… is from pages 1191-1192 of my former GMU Econ colleague Jennifer Roback-Morse’s Fall 1984 University of Chicago Law Review paper, “Southern Labor Law in the Jim Crow Era: Exploitative or Competitive?” (footnote deleted):
The American layman has the impression that the economic oppression of blacks in the Jim Crow South was the result of a universal antipathy of whites towards blacks. He believes that whites were so powerful economically that their private preferences could be translated through the market into segregation and discrimination against blacks. Indeed, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be said to reflect this view in its prohibition against discrimination by private persons.
Perhaps the time has come to reject this view. There is hardly any question that legal sanctions were necessary to enforce discrimination against blacks. After all, if social pressure, economic power, and custom were sufficient, why did Southern whites bother to enact labor laws in order to extract what was wanted from blacks?
DBx: Yes. As Jenny shows here, and especially as Bob Higgs has extensively documented, market forces in the post-Civil War America – including in the American south – were going a long way toward liberating blacks from white prejudice and oppression. To ensure that such prejudice was able to have the oppressive effects that racist whites desired, whites required the intervention of the state – intervention that they unfortunately got in the form of Jim Crow legislation.
