But not quite, thanks to blogs:

..on July 19, 1958, several black teenagers, members of the local NAACP chapter, entered the downtown Dockum Drug Store (then the largest drug store chain in the state) and sat down at the lunch counter. They were ignored. They kept coming back and sitting at the counter, from before lunch through the dinner hour, at least twice a week for the next several weeks. They sat quietly, creating no disturbance, but refusing to leave without being served.

...They asked for help and support from the national NAACP, but the national organization refused to endorse or even acknowledge their actions. The confrontational tactic was against NAACP policy. The national newswires picked it up and the story ran nationwide, but quickly vanished.

On August 11, while the early arrivals were sitting at the counter waiting for their friends to show, a white man around 40 walked in and looked at them for several minutes. Then he looked at the store manager, and said, simply, "Serve them. I'm losing too much money." He then walked back out. That man was the owner of the Dockum drug store chain.

That day the lawyer for the local NAACP branch called the store's state offices, and was told by the chain vice-president that "he had instructed all of his managers, clerks, etc., to serve all people without regard to race, creed or color." State-wide. They had won, completely. Their actions inspired others, and the sit-in movement spread to Oklahoma City. By the middle of 1959, the national NAACP was losing disaffected members for refusing to endorse the scattered but spreading sit-in protests, gave in, and sponsored the Greensboro sit-ins.

Nineteen months before the Greensboro sit-ins that have been credited with being the start of the civil rights sit-in movement, it really began at a downtown drug store in Wichita, Kansas. The Dockum sit-ins were largely ignored by the NAACP in their archives, probably out of embarrassment, and were unknown even to many civil rights historians.

This is the kind of civil rights that everyone can get behind. No laws were needed to get the chain to do the right thing. The market did it, as a result of the demand of its customers. Jim Crow was evil, but most don't seem to understand, or remember, that Jim Crow was the government. When the government gets involved, in fact, history indicates (as evidenced by affirmative action, not even to mention much of the twentieth century in Europe, including Russia, and South Africa) that racial discrimination gets more, not less egregious, and that individuals take hindmost. And of course, the NAACP should be ashamed.

An army of Davids, indeed.

Kansas wasn't "south" enough to make the NAACP's point, that's why Greensboro gets the boost.

Now for the local bent. The city fathers and local civil rights crowd in Greensboro have been trying to get the drug store space turned into a museum / meeting place. On their own web site their was a big fund raising dinner in 2005, but none this year to commemorate the event. Support for the space is mostly luke warm and money short.

The sit-in is a non-event now, even in Greensboro.

That's right--we didn't need the government to abolish slavery; the market would have taken care of it eventually. Same with the Voter's Rights Act. Eventually, capitalism would have made it necessary to allow them dark people to vote.

That's right--we didn't need the government to abolish slavery; the market would have taken care of it eventually. Same with the Voter's Rights Act.

You seem to be making some major category errors here.

Rodney Naylor thinks he's being ironic but the reality is that this is exactly what happened.

Slavery (in one form or another) was pretty common
around the world in the 1700s. The U.S. was just
a tiny part of it. Apart from a few countries in africa it's unknown today.

So what happened?

The spread of free markets is what happened. The U.S. is close to unique in having had a civil war
driven by the issue. The economic inefficiency
of slavery in the context of free markets is what
drove it to disappear most places. Adam Smith
predicted this would happen. It's part of the reason he advocated replacing government monopolies with free markets. Absent the power of the state and state-supported monopolies, slavery was an economic failure most places.

And why isn't this common knowledge?

The almost universal response of most societies to the issue of remembering their rather recent pasts is to more or less pretend than never was any such thing. Or if there was, it was a very long time ago.

one of Adam Smith's arguments
for free markets was precisely that it would end slavery.

And of course he was right. Slavery in one form
or another was present in most countries

Rand,
That was probably the stupidest post you've ever put up. There's not point commenting further.

My.

What a compelling and convincing argument.

Not.

1954 - Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education.

1957 - Eisenhower sends the troops into Little Rock, Arkansas. The most courageous and possibly the most important civil rights action taken by any U.S. President in modern times.

Rand's argument doesn't much differ from that of non-racist conservatives of that era. Philosophically correct but most untimely. When the house is burning is no time to muse on new bathtubs.

Jim Crow was at that time the reality to be dealt with and any market solution involved generations of evolution. People weren't waiting generations but were forcing the issue to force government to take action.

Christians have Satan and libertarians have Statan. Let's please not forget that government is people doing what people have always done and that each generation of people is stuck with what has come before. To invoke the phantasm of government as doer of all evil is to deny that people can do no other than to deal with the world as it is at the time.

Jim Crow was at that time the reality to be dealt with and any market solution involved generations of evolution. People weren't waiting generations but were forcing the issue to force government to take action.

I never proposed that there was a market solution to Jim Crow, since Jim Crow was oppression by state governments, so I'm not sure what your point is.

...I'm not sure what your point is.

Nor I yours. What do you mean when you say, "The market did it, as a result of the demand of its customers."? If you mean the black teens were the customers then they at that time weren't. They violated the property rights of the owner in commandeering the counter stools until their demands were met. I see nothing about existing customers demanding the serving of the black teens.

To be clear, I am not arguing for segregation. And I'm not treading new ground. Libertarians have long argued that Lester Maddox was within his rights (right of association) to deny blacks admittance to his restaurant. The argument has been that absent the Jim Crow laws the market would have sorted things out. Maybe so and maybe not.

"When the government gets involved, in fact, history indicates (as evidenced by affirmative action, not even to mention much of the twentieth century in Europe, including Russia, and South Africa) that racial discrimination gets more, not less egregious, and that individuals take hindmost. And of course, the NAACP should be ashamed."

This is pretty absurd. You think that the NAACP should be ashamed because of its then non-confrontational policy... but you're pretty much silent about white racists?

And if "the market" took care of this, then how come the Greensboro sit-ins were necessary? How come the Voters Rights Act was necessary? You think that all of this stuff would have taken care of itself without the federal government stepping in to protect the rights of American citizens? How is your position any different from that of white Democrats who had no problem with segregation?

Rodney, the point is that in the free market, racism not backed by government sanction disappears pretty rapidly. Jim Crow was mostly driven by laws, not practices. Integration of schools was against the law. I don't see anybody arguing that federal government action wasn't necessary to overcome the loathesome discrimination set in place by state government action. The issue remaining before us politically and socially today is the extent to which the government should be involved in remedying the remaining private-sector racism. All of the examples you've provided of effective and necessary federal government intervention have involved federal intervention against actions taken, not by private companies or individuals but by state governments.

And sit-ins and boycotts and demands to be served are indeed part of the free market process, not something separate and apart from the market. Businesses, to survive, must not only keep happy existing customers, they must cultivate new customers in the future. The sit-ins called great public attention to the owners of businesses that they were missing out on a lot of potential customers. They also caused some white customers to consider the racial policies of the business when deciding which business to shop with.

You're correct that the sit-ins might, in some circumstances, be violating the owner's property rights. But property rights are limited a bit, by long legal history, when you open for business serving the public. You have to formally demand that trespassers leave, for example. There's no indication in the story that the store demanded that the sit-in folks leave; they were just ignored. The only time the police were called was when the white youths showed up to intimidate the protesters. Thus, no violation of the owner's property rights, because the owner never told the sit-in folks to leave his property.