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Civil Rights and the Great Society · Saberian History Lectures

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All right, so we left off with the assassination of Kennedy and with the rise of the Civil
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Rights Movement of the 1960s.
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Now one of the things that you need to recognize is that the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s
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was drastically different from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s in both style and in
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order.
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Now one of the things that you have going on in the 1950s is the order of things.
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So think about this for a moment.
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In the 1950s, which came first?
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Agitation, litigation, or legislation?
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LITIGATION.
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LITIGATION.
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Before our contemporaneous to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, you had the sweat case.
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So you have sweat versus painter in 1950.
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Then you had the Brown case, Brown versus Borden in 1954.
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Then you have 1957 legislation.
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You have legislation, actually I shouldn't underline that because that might confuse
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you.
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Legislation, Civil Rights Act of 5760.
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And then you also have kind of contemporaneous to you have the agitation of the Montgomery
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Bus Boycott.
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So I wanted to say that was well after the Brown case.
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So you have the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
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Could we actually classify the Little Rock Nine as a type of agitation or a reactionary
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agitation?
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You have the Little Rock Nine being escorted to class by the US Marshals.
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You have the Airborne Division being sent in to pacify the situation.
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It is safe to say even if there wasn't agitation going on, is it safe to say that people were
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agitated.
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I mean, you had the people of Little Rock up in arms and chanting 2468, we don't want
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to integrate.
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Now in the 1960s, again, kind of in a way building off the agitation that left off in
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the tail end of the 50s, you actually have in the 1960s a fair amount of agitation precipitating
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legislation being enforced by litigation.
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Now what I mean by being enforced by litigation is you have laws being put in place, but part
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of that law enforcement is not cops kicking down doors, it's individual families saying
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this school district's policy, that municipality's policy, this custom doesn't fit with this
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written law and we will sue you to see to its compliance or we will sue you for damages.
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Does that make sense?
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And so litigation can be a means of enforcement even though we don't typically see it as such.
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Also can the threat of litigation even be a determining factor in action?
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Do people change policy for fear of being sued and having to defend themselves and having
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to bear the costs associated with that?
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So litigation can have an executive function.
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Now when I look at the agitation, I'm going to look at sit-ins and freedom rides in particular.
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Freedom rides, I'm going to talk about freedom summer, and I'm going to talk about the March
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on Washington.
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So let's start with the sit-ins.
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1960, February, the Greenboro boys sat at a lunch counter that was marked whites only.
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I'll show you the graphic and then we'll get to the other one.
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Couple of things I want to point out from the photograph.
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So the four boys that you see in the photo, they're at a lunch counter.
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Now again, if I can look at the set up, this is a diner, yes?
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What's even more interesting is look at the man in the far left with his head down.
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He's on which side of the counter?
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He's on the service side.
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So this establishment had employees of color but would not serve patrons of color.
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Now I want you to think about that for a moment, not just the irony of the situation, but think
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about this for a moment.
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So in the previous frontier of civil rights, agitation, and litigation, Montgomery was
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about public transportation.
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Lowell Rock Nine was about public high school.
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What do both of those things have in common?
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They're public places where you pay taxes.
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What's different about a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina?
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Well, it pays taxes but you don't pay taxes for it.
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It's a public accommodation but it's not publicly owned.
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It is a private company, probably a mom and pop store with a few employees.
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This is even before while we had talked about in the last unit, corporate and franchises
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of fast food exist, but I get a sense this is not a franchise.
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This is probably a small mom and pop shop with a few employees of that.
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Now if you're the person of color in the serving line and your boss says don't serve these
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people, do you serve them?
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No.
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Why?
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Because your boss told you to because you needed that job.
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Perhaps in North Carolina if you had, you might be subjected to vigilante violence,
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extralegal violence for noncompliance with your employer's request.
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Do you see maybe why the gentleman has his head down in the shot?
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Now let's add one more dimension to it for a moment.
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What is a sit-in if you think about it?
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It is a form of protest but it's not just that.
