The passing of Rosa Parks has put the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s into the news. I wonder how long it will be, if ever, before the government admits the truth behind those times?
Had ending segregation been accomplished properly, the desired results would have been the same, millions of dollars would have been saved, lives would have been spared (including Dr. King’s) and, most importantly, hard feelings among both races which linger to this day would never have developed.
Segregation should have been eliminated by the federal government in 1875 – by the same federal government which installed it during so-called Reconstruction. The states could not have eliminated Jim Crow even if they had wanted to because they were federal laws, and the right of the states to overrule federal law had been lost, remember?
But given the next century of living under those laws in the South, which naturally evolved into favoring the white man, he became reluctant to give them up. (Truth be known, blacks sort of liked separate conditions, too. Most objected only to those instances and events which left a feeling of depravity.)
Only when economics dictated a second invasion of the South (entertainment industry, business and factories seeking non-union labor, professional sports, transportation, air conditioning, interstate highways, jet travel, etc.) did racial segregation become a deterrant to primarily Northern-based industrial progress. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, perhaps it was not a socio-cultural movement as much as it was an economically manipulated one.
The government, acting under lobbyist pressure, set it up for us to fight it out in the trenches instead of admitting their own mistake of nearly 100 years earlier. After they’d let the street fighting and demonstrations go on long enough, they drew in the Supreme Court when civil rights was never a judicial affair. It was legislative, and could have been resolved by any Congress at any time after 1875. But had Eisenhower’s Congress done it, imagine the (white, Southern) votes that would have cost the Republican party!
Most of us would like to think that it was a revolt, a humane, Black Power-inspired movement from the bottom up instead of a white-manipulated economic plot from the top down. But by applying common sense to known historical facts – and to economic pressures, advancements and demands of the post-WW II era – I wonder what really went on behind the scenes.
Bob Arnold
St. Peters