Pheonixops
Proud Liberal
yes...
but of course it goes against conventional wisdom....
so I can understand why you might have a problem with it...
No, it goes against REALITY. I guess in his effort to candy coat Jim Crow, he forgot about the Black Codes:
Segregation
As one historian has noted, "Racial segregation was hardly a new phenomenon. Before the Civil War, when slavery had fixed the status of most blacks, no need was felt for statutory measures segregating the races. The restrictive Black Codes, along with the few segregation laws passed by the first postwar governments, did not survive Reconstruction," Leon F. Litwack wrote [p. 229] in Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning history Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery.
Re-establishment of white supremacy meant that within a decade white people forgot that blacks were creating thriving middle classes in many states of the South. African Americans' lack of representation meant that they were treated as second-class citizens, with schools and services consistently underfunded in segregated societies, no representation on juries or in law enforcement, and bias in other legislation. It was not until the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of Federal legislation that African Americans regained their suffrage and civil rights in the South, under what is sometimes referred to as the "Second Reconstruction."
Why don't you quote what Sowell actually said regarding Jim Crow, PO...
I sourced his article and if you read it, you can see where my rebuttal is correct when I referred to the "Black Codes".