Rosa Parks, 1913-2005

I suppose I should say something about the death of Rosa Parks.

The story of the Montgomery bus boycott is very interesting. While I am not so enamored of the use of the federal courts to desegregate the buses, I like the boycott itself very much as a tactic. Bringing the market to bear through a boycott was a good example of capitalism in action (although considering that it appears that the buses were city-owned, and therefore likely subsidized, I am willing to concede that market forces alone might not have been enough, as the buses didn't necessarily have to be profitable).

And, as is often the case, it was the state that was the enemy of freedom:

In addition, city [i.e., Montgomery] officials struck a blow to the boycott when they announced that any cab driver charging less than the 45 cent minimum fare would be prosecuted. Since the boycott began, the black cab services had been charging blacks only 10 cents to ride, the same as the bus fare, but this service would be no more.

It also comes to my attention that the effectiveness and organization shown by the 50s and 60s civil rights movement shows the great competence of the black community (or at least much of it), meaning that under the right conditions there is no reason why the U.S. should not be able to have a thriving black community. Put another way, that means that even if there is an innate racial IQ gap, no one should assume that we should take that as a reason to write off African-Americans as hopeless.

Indeed, I wonder how much of the deterioration of the civil rights movement comes from the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. decided to deal with the devil (i.e. the federal government) for much of his agenda, and how much of it came from the dissolution of the black family and of the black community following the Great Society programs of the 1960s. (Perhaps Lyndon Johnson was not a hopeless idealist whose Great Society programs failed, perhaps they were designed to do exactly what they did - bread and circuses to keep the unwashed masses in check, mm?)

Or to say something that will shock and offend everyone, I wonder whether things would have been better if Malcolm X had outlived Dr. King rather than vice versa.

That is all.