I Apologize to My Fellow Americans

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-29-2017, 04:36 AM)Galen Wrote:

(01-29-2017, 04:04 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(01-29-2017, 03:19 AM)Galen Wrote: Actually up until the mid-twentieth century it was understood that people have the right choose what do to with their property and whom they might choose to do business with

Well, yes.  In the mid 20th Century, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP systematically went after the Jim Crow interpretation of the Constitution.  If libertarians are yearning for the good old days, I'll dissent.

Jim Crow was a set of laws passed by the southern states which mandated discrimination.  In short they were specific acts of the government to force businesses to discriminate.  You are now reaching Eric the Obtuse levels of ignorance.

At the end of the Reconstruction, there was a series of Supreme Court cases which systematically negated the Bill of Rights.  In the mid 20th Century, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP removed these cases from precedent.  Jim Crow indeed included state and local laws, but there was a federal element as well.

Plessy vs. Ferguson is the best known of these cases.  There were five of them in 1883. New Orleans & Texas Railway v Mississippi and Hall v DeCuir are also worth mentioning.

Encyclopedia Britanica Wrote:Civil Rights Cases, five legal cases that the U.S. Supreme Court consolidated (because of their similarity) into a single ruling on October 15, 1883, in which the court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional and thus spurred Jim Crow laws that codified the previously private, informal, and local practice of racial segregation in the United States. In an 8–1 decision, the landmark ruling struck down the critical provision in the Civil Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in public places (such as hotels, restaurants, theatres, and railroads), what would later be called “public accommodations.” The ruling barred Congress from remedying racial segregation and in effect legalized the notion of “separate but equal” (though the ruling did not use this language) that would predominate in American society until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was a devastating blow to the rights of African Americans. The five consolidated cases were United States v. Stanley, United States v. Ryan, United States v. Nichols, United States v. Singleton, and Robinson and wife v. Memphis & Charleston R.R. Co.

It is possible to question just who hasn't done their homework. During the Reconstruction, when the Black Republicans were attempting to integrate blacks into southern culture on a more or less equal basis, they had control of the state legislatures and US Congress. Equality laws were passed at both state and federal levels. After reconstruction, as Jim Crow was being established, rather than have the legislatures take these laws off the books, quite often the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. Some of these cases declared that the US Congress and state governments do not have the power to forbid segregation. In this time window at least, it was the Reconstruction legislatures pushing equality laws while later the Jim Crow era US Supreme Court quashed the equality laws and enabled segregation.

Again, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in the mid 20th Century pushed a series of court cases which quashed the above precedents.

Again, it wasn't a matter of governments forcing businessmen. The dominant southern culture of the time favored segregation. The segregationists were in charge of the state legislatures, and owned the businesses. It wasn't a question of one element forcing the other. The culture of the time placed race relations as very important, much more important than the difference in profitability of maintaining separate facilities.

You have a nice internally consistent alternate reality going. It just doesn't share all that much with real world history.