on the Commerce Clause, but I think Heart of Atlanta is a valid holding. Don’t see how you could find a hotel in a major hub city with an international airport and at the intersection of three interstate highways to NOT be engaged in interstate commerce.

Moral of this story is that if you’re going to get into Constitutional arguments on TV, especially with lefty hosts, you’d better have your position down to well polled soundbites. Rambling libertarian style discussion of big Constitutional questions gets eyes rolling out there and allows the lefty hosts to mischaracterize what you said. Then you find yourself saying, “but I’m really not a racist.”

I grew up in the Jim Crow South. An easy racism was in the air you breathed. There was nothing remarkable to me or to anyone I knew about White and Colored entrances, waiting rooms at the doctors’ offices, water fountains, “Colored” sections in theaters, even the Courthouse, etc. There generally weren’t “White Only” signs on restaurants, hotels, motels, etc. because it went without saying that they were for whites only unless they were in the “Quarter.” In the Black sections or at the boundary between Black and White sections you’d find hotels and motels that would explicitly say that they were for Colored. Restaurants for Blacks were exclusively in the Black parts of town. Only in the bigger cities or in places along the big federal highways and, later, the interstates might have “White Only” at a lunch counter, restaurant, or hotel/motel because sometimes Yankees came through who didn’t know the rules.

The one firm and universal rule of segregation is that Blacks and Whites did not eat together except in the fields and they did not share living and sleeping quarters under any circumstances. There was an informal exception for White men sharing certain accomodations with Black women, but the opposite arrangement was pretty much an automatic death sentence, with or without benefit of trial, for a Black man.

There was a reason MLK put this line in the “Dream” speech: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” Unless you are a White Southerner who was around in those days, you have absolutely no idea how inflammatory that line is. The only line more inciting is this one: “one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” That one was guaranteed to incite White men to a fit of rage. Little Black boys holding hands wiht little White girls? Few White men would shake hands with a Black man that they had known for a lifetime. Few White men would let their Black laborer or even farm foreman ride in the front seat of the truck with him. I remeber my father catching Hell from “the Boys” at the Feed and Seed because he’d shown up with our foreman in the front seat of the truck and me in the bed. My Dad didn’t care because he was a merchant and as many of his customers were Black as were White and he needed their good will. The rest of the Nation saw that speech as poetic and inspiring; White Southerners in the main saw it as threatening and taunting.

I remember passage of the ’64 Civil Rights Act. I remember the Preacher railing about the Hellfire and Damnation that was going to rain down on the United States because of it. I was right at 15 that summer and had about reached the place where I’d lost all respect for anything I heard coming from stump, lectern, or pulpit, so that pretty much meant to me that something must be right about it, but I was still a creature of my upbringing and the society around me, so I wasn’t looking to go join the Freedom Riders or anything like that and I’ll plead guilty to having been as bad as any in taunting the two very brave Black students who joined my classes in ’66.

Western libertarians and Northern conservatives can have nuanced discussions about the fine points of Constitutionality of the law that at least formally ended the world of Jim Crow, Southerners can’t and neither can Blacks. A Southerner either thinks that ending the old ways of The South was an abomination or they think that it was worth it to end it by whatever means were necessary, be that federal troops or laws that might bend the Constitution here and there. I fall in the latter group.