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It has something in common and let's link it back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
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What is it impeding on?
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If they're sitting at the counter, they can't serve other people.
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If they're sitting at the counter and they as a matter of policy, as a matter of principle,
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as a matter of proprietors, instructions, won't serve them, they're losing money on
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the protest basically.
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Now the solution might be painfully simple.
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We'll just serve the people.
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That then upsets the social order and so I sort of see the other side of the Markov chain
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for a moment.
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Now here's the other part.
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I kind of feel for the person behind the counter, in this case this guy is really in a bind,
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isn't he?
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I also think about this for a moment.
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Let's say you are a drug store clerk in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina and you are going
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to go to that diner to grab a meal and you see the sit-in, you see the tension, you see
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the crowd.
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I know a lot of us might have the vain delusion that we would actually do something heroic
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but most of us would probably just go find somewhere else to eat.
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The other part of it is, and again we tend to heroize history more than I think we ought,
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that again there were a lot of people who were just trying to get through their day
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to day lives who just wanted nothing to do with what they perceived as noise and upsetting
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the social order.
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So I wanted to speak to that for a moment.
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So that was the first.
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Of course they were arrested, they would be bailed out and then other people would go
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in their place.
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So this was a bit of a long running protest and of course no one ever gets arrested gently
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and especially if you were upsetting mores, again you slap the cuffs on somebody and might
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you throttle them to the ground a bit more violently just because you can.
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And so that was a gruesomely unpleasant experience.
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And then the next frontier was buses.
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So you had the Freedom Riders.
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Now what the Freedom Riders did, they were a group of college students who got together
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and decided they were going to protest southern segregation of buses by, and to see to it
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if the south was actually complying with the federal orders not to segregate buses, by
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the way if there was a federal order not to segregate buses in 1961 who probably put
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that order in place.
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As an extension of the Civil Rights Act, but who was charged with executing it in 1961?
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Kennedy's attorney general, Robert Kennedy.
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Robert Kennedy was no Republican, Robert Kennedy was a Democrat.
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And so here you have the Kennedy administration actually again for lack of a better word trying
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to enforce the previous desegregated policies of the Eisenhower administration now running
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into upsetting people in their own coalition.
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Because remember, southern whites are part of the Democratic Party coalition but now you
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have the northern immigrant wing of the Democratic Party trying to enforce federal laws that
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were passed on a bipartisan basis.
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Now here's the part and I'm going to get to the alphabet soup and then I'm going to get
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back to the freedom rights.
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So let's start with our oldest civil rights organization.
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What was the oldest civil rights organization founded by W.E.B.
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Du Bois back in 1920?
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NAACP.
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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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And I've got to angle this down because the clock's in the way, I know the online class
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doesn't care because they can't see it right now, but hey.
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All right, now up next, SCLC.
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Now before I get into the SCLC, let me talk to you about the NAACP.
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Starts with W.E.B.
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Du Bois, Doctrine of Ceaseless Agitation, becomes the Doctrine of Ceaseless Litigation.
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The NAACP, still a major political action committee, still a named amicus and a named
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litigant in multiple civil rights cases as recently as in modern times.
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They were one of the named plaintiffs in the case against Texas's voter ID law.
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SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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Now as the name might suggest, what type of people do you suppose are in the Southern
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Christian Leadership Conference?
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Southern Christian Leaders.
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What's one word for saying Christian Leader starts with a P and ends in or?
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Pastors.
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So name a famous pastor who might have been associated with the Southern Christian Leadership
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Conference that would have a dream in 1963.
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Martin Luther King.
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So Martin Luther King is part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, key word
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there, Christian Leadership.
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So that was a religious organization using both the moral and organizational powers that
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come with churches in the United States.
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Has the church been an instrument of social change in the United States before?
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Yes.
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Everything from abolition to suffragism to prohibition.
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So you've got the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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Now that had been a thing, that was Martin Luther King going back to the Montgomery Bus
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Boycott.
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Certainly Rosa Parks was a member of the NAACP already, not a major player.
