Written on February 11th, 2012
Edited in April 2014
The
purpose of the Civil Rights Act was to provide civil rights to
blacks. Civil, as in rights relating to their participation in
government (like voting rights), not their right to tell employees
and management of private establishments how to conduct their
business.
That
is, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came along. This act had ten
provisions in it. Nine of them dealt with real civil rights having to
do with blacks' participation in government. The other provision
required states to prohibit businesses which serve the public from
discriminating against patrons on the basis of race.
This
provision did not define the difference between "public"
and "private", and subsequent court rulings on the law
simply assumed that all businesses serve the public (which I
associate with government, i.e., "the public sector", not
private businesses), and declared federal jurisdiction on the grounds
that any business can be construed to have some "substantial
effect" on interstate commerce, which the federal government has
(way too broadly) asserted itself to have the ability to regulate.
Not
all southern businessmen segregated customers by race or refused to
hire based on race because they were racists. But all of them did so
because it was the law; specifically, the Jim Crow law. A law,
created by governments, not by the private sector. The reason Jim
Crow laws were maintained is because racists intimidated city council
members into codifying them.
Providing blacks with civil rights to vote and
participate in government like all other citizens would have
permitted them to vote that the governments of their states to
prohibit discrimination in private businesses, and the federal
government wouldn't have had to breach the Constitution the way it
did in the Heart of Atlanta v. U.S. ruling which resulted from the
1964 CRA.
There
is no civil right that allows someone to compel a business to
associate with him. The liberty which the Declaration of Independence
guarantees to us means the freedom of association; that is, the
freedom to associate, and the freedom not to associate. If you can
compel someone to associate with you in a way that violates the
Constitution, you are making someone serve you against their will,
i.e., involuntarily. It's involuntary servitude, which is prohibited
by the 13th Amendment, which the law regards as on-par with slavery.
Indeed, this is the defense which the plaintiff used in the case of
Heart of Atlanta v. U.S., which I referenced above.
The
same law that prohibits businesses from discriminating against blacks
and segregate patrons in order to protect whites can also be used to
prevent businesses from segregating in order to protect black patrons
from white patrons. If government has eradicated all private-sector
discrimination - as one of my past UW professors has claimed - how
can businesses still legally hire bouncers and security guards to
choose which potential patrons enter and which must leave?
For
more entries on civil rights, slavery, segregation, and
discrimination, please
visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/06/title-ii-of-civil-rights-act-of-1964.html
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/06/title-ii-of-civil-rights-act-of-1964.html
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