Portrait of a Happier Time
By • 3/27/08One of my favorite blogs, MANSIZEDTARGET, just published an entry designed to correct the current perception that pre-Civil Rights America was “hateful and oppressive hell-hole” because of racial conflict. The entry quotes a Time magazine article from 1957 on a successful police raid on black nightspots in Kansas City designed to stop a crime wave. The police conducted the raid at the prompting of black businessmen frustrated with chaos in their neighborhoods. The businessmen pledged to provide the police moral support if there were any outcry about the raid.
The blogger, Mr. Roach, sums it up:
Consider all the details: black businessmen partnering with law enforcement; a major national magazine candidly discussing higher rates of black crime; politicians (then as now) afraid to anger voters of any race; pre-Miranda law enforcement actions that still preserved the rights of the innocent; cooperation among black leaders with the white “city fathers” against the black lower classes; and, an aggressive, but popular, approach to crime that employed racial profiling, but cannot reasonably be called racist.
The Time search engine is a real asset, a way to look into the past without the filter of today’s propaganda-laden universities and journalists. It shows a healthy, sometimes complicated, American past that belies the tales of woe and misery that Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama have spun in recent weeks.
I’ll make the point that the blogger, Mr. Roach, leaves implicit: pre-60s race relations were not merely better than most currently believe; they were in fact much more harmonious and realistic than they are today. Police could take tough actions to stop crime without being pilloried by black organizations. The press could plainly admit the fact of black crime without finding some way of blaming it on whites. Black businessmen felt comfortable cooperating with mostly white police against the black underclass.
If they tried the same thing today, the police would be would be found guilty by courts for rounding blacks for questioning without probable cause. The newspapers would go on the warpath. Black businessmen would be too afraid of being branded traitors to their people to cooperate. And the crime would have continued unabated, to the detriment of the black community.
Which period is better described as a “oppressive and hateful hell-hole”?
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The pre-(un)Civil Rights era was a time of much greater racial harmony than what we have today. The races lived to a significant degree separately, although they rubbed shoulders everyday in the work place. People got along, and society was civil. It was in the interest of everyone to get along, and we all knew it. I remember those days very well myself.
Then came the (un)Civil Rights campaigns and all they did was to stir up grievance and create ill will where there had previously been good relations. People who had gotten along well for generations were suddenly made to be enemies of each other. Oh, this was real progress!! Yes, sir, we were really getting some where! We took a situation in which 98% of the people were happy and reduced it to a situation wherein no one was happy. What a success! But the Left was jubilant in the destruction of America. They were on a roll and they have been ever since.
By on 3/29/08 at 12:50 pm