Counterfactual History – Geitner Simmons has an interesting post on his Regions of Mind today about “what if…” the Supremes had invalidated voting discrimination before school segregation. He quotes a thoughtful email from one of his readers suggesting that the course of recent Southern history would have been better, because the transformations in the South would have been brought about more from internal pressure than outside legal and political force. Simmons himself is somewhat skeptical.
Food for thought. But while we’re on this counterfactual diet, I’d like to suggest one more item to consider. If the Southern segregationists had been smarter, i.e., had not responded with “massive resistance” but with the more muted and flexible resistance followed occasionally in North Carolina and Virginia, integration would have been held at bay much longer, and the South and nation spared much trauma. Now, there’s nothing original about this observation, and because massive resistance gave us not only eventual integration, once it was forced by the courts, but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it’s a good thing ultimately that they were as self-defeatingly dumb as they were.
The above observation, as I said, is not original and probably not very controversial. However, let me take it one step further. If there had been no massive resistance to school integration, busing would not have emerged as a court-ordered response. And busing was the first civil rights remedy to “take race into account.” In many respects the later arguments for affirmative action and race preferences merely expanded upon the arguments that were used to justify busing (hiring preferences have been described as “economic busing”).
Thus, in this scenario: no massive resistance, no affirmative action.