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Again, there were local chapters like any type of political action committee.
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Now then you have SNCC, SNCC, that is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
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Anybody want to guess what type of people were in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
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Committee?
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Specifically students.
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Now the nonviolent part was the obvious one, but the interesting thing about the Student
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Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is students.
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Now when we're talking students, we're talking people as young as high school and as old
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as college.
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So you're putting 16 to 24 year olds.
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I say that for two reasons.
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What's the great thing about 16 to 24 year olds?
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They do not have a fully developed frontal cortex, which is when you're 16 to 24 you
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think you're six feet tall and bullet proof.
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And also, kind of interesting, among the males testosterone starts picking up, which makes
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you a little bit aggressive.
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So this is why you get, and again you see this from all sorts of your classmates now.
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I mean how many of you know someone between the ages of 16 and 24 who is perfectly content
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to, I mean, and this is not diminishing their sacrifice.
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There are plenty of people who do very brave things, mainly for lack of foresight.
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But anyway, but again these people, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the students
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again, who's going to go get the snot beat out of them?
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Who's going to go do the thing to get themselves arrested?
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It's not going to be, for lack of a better word, seasoned, respectable people.
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It's going to be young people who have the elan, the audacity.
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And so, and some of you are chuckling, but that's because you all have foresight.
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And because you can say that now.
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None of you have had the misfortune of living under these conditions.
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But anyway, now up next you have the Congress on Racial Equality, or CORE.
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And so we have different arms of a civil rights movement, or we could even think of this as
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civil rights movements.
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Each trying to attain different goals by different means.
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And so here you have the audacity of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
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Here you have the religious authority of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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And here you have the political savvy and establishment of the NAACP.
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All working towards desegregative ends in different dimensions.
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And so the book categorizes all this as the civil rights movement.
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And then they talk about the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party as a separate
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movement of black power.
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I am actually kind of thinking that that classification as a separate movement is not entirely valid.
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The reason I say that is some of what was achieved was what we would call triangulation.
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If you are the NAACP and you are dealing with a congressman who might be on the fence, you
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could take the deal with us.
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Or who might you have to deal with if you do not deal with us?
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Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam, you get the idea.
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And so one of the really nice negotiating tactics sometimes in any hardball politics
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is do it my way or you have to deal with someone far less reasonable than me.
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Sort of the Godfather.
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I am a very reasonable man.
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No?
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No?
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But you get the idea.
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I mean that is not an uncommon thing in politics.
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Okay, so let us get to the Freedom Riders.
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Okay, so you got the Freedom Riders.
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So here is what happened.
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A group of students, a group of young people, both white and black, get on interstate commerce
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buses, I want to say it was in Washington D.C., riding through the American South, to
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see to it that buses were not segregated in the American South.
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Now a couple of things getting into bus segregation in the American South.
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So you have got a federal order that says you cannot segregate buses in the South.
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All right?
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You are the Greyhound driver.
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By the way, how many of you have ever been on a Greyhound, just for my own clarification?
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Now was it for a school activity or you were using it as transportation?
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I mean you can charter a Greyhound and that is what you do when you have the really long
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trips that you do not want to stop to go to the bathroom because there is a bathroom in
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the back of the bus, yes?
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Now for those of you who have never been on a Greyhound, first of all prior to traveling
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by interstate bus and also by train was a lot more common in the 1960s than it is today.
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For one thing air travel was still much, much more expensive than it is now and much less
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reliable.
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And so one of the other things you got going on is, again, 1960s a lot of the pilots are
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still relying on ground markers so you had limited flights at night and so that is part
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of it and other instrumentation things.
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But anyway, so if you wanted to travel cross country, you stood a better shot of taking
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an interstate bus or a train.
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Now one of the things that you do of course when you are on a bus is you go from terminal
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to terminal in different towns picking up passengers and letting them off and also it
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gave the passengers who were on the bus who had a longer haul ticket a chance to get off
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the bus and go to the bathroom in a bathroom that was not going 55 miles an hour.
