Review & Outlook: Government and Segregation - WSJ.com: "Racial hatreds were—and often still are—rooted in historical and individual prejudice. But that prejudice was so destructive before the Civil War because it was harnessed to state-imposed slavery. And it became so pernicious again in the post-Reconstruction South because states enforced it through arrests and prosecution—or, in the case of the KKK, by doing nothing as blacks were harassed, beaten and killed. Bull Connor was not a libertarian.
Federal laws had to be passed, and federal enforcement imposed, precisely because the national government was the only force powerful enough to break state-enforced segregation. It's a point worth recalling when the President invokes government as a source of unalloyed political virtue."
H/T
Glenn.
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