Crispy: “the very fact that a group would have ‘diffuse, locally based structures’ is extremely troubling to the naacp. i suppose now they will be attacking … the civil rights movement of the 1960s, for being too local and diffuse.”

Well, hell, why not? That basically was their criticism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s back during the 1960s — when the NAACP was constantly ragging on sit-in groups and then SNCC for not having “structure” (meaning unitary centralized chain of command) and for being too locally-driven, which supposedly led to adventurism and getting local movements into all kinds of messes that NAACP chapters and the Legal Defense Fund would then have to clean up after. (Hence, e.g., the recriminations over the fizzle-out in Albany, efforts to shut SNCC reps out of civil rights “unified leadership” summits and fundraising events, etc.) To abandon this proud tradition of pissing and moaning about diffuse, locally based movements, and those factions of the civil rights movement of the 1960s that actually got some shit done here and there, would mean abandoning all kinds of time-honored NAACP traditions. (Of course I refer here to the NAACP central command. NAACP local chapters did all kinds of courageous work alongside the direct-action movement, and generally didn’t waste time wagging fingers at SNCC’s lack of “structure.”)

mythago:

But Boaz’s point wasn’t just about the Gilded Age; the problem wasn’t “1880s, good/bad” but the kind of privileged perspective that grants the luxury of viewing civil rights as an abstract question.

Yes, I agree. Boaz isn’t the first to raise that point within debates about this kind of Old Republic nostalgia, but his article did do a good job of articulating the worry.

Boaz noted that this not only cripples the validity of Hornberger’s analysis, but it cripples Libertarianism as a philosophy;

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by “libertarianism as a philosophy,” and who and what you take to be representative of it. I certainly agree that it causes some serious problems for some parts of libertarianism as a political movement–it goes a long way towards explaining, for example, the endless stupid problems that the Libertarian Party or quasi-libertarian Constitutionalists like Rand Paul get themselves into, for example. I’m not interested in trying to save either the Libertarian Party or Rand Paul’s campaign, since I consider them to be wastes of time and organizing energy, but, looking at the social movement more broadly, the sooner that sort of privileged bunkum becomes unpopular and gets you laughed at or shown the door, the better.

And while that problem isn’t limited to Libertarians, it’s a serious problem and it’s why Rand shot himself in the foot. He doesn’t need to think about civil rights much, so he didn’t have a deeper answer

Sure, I agree with you about all that. Like I said at the outset, my interest here is certainly not in defending Rand Paul or the viewpoint from which he understands libertarianism. It’s just to point out that more radical and consistent forms of libertarianism are on offer, and that “the idea at the core of libertarianism” doesn’t have the conservative implications that Jeff Fecke suggested, if your notions of consensual social organization are less constricted (and more closely based on the history of the direct-action sit-in movement itself) than either Paul’s or Maddow’s.

Myca:

I meant it to modify the former and was clumsy in my construction. Sorry about that

O.K., no problem. I’m sorry to belabor the point on something you didn’t mean to say in the first place, then.

It’s as if there was a high-profile extended argument among online liberals over whether or not the USSR ought to be our model for an ideal society. You’d find that disturbing, right?

Myca, I’ve clocked at least as many hours in “Progressive” and radical Left circles in my life as I have in libertarian circles. (It comes with being an Anarchist.) I quite meant it when I mentioned hearing similarly shitty things in a lot of political circles. For example, back when I was more involved with the leftish end of Democratic Party politics, I remember being directly involved in debates with “Progressive” dudes who were convinced that Progressives should stop worrying so much about Roe v. Wade, because abortion rights are “divisive” and taking a stand against forced pregnancy was allegedly driving “working-class” voters (by which they meant working-class white men) to vote Republican. I also recall several conversations, especially around 2002-2005 or so, in which “Progressives” explicitly pined for the days when the Democratic Party was “a national party” and hoped for a day when it would “be a national party again.” (Like it was back in the good ol’ days from 1932-1964, when the national Democratic Party maintained its position by supporting Jim Crow parties throughout the “Solid South,” and the Democratic leadership included august statesmen like Theodore Bilbo, Jim Eastland, Richard Russell, George Wallace, J. Strom Thurmond, et al.)

I did find these debates disturbing, and did my best to call them out on it at the time. So did a number of the people I knew through various feminist blogs. This is old news, no? Calling out this kind of wack privilege is unfortunately something that happens a lot pretty much wherever you go in political circles.

Jeremy P:

Government in itself is neither good nor bad it is just a tool.