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Which if you haven't taken a pee at 55 or 60 miles an hour, it's an adventure.
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It's not a natural act but it's an adventure.
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Actually I remember the most unnerving time I had, I was on an Amtrak between Temple and
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Austin and I had to go pee and it was going at like 45, it was going at 60 miles an hour
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and you think here's this giant train thing, but no it shakes and moves and so that was
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unnerving.
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Ok, setting aside that, so bus transportation really frequent and so ok you are the bus
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driver of the Greyhound, you are used to having these people desegregated when they get on
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the bus in the places where segregation is not a thing and then you get into Alabama
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or something and what would typically happen is people would segregate themselves because
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if you are the bus driver and people segregate themselves, are you going to say anything?
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If you see the white customers moving up to the front and black folks moving to the back
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and you are driving the bus, you are not going to say anything, alright you just come to
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a stop in Mobile or something like that and the law man says you need to move those people
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back here and these people up there, what do you do?
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You do what the law man says because you are the bus driver and you don't want any trouble.
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And so there is a lot of this is maintained by law, by custom and by sloth, for lack of
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a better word, it's not right but it's so.
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So these people, the Freedom Riders, challenge this, their bus is greeted by an angry mob
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where they pull the people off the bus, beat them with bats and chains and set the bus
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on fire.
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Subtlety was not employed.
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Persuasion not employed.
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Correct.
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And set the bus on fire.
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Which again, I say this having driven school buses before but you know, how do you call
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that in?
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I mean because you know that the town law enforcement was not on your side on this one
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but you are like more importantly you think to yourself, man how do I explain this on
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the insurance paperwork?
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Anyway, moving on.
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So we've got that.
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Now that made the news.
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Both to employ, or to impose fear but again, these are students, many of them have connections
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up north and so now it begins that the conversation about segregation, the conversation about
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racial customs in the south was not confined anymore to the south.
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It began to get national attention.
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Up next, thing to make the news.
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James Meredith, a veteran of the United, of the US Armed Forces, tried to enroll at Ole
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Miss.
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He was able to enroll at Ole Miss, sent with federal marshals, greeted by the National
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Guard of Mississippi and federal troops had to be called out again and so it made the
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news.
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So now the Kennedy administration had a test similar to the one faced by the Eisenhower
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administration except this time it was not a high school, it was college.
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So far so good.
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Then there was Birmingham.
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April 1963.
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They were celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
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Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were having a march
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through the streets to celebrate the emancipation and to talk about further injustices.
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The local response was, for lack of a better word, slightly less than pleasing.
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They arrested about 3,000 of them, they sick the dogs on them and they busted out with
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the fire hoses.
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Here in the graphic you have a dog attacking a man.
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This is a canine unit.
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So they arrested 3,000 people, busted out with the fire hoses and the dogs and it was
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on national TV.
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Now think about this for a moment.
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If you're the local person and you have these outsiders showing up with the TV cameras you
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might be slightly less than pleased.
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At the same time now the image of Southern segregation is now blasted over television,
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CBS, NBC.
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The thing with CBS at the time, I want to say it was Walter Cronkite reporting, but
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here's the thing.
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If you were living in Kansas, if you were living in California, if you were living in
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Washington State, how did you know about Southern segregation, if at all?
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In 1960s through the television news.
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But would the news have necessarily reported about the uprising in Brownsville during and
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right around the time of World War I?
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Not necessarily.
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Would the news have necessarily reported in lurid detail about other racial events?
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No, because these were typically local.
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And also if you heard about it, maybe it was on radio, maybe it was in print.
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But it's something very different than seeing it in your home on TV.
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You get the idea.
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And so now all of a sudden people's interest in the peculiarities of Southern segregation
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are piqued.
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Now summer of 1963, March on Washington for Equality.
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Many of these organizations come together for a massive rally for a civil rights bill.
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Another one specifically to address the issues of inequalities of station in places of public
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accommodation, inequalities of station when it came to transportation, and inequalities
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when it came to matters of pay.
