One example illustrates this principle. In the State of Kentucky, public schools were often, although not always, segregated in the late 1800s. Private schools had the opportunity to be integrated — including both secular institutions and parochial religious schools.
One private school in particular — Berea College — took advantage of that opportunity and functioned in a fully desegregated manner. In November 1903, a member of the Kentucky legislature, Carl Day, happened to be on the campus of Berea College. He witnessed firsthand how Black and White students socialized as equals.
Carl Day returned to the state legislature, conferred with his fellow members of the Democratic Party, and introduced a bill which would require all schools — public and private — to be segregated. The president of the Democratic Club, J.M. Early, gave speeches in favor of this proposed legislation.
Administrators, professors, and students from Berea College spoke in opposition to the bill, but to no avail.
In January 1904, Carl Day’s bill was passed by the legislature, and in March 1904, it was signed into law by Governor John Crepps Wickliffe Beckham. Governor Beckham was known as “J.C.W. Beckham” in many reports.
Left to their own devices, the people of Kentucky were content to have integrated institutions of higher learning. But the government imposed segregation. As historian Benjamin Shapiro writes:
Segregation was governmentally imposed, not socially imposed. The whole reason that government was necessary was so that those who would not abide by social racism were forced to do so. As black economist Walter Williams states, “whenever there is a law on the books, one’s immediate suspicion should be that the law is there because not everyone would behave according to the law’s specifications.”
Walter Williams goes on to identify parallels between “Jim Crow Laws” in the United States and “Apartheid” in South Africa. In both cases, society had no desire for complete and legally enforced segregation. In both cases, individuals in the private sector were willing to violate the government’s demands for segregation.
Racism requires the existence of government regulations in order to do its damage. Without such regulations, ordinary women and men are happy to do business with anyone of any race, if that person can strike a good deal. Walter Williams writes:
The bottom line is that racists cannot trust free markets to racially discriminate. Free markets, with their dispersion of power, have little respect for race. Racial solidarity could not prevent white South African businessmen from contravening laws that banned them from hiring blacks in jobs "reserved" for whites. In the U.S., Jim Crow laws were frequently ignored. In South Africa, the U.S. and elsewhere, the private desire for profits and other personal gain challenged racial loyalty. Racists need the force of government to have success.
After the “Reconstruction” Era began to wind down, around 1877, the Democratic Party in many of the states in the South were still bitterly angry that slavery had been abolished and that the Democratic Party had lost the war. Walter Williams explains that these states “enforced some form of segregation through what were known as Jim Crow laws.”
While American society was content to embrace integration and desegregation, historian Benjamin Shapiro explains that “segregation was imposed governmentally.”
The suffering imposed on African-American in South after the Civil War, up until the relief provided by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, was imposed not by American society, but rather by governments which had gained too much power over the daily lives of ordinary people.