So’s an atom bomb. Some tools have fewer productive uses than others.

Yeah; I think that Paul's obvious evasiveness and non sequiturs are a perfect example of how political strategery actually obliterates anything like sensible communication. If he had his head screwed on straight, it would have been obvious to him that the sit-in movement works in favor of the position that you don't need federal laws to win civil rights victories -- if it didn't occur to him spontaneously, it should at least have occurred to him when she repeatedly bashed him over the head with it. But of course, if he had his head screwed on straight, he wouldn't be running for United States Senator. So. We end up with this rigged conversation in which both sides play off of each other to obliterate the real issue.

Yeah; I think that Paul's obvious evasiveness and non sequiturs are a perfect example of how political strategery actually obliterates anything like sensible communication. If he had his head screwed on straight, it would have been obvious to him that the sit-in movement works in favor of the position that you don't need federal laws to win civil rights victories -- if it didn't occur to him spontaneously, it should at least have occurred to him when she repeatedly bashed him over the head with it. But of course, if he had his head screwed on straight, he wouldn't be running for United States Senator. So. We end up with this rigged conversation in which both sides play off of each other to obliterate the real issue.

Mike D.:

Simply staying put when the owner has made it clear he or she wished you to leave seems to me to be sufficient to constitute a violation, though I admit I need to think more on the matter.

Well, I’ve held the same position as you on de minimis trespass before, so I’m sympathetic to the worry, although I’m no longer persuaded by it.

Would help to think about some concrete cases? For example, do you think that people who slip into talks at conferences (say, the APA) without paying the registration fee are violating the rights of the conference organizers (who have stated clearly ahead of time that the sessions are only supposed to be open to those who register and pay up)? Or does the lack of an attempt to enforce mean that they have effectively abandoned claims against freeriding audience members?

(Note that this is actually directly analogous to some of the sit-ins: many sit-ins ended without any arrests at all. The protesters were refused service, but police often weren’t called in to arrest them unless and until white thugs came in to terrorize or assault the protesters. At which point the black students would be arrested by the police, not for trespassing, but for “disorderly conduct.”)

**Sheldon,**

The goal was to make the owner’s life so unpleasant that he would relent and integrate. Fine. But are the tactics likely to be effective against someone who wants to integrate but fears for his life and property if he does so?

It’s hard to know how many store-owners were in that position, but briefly, I think the answer is yes. For two reasons. Firstly, because it’s not like the Civil Rights Act itself instantly changed local culture or eliminated the threat of retaliation from the Klan or WCC. (* In a lot of towns the threat of economic blackballing through the WCC was actually more of a threat to white business owners than the threat of physical retaliation from the KKK.) Death and firebombing are also a lot more unpleasant than a Title II lawsuit; at most, what Title II and Title VII did was to give intimidated closet integrationists a plausible excuse to tell the local terror groups — “Well, it’s not that I want to let black people in, you know; but I run a business and I need to follow the law to keep it” — which might make them less likely to retaliate, and also strength in numbers — if all businesses are moving to integrate at once, it’s harder to single any one out for retaliation. But the economic and social pressure created by the sit-in movement also created plausible excuses — “It’s these damn students; I can’t run a business if they’re taking up seats!” — and often allowed an opportunity for a lot of downtown merchants to buck Jim Crow at once — in Nashville, for example, the NSM protests led to an agreement from all the downtown business owners.

Second:

I don’t approve of the CRA64, but there is a sense in which it “worked”; the culture changed relatively quickly,

I agree that the culture changed quickly, but I don’t think that the Civil Rights Act was the reason for that. There’s more than one way to change a culture, and I think the deliberate confrontation, the assertion of black dignity, the practice of social solidarity, and the firestorm of conversations that the grassroots movement provoked, were the social forces that actually brought about cultural change in Southern towns. (See, for example, the decisive role that the cultural pressure from the sit-in movement — and a single question posed by Diane Nash — played in desegregating downtown Nashville in 1960.) Not the Civil Rights Act, which was a late development and which only came about because of the huge cultural shift in progress, not vice versa.

(If anything, tended to *stifle* efforts at cultural change, by redirecting the fight away from moral arguments in the streets and neighborhoods, into legalistic arguments in the federal courts and the Equal Opportunity bureaucracy.)

Rand Paul is a liar and a politician. (But I repeat myself.) However, in the interest of fairness, I watched that interview, and he didn’t say that he was against “lunch counters being desegregated.” What he said is that he’s against the use of federal antidiscrimination laws to desegregate lunch counters.