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And so King has his great I Have a Dream speech, one of America's great works of oratory.
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Oh, I forgot to get back to.
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Oh yeah, King was arrested and wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail where he chastised
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those preachers who were preaching compliance and obedience and actually posits the idea
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that it is the obligation of the just man to resist the unjust laws.
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Then that summer I Have a Dream speech again using skills of oratory and the religious
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ethos to expand on the idea.
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But primarily the March on Washington also, in addition to having a spiritual meaning,
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had a very simple policy implication.
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They wanted a civil rights bill in the summer of 1963.
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I'm going to get back to the Warren Court.
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I kind of want to talk about the Black Power Movement.
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And then I want to get to the election of 1964.
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Kind of interesting.
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You have people responding to these types of agitation with, for lack of a better word,
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reactionary demonstration.
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Now if I look at this picture, you see a rather racist sign, you see a Confederate flag, and
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you see white people in a car.
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Yes?
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Where do you think that is?
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And you would be wrong.
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Chicago.
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You say wow.
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Yes.
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Why do we say wow?
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Yes but again, and also Chicago is part of the Democratic Party struggle, but not only
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that, think about this for a moment.
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We normally associate the Confederate flag with the Klan.
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Yes?
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And we associate the Klan with the South.
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And if I look at these people, yes they're white, but these are probably the sons of
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Irishmen, the sons of Poles, the sons of Italians.
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Did these people fight in the Civil War?
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Did their ancestors fight in the Civil War?
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Then why do you have the sons of Polocks, the sons of Italians, the sons of Irishmen,
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sporting the rebel battle flag?
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Because it had become a symbol of segregation.
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It had become a symbol of segregation, or let's try this one for size.
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If you're growing up in the neighborhoods of Chicago, did I get the accent right?
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I seem to recall you do come from Illinois.
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But no, but again, when you're growing up in the neighborhoods of Chicago, you have
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the black part of town, you have the Irish part of town, you have the Italian part of
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town, you have a segregated neighborhood and you each have your own miserable little working
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class ghetto, and you don't like those people.
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Now here's the thing, in rural society, what separates you from those people?
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No, I said in the rural areas.
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Lot of space, yes?
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I mean maybe you deal with them in towns like Greensboro, North Carolina, but for most of
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the countryside, hey, I mean your next door neighbor could actually be a person of color
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and you wouldn't know because next door might be five acres away.
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I mean you get the idea.
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Whereas if you're in the tenements of Chicago, could be next unit over, could be down the
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block because you might have this block that is Italian, this block that is Polish, this
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block that is Irish, and this block that is African American.
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And you don't go down that block because why?
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It's not your block.
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And you might be worried about gang-related violence because one of the things, and again,
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you have street gangs associated with the Irish, with the Poles, with the Germans, not
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with the Germans, but the Irish and the Poles and the Italians.
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And so it's kind of interesting.
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Now let's get to the Black Power Movement.
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One of the things that you notice about all of what's going on, and also Freedom Summer,
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which I want to say was the summer of 62, which was a massive voter registration drive
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for the South is, and this is the one dimension of all of this agitation that nobody bears
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in mind, it is that 70% of the African American population in the United States lived in cities.
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So do these people who are concerned about the southern segregated customs actually speak
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to the day-to-day needs and desires of the poor African Americans living in the ghettos
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of major cities of the North?
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No.
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So you have the Black Power Movement that results largely, you've got two things going
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on.
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You have a dissatisfaction with nonviolence because by the way are the nonviolent people
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being met with violence.
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Also does the nonviolent actions regarding segregation of the American South ameliorate
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the plight of the 70% of the African Americans living in the cities?
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No.
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Now adding the next dimension you have Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, grew up in, who as
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a youth he was a criminal.
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He was a drug dealer, he was a pimp, he was arrested and incarcerated for seven years
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while in prison converts to Islam, joins a group which will later be called the Nation
32:02
of Islam, they're also called the Black Muslims, led by Elijah Muhammad.
