Bigotry's Half Life

At least there's some intelligent discussion of this topic.  My bottom line - without government's backing of bigotry via law, and if not for the Federal Government's failure to enforce it's charter to defend the rights of the individual, the CRA of 64 would not have been necessary.  Negative unintended consequences of govt intervention always becomes the justification for additional govt intervention.

"But while the libertarian argument against anti-discrimination laws is certainly not racist, it sometimes seems uncomfortably nave (in 1964 or today) about the social realities of Jim Crow. As some strong champions of free markets, such as legal scholar Richard Epstein, have pointed out, racial segregation and discrimination by private businesses in the South was not simply the result of owners' personal choices but of powerful societal pressure as well as coercion by state governments. Businesses that refused to discriminate were targeted for officially sanctioned or condoned harassment and intimidation.

Would "whites only" business practices have crumbled fast, as some libertarians believe, if the federal government had limited itself to dismantling the public foundations of segregation? Or was bigotry too pervasive, too deeply entrenched in minds and morals? The latter seems more likely. Moreover, for generations this private bigotry had been not only enabled but fostered by public policy, from slavery onward. Writing in The New Republic, John McWhorter, an insightful, iconoclastic black commentator, defends Paul's and Stossel's right to express their unorthodox views but also asserts that "the social rejection of racism was driven in large part by the head start, authority, finality, and even the drama of the legal banning of segregation.""

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/06/11/racism_civil_rights_and_libertarianism_105934.html