The second position implies the first only if there’s no other way to desegregate lunch counters except for getting a federal law so you can go hire a lawyer and file a Title II lawsuit against the department store in federal court. But of course there are other ways besides that kind of bureaucratic bullshit. Nothing that Rand Paul said about Title II or Title VII would rule out the use of grassroots organization and nonviolent direct action, of exactly the sort that was already being used effectively to dismantle Jim Crow in towns throughout the South, when the a bunch of grandstanding white Democrats decided to rush in and take all the credit.

Besides movie theaters and windshield annoyances, I also ought to mention sitting in on APA talks without having paid the registration fee for the conference.

Also, in my previous comment I meant to add: whether you’re raising the Rothbardian worry that Roderick raises, or the kind of worry that I mentioned in my comments will have some effect on what you can say about the choice of tactics. If the considerations have to do with the claims created, or not created, by a de minimis trespass, then it matters that the students in the sit-in movement maintained disciplined nonviolence (e.g., they went limp when the cops came to pull them away; they didn’t try to fight with the owners in order to stay). If you’re appealing to the Rothbardian considerations (which I think are also legitimate, although I bracketed them for the sake of discussion), it’s not clear that even matters. If the nominal owner is not a real owner, and has no right to evict, then the protestors would have a right to physically fight off attempts to force them out. Make of that whatever you will.

Mike D:

I’m sure you have a well articulated answer for this already, Charles, but can you explain how sit-ins were not trespassing, and did not violate the NAP?

Well, what Roderick said.

But also, even if we bracket the question about the legitimacy of ownership, I think that there’s a good case to be made that sit-ins are a legitimate form of social protest. There’s a long, complicated story about the various different moments of what was going on in a sit-in protest, and how this affects the rights of each of the parties concerned (business-owner, sit-in protestor, and the police called in to haul them off), all of which I’d like to take the time to work out in more detail, but for now, the tentative, short version is that I think what the sitters-in did was a form of de minimis trespass, like shoving ads under someone’s windshield wiper or smuggling your own gummi bears into a movie theater, which doesn’t count as an invasion of the rights of the owner unless you go on to use physical force to try to stay when the owner tries to make you leave.

No matter what the form of trespass, the owner of the property has a right to demand that they leave, and they have a right to have the protestors forcibly removed (within limits of proportionality) if they won’t. But if the protestors aren’t causing any lasting damage to the facilities, aren’t trying to physically fight the owners or the police in order to stay where they are, etc., then I don’t think that there is any act of force that would give the owners a claim for anything beyond the simple removal of the protestor from the scene. So my view is that sit-in protestors weren’t violating rights or moral duties by sitting down, and that lunch-counter owners weren’t violating rights by evicting them, but were violating a moral duty (while evicting was within their rights, what they ought to have done is to take the opportunity to abandon their stupid racist lunch-counter policy).

If the form of intrusion on the business’s property were more intrusive or destructive (e.g. by barging into closed shops or doing some kind of physical damage to the property or by physically blocking other patrons from sitting at the counter, or what have you), then my judgment on the matter might change. Of course, that wouldn’t change my view of the rest of the social movement (e.g. the organized boycotts and public pressure campaigns) that surrounded the sit-in movement.

12:31 PM: s not like if only the mean old racist authoritarian president of the CSA or whoever had said "alrighty I guess y'all can fraternize with coloreds if'n ya wanter" that segregation would've disappeared; it took the violence of the federal government to do that,

Well, except that Woolworth's lunch counters weren't desegregated by Title II.

They were mainly desegregated by the social and economic pressure created by the student sit-in movement and the boycotts that accompanied it. Years before the Civil Rights Act even existed. The Greensboro Woolworth's was desegregated in July 1960, and the Nashville Student Movement won a desegregation agreement from all the downtown merchants in Nashville in May 1960. If they had waited around for the Feds to show up with Title II, they would have been waiting at least four years. (Or, more likely, they would have been waiting forever, because the cultural changes created by their direct action were a major part of what made it even possible for later legislative actions to get through the Democratic Congress.)

1:12 PM: The protests were intended to force a change in corporate policy (which was ultimately successful), they were not aimed at changing laws.

I agree, which is exactly why it's a ridiculous example for Maddow to try to use to prove her point against Paul. The sit-ins are relevant to the conversation, but in exactly the opposite of the way that Maddow (and apparently also Paul, because Paul is a moron and a politician) seem to think: they are a remarkable example of how a grassroots social movement succeeded in dismantling segregation in private businesses without the assistance of federal antidiscrimination laws.