32:08
He is a charismatic speaker preaching that people of color should arm themselves and
32:13
should live separate and be self-reliant.
32:17
And so it's kind of this Garvey-y Booker T. Washington little bit of second amendment
32:28
thrown in just to make it interesting, mix, batter and stir.
32:33
And he had quite the following until the goons of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam's
32:38
foundational leader, had him assassinated in 1965.
32:44
So you have people who had become frustrated by the nonviolence not achieving their ends,
32:53
being ignored by the white mainstream, and so you have the rise of the Black Panther
32:57
Party speaking to their needs to be achieved by force of arms.
33:03
Now this is a group of people doing the Black Power Salute varying in age from probably
33:08
six, well the dude in the middle looks like about 20 and the youngest one looks about
33:12
eight.
33:13
Well, there's a smaller child still.
33:15
Alright, never mind.
33:16
Alright, moving on.
33:17
Five maybe?
33:19
Maybe three?
33:20
Yeah.
33:21
Anyway, you get the idea.
33:24
So you've got all these different movements going in all these different directions, all
33:28
using different means.
33:29
Now a couple of things.
33:32
Alright, talk to you all about the political triangulation, that if you're a member of
33:35
the SCLC or the NAACP, you can always use the threat of those other unreasonable people
33:42
to get your point across, yes?
33:45
Now the other thing that most people don't appreciate is that probably, actually I'm
33:54
going to pause for a sec.
33:57
Before I get to that, let me actually address one thing.
33:59
Why do you suppose that some of the elements of the protest movement did nonviolence?
34:08
Why was nonviolence a necessity for the movement in the American South?
34:15
Wasn't it already being met with violence?
34:19
Now here's the thing that's kind of interesting.
34:24
If I look at Birmingham, they were met with dogs, they were met with fire hoses, and they
34:30
were arrested.
34:33
They were met with mob violence, extra-legal violence, which as I say, that's violence
34:38
that is not prosecuted.
34:40
Now if the movement in the South had been openly violent, they would not have been met
34:46
with water cannons.
34:48
They would have been met with firearms on a massive scale.
34:51
It would have been transitioning from extra-legal violence to now legal violence.
34:56
It would have been considered an existential threat to the state, not just the social order.
35:01
And so you have the religious principle of nonviolence, but you have the much more, for
35:09
lack of a better word, pragmatic idea that if the movement became violent, the intensity
35:14
of the violent by established society, the entire arm of the state would have been turned
35:19
against it, not just some of them, for lack of a better word.
35:23
Now here's the part that I think most historians would, some would say it, some would disagree
35:31
with me on this point, is that probably one of the pivotal things in getting the Civil
35:43
Rights Acts passed through Congress, and this may seem rather crass, is the election, or
35:53
the succession and then election of Johnson.
35:56
What do I mean by the succession of Johnson and then his election?
36:00
Kennedy was assassinated.
36:04
Johnson is president by succession.
36:06
The following year, Johnson is elected president in 1964.
36:11
Here you have the graphic of Lyndon Baines Johnson being sworn in as president on Air
36:15
Force One.
36:16
You see Jackie Kennedy in the coat in front of him and Lady Bird Johnson behind him.
36:22
Couple of other things just to make your sense of irony tingle for a moment.
36:26
Air Force One is a smaller plane than it is now and Kennedy's corpse is in the cargo
36:32
compartment directly beneath them.
36:35
I mean depending on where the casket was put, he might literally have been taking the oath
36:39
of office on top, above the corpse of the previous president.
36:45
Jackie is in a coat thrown over, that was not the dress she was wearing earlier that
36:50
day, I think she's wearing it underneath, and that's to conceal the blood spatter.
36:56
I don't know if any of you had seen the film where Kennedy's head explodes and she actually
37:01
goes to the back of the car and picks up a chunk of his brain as if to put it back in.
37:07
People do some interesting things when they're under stress.
37:09
I don't want to get into the psychology of it because I have an entire psychology class
37:12
for that, but I wanted to get into.
