For MLK Day - Let's Remember States' Rights
Let’s remember Martin Luther King by remembering state’s rights. For those too young to have seen the brutality of Southern police during the civil rights era, it is important to remember that a key argument used to keep blacks from exercising their rights was that it was that such matters were up to the states and not the federal government. Had these pronouncements been followed by a series of state laws protecting black citizens from the evils of Jim Crow, we could respect states rights as a serious matter, but states rights has always been a lie. Used to suppress blacks - first under slavery and then under Jim Crow laws that created virtual slavery. And when Southerners found that the sovereignty of other states went against them, they asked for fugitive slave laws to help recapture lost slaves. After the Civil War, the South re-established virtual slavery via an aggressive system of imprisoning blacks for minor violations of law - and then harnessing them as cheap labo