1866 Civil Rights Act A descriptive point & somewordsabouttheelephant in ...

[Mark Graber]

1. Actually for nearly 100 years, private violence and intimidation were
exceptionally effective.  

2. Is Tulsa an urban area for purposes of analysis?  Springfield,
Illinois?  Cicero?  You get the idea.

3. Howard Ball in his book on UNITED STATES V. PRICE points out that
infiltration was also used to great effect.

4. Note also the various strategies aimed at gutting unions, which
included infiltration.  And as the IWW demonstrates, why inflitrate when
you can outlaw (see Herndon v. Georgia in this sense).

Mark A. Graber

>>> <DavidEBernstein at aol.com> 06/11/07 2:23 PM >>>
 
The whole South was not the Deep South, and urban areas had different
mores  
than rural ones.  The very existence of various organizations in places 
like 
Atlanta that would have never been permitted in rural Mississippi is an 

example.  And the point is not that antidiscrimination laws were  
considered and 
then rejected on constittutional grounds, but that it would have  never
occured 
to anyone circa 1930 to use antidiscrimination laws as a weapon, 
because the 
idea that the government could just declare a private membership  
organization to be a a "place of public accommodation" open to all
comers was  simply 
outside the cognitive map of the times.  I'm sure many whites also 
simply 
thought they could keep blacks "under control" by using private 
violence and 
intimidation against any organizations that threatened the status  quo,
but they 
turned out to be wrong.