37:15
Johnson as a figure in many ways is a boon to the Civil Rights Movement.
37:19
Here's why.
37:21
See and most people don't talk about this, Kennedy was not an effective legislator by
37:28
any stretch of the imagination.
37:30
He was a relative novice to the DC scene.
37:33
He had barely been in the Senate for a long duration of time.
37:37
And here he was a Yankee Irishman in a party that had Southerners as a large part of the
37:44
constituents.
37:46
Whereas LBJ is a man of the South, he is a creature of the New Deal, and he had been
37:51
in the Senate long enough to be its majority leader.
37:54
He knew major players in the Washington establishment.
37:58
He knew people in Congress.
37:59
He knew people in the Senate.
38:01
He was able to get stuff done in ways that Kennedy couldn't.
38:04
And he also was able to manipulate the martyrdom factor.
38:07
It's what Jack Kennedy would have wanted, which is very crass.
38:14
But do the ends justify the means?
38:16
Sometimes you have to ask.
38:18
So let's get into the Civil Rights stuff, and then I may have to do a separate thing
38:24
on the Great Society because I'm running out of time.
38:27
So you have a Civil Rights Act in 1964, and you have a Voting Rights Act in 65.
38:41
Civil Rights Act of 64, prohibited discrimination in restaurants, hotels, and other places of
38:59
public accommodation.
39:04
Voting Rights, it forced, the wording is states with previous histories of racial injustice,
39:22
but they named the states.
39:25
Basically the states that participated in the Civil War.
39:28
The Southern states to submit, basically they had to submit to the
39:41
Justice Department, the Congressional Districting, and voting procedures for approval.
40:01
Now I bring this up because these two cases, or these two laws were recently litigated
40:08
in modern times.
40:10
These laws have been brought up in litigation time and time again.
40:14
Every time Texas draws its congressional districts, somebody files a complaint with the Justice
40:19
Department.
40:22
Usually the NAACP or some other organization, but it's every time.
40:26
Now of course the argument could be made every time, you know, maybe they suppose that the
40:31
district maps were racist.
40:32
They might not be racist, they might just be partisan.
40:36
As if that sounds better, but anyway.
40:38
Okay, districting and voting procedures.
40:42
Actually the one that came up recently was, you may recall there was a controversy that
40:46
in the Texan state you have to show photo ID in order to vote.
40:52
That Texan law was being litigated under the Voting Rights Act of 65.
40:56
Indiana had a law that required you to show photo ID in order to vote.
41:01
They did not get that litigated under the Voting Rights Act of 65 because Indiana did
41:06
not secede from the Union.
41:07
You get the idea.
41:08
And actually the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act was actually being questioned
41:13
again because how do you have one set of law for this set of states and how do you have
41:17
another set of law for the other set of states.
41:19
Also again, it is this idea of federalism.
41:21
Okay, if you have states, what business of it is the Justice Department?
41:25
How they draw their maps.
41:27
But it is of interest.
41:28
In the name of racial equality.
41:32
So now I begin to show you one of the arguments that is going to pepper this time and bleeds
41:36
into yours.
41:39
Do the states make the Union or does the Union make the states?
41:43
I'm not asking for an answer.
41:44
I want you to ponder that.
41:45
I want you to take that with you today and into tomorrow because tomorrow belongs to
41:48
you.
41:50
Now the other thing is, and I want to get into the Civil Rights Act of 64, it prohibits
41:56
discrimination according to race, national origin, and ethnicity.
42:03
Later it's amended to include gender and sexual orientation.
42:06
I bring this up because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was at issue in the case of the gay
42:14
wedding cake.
42:17
There was a baker in Colorado who elected not to bake a cake for a gay couple that was
42:24
getting married and the question was did that bakery fall under public accommodation or
42:29
restaurants because again, cake catering is kind of a luxury good, you get what I'm saying.
42:35
Although I kind of wonder how it went down.
