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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28781 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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If the powers that be had made it a felony with long jail time to sit in the wrong seat in the bus or patronize the wrong lunch counter, and the Feds had backed them up or at least just stood by, we'd still have Jim Crow.

and the Feds had backed them up

Too late - Brown vs Board was in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott was 1956. The Alabama authorities knew that Rosa Parks would win a federal case, so they tried not to give her one. The non-poster-girl bus protesters (most famously unmarried teen mum Claudette Colvin and long-time activist Aurelia Browder) were not treated with kid gloves, did get their federal case, and won it (Browder v. Gayle).

The retellings of elders who lived under Jim Crow which I have heard are that actually enforcing these laws was a task that almost no one was enthusiastic about unless it was perceived as some kind of a threat to white women, and given what we know about long prison sentences(that is, they’re meaningless if you get away with the crime 99 times out of 100), it wouldn’t have done anything to make using the wrong bathroom a serious crime.

Long prison sentences are meaningless against career criminals if you get away with the crime 99 times out of 100. They'll work fine against activists. You won't get a nice black lady like Rosa Parks to deliberately refuse to move if she's courting hard time by doing so. So either you don't get your test case or you get a case of opportunity, who is going to be a LOT less sympathetic (because he -- and it'll likely be a "he" -- is the hardass type who is willing to risk hard time rather than sit where he's told). Martin Luther King might be writing letters from the Birmingham jail, but let's see how much influence he has if he's given 5 years in Georgia State Prison (where he was once sent but quickly released). Hell, never mind Jim Crow; if Scopes had been facing a felony rather than a fine, evolution still wouldn't be being taught in Tennessee.

Southern State Legislatures were the ones making Jim Crow laws, why didn't they increase the sentences?

The idea of making the penalties high enough to deter test cases hadn't occurred to them, I suppose.

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