| | In this segment, Maddow criticizes Rand Paul for defending the right of private businesses to practice racial discrimination. She refers to the notorious Southern lunch counters that had a policy of not serving blacks and which were the site of the famous sit-in demonstrations in the late '50's. She points out how harmful to blacks such a policy of discrimination was, and expresses astonishment that Paul would defend its legality.
Unfortunately, Paul fails to stress that the reason these lunch counters had such a policy is that they were forced by the Jim Crow laws to segregate their facilities. Here is an example of one such law from Birmingham Alabama that was typical of those which were eventually over-turned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
SECTION 369. SEPARATION OF RACES
It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place of the serving of food in the city at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.
Since restaurants and lunch counters didn't have the money (or didn't want to incur the expense) to construct separate doors and partitions as required by law, they settled for serving the race with the greatest number of potential customers, namely, whites.
If whites and blacks weren't willing to sit together in a restaurant or if the restaurant wasn't willing to serve them, then the Jim Crow laws mandating segregated facilities wouldn't have been necessary. It is therefore reasonable to infer that without these laws, restaurants would have found it profitable to serve both blacks and whites at the same lunch counters.
So even if it were legal for a private restaurant to practice racial discrimination, it is unlikely even in the old South that they would have done so, since they would undoubtedly have lost business.
In fact, Maddow could just as well argue that an avowed racist shouldn't be allowed to run for president, since he would wreak havoc on the country if elected. But since it unlikely that such a person ever would be elected, it is foolish to eviscerate free elections just to guard against that possibility.
By the same token, since it is equally unlikely that a private restaurant that refused to serve blacks would survive, it is just as foolish to eviscerate private property rights in order to guard against that possibility.
- Bill
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