42:37
Here you're the baker, you see a dude come in with another dude and you just figure out
42:42
this guy's getting a wedding cake and brought his buddy for moral support.
42:44
Then you figure out that the dude with the dude is the dude's dude.
42:48
And then that had to have been a bit awkward.
42:50
But anyway, moving on.
42:54
But here's the thing.
42:57
Now you have the federal government saying to such a man, you, oh man, you must sell.
43:08
Now the ethos behind it is they thought in 1964 that racial equality was more important
43:16
than free market capitalism.
43:21
What is the freedom in a free market capitalism society is that the buyer or the seller may
43:26
say no for any reason or no reason.
43:34
Now if you're the proprietor and you have a federal law that says, you, oh man, you
43:37
must sell this thing, you're like, wait a minute.
43:41
And the case was actually litigated.
43:44
And this was a hotel and it said, wait, where does the federal government get off telling
43:48
me who I can and can't sell to?
43:50
They said, well, you do commerce next to the highway.
43:57
But think about this for a moment.
43:59
The case of the gay wedding cake made us ask the question.
44:02
What business of it is of the state to tell a man what he must and must not do with his
44:07
commerce?
44:08
Now again, principle of free market capitalism says if you don't sell to people, what happens
44:11
to you?
44:12
You go out of business.
44:14
And so maybe freedom is the freedom to commit business suicide, for lack of a better word.
44:20
But at this point, they pass a law to say this.
44:22
And so I get to ask you, is that still a valid principle?
44:25
That's something I don't want an answer for now.
44:27
I want you to ponder it because the day will come when you must ask yourself, in this context,
44:33
does equality trump liberty or does liberty trump equality?
44:36
And no, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
44:40
Actually, it took me a while to understand the phrase, how do you have your cake without
44:45
eating it?
44:46
And then finally somebody said, no, no, like to look at it.
44:49
I was like, Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
44:52
Come on now.
44:54
Johnson gets elected, does not just deal with civil rights.
44:57
He starts the quote unquote war on poverty.
45:00
This is the massive expansion of the federal apparatus, not only to deal with social inequality,
45:06
but to deal with economic inequality.
45:08
So you have the government of the United States building housing projects, printing food stamps,
45:19
and providing health care in the form of Medicare, which is health care for the retired people,
45:29
and Medicaid, which is health care for the impoverished.
45:37
Now here's the thing.
45:43
And they call this the great society.
45:45
So this is where you have the government intervening in matters of health insurance, higher education,
45:50
and housing.
45:51
I was going to say, has the Democratic Party had to change in the platform since then?
45:58
Probably not.
45:59
But anyway, enough about that.
46:00
I was like, oh, health care.
46:06
But no, you have.
46:08
And actually, this is also where the government starts getting into the corporation of public
46:12
broadcasting.
46:13
PBS.
46:15
All of this is going back to the great society, where you have the government intervening
46:19
now spending massive sums of money on art and on improving people's, for lack of a better
46:27
word, providing aid to the impoverished.
46:31
So let me get to the bit.
46:37
Because I kind of want to deal with this.
46:39
I'll probably have to do this as a separate lecture talking to myself like a crazy person,
46:43
that's fine.
46:45
How do you have such a massive expansion of the federal government into people's lives?
46:57
Think about this for a moment.
46:59
What did it take to pass the first New Deal, the second New Deal, and now the great society,
47:05
which I would call the third New Deal?
47:08
What did Roosevelt have in 1932 that allowed him to get the first New Deal passed?
47:15
A majority in the House, a majority in the Senate, and the White House.
47:19
And so it's the election of 1964 that sets the stage for the massive expansion of the
47:25
federal government.
47:26
And so I'm going to actually shoot that one as a separate podcast that you all are going
47:31
to have to hear on your own because I'm out of time.
47:33
But the election of 64 actually sets up two things.
47:36
One, the expansion of the social welfare state in 1964, and the rise of Nixon in 1968, which
47:45
is going to be my first lecture after the test.
47:47
All right.
47:49
Questions, problems, concerns, revelations?