Self-interest isn’t a cure-all for bigotry, but, as this bit of history shows, it can be a powerful preventative.
Further reading: Anthony R. Bradley, “The Moral Legacy of Rosa Parks”:
The black America that focuses on financial independence, entrepreneurship, education, and a resurgence of black pastoral leadership will remain, for the most part, outside of government control. Truly free blacks are those who are free to make their own morally formed choices without government involvement. What is needed to continue Parks’ legacy is to free blacks disempowered by government surrogacy, and restore their dignity through a resurgence of black religious leadership, a focus on education, and a renewal of marriage and family. These were the pillars of the civil-rights movement and are the principles that will bring true liberation to those blacks left behind.
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