A LIBERATING TECHNOLOGY The auto & civil rights

A LIBERATING TECHNOLOGY

The auto & civil rights

The Competitive Enterprise Institute in 1995 published “Autonomy and Automobility” by philosopher Loren Lomasky of Ohio State University Bowling Green which argued that the automobile is a liberating and ennobling invention, comparable in its contribution to human good with the printing press and that it is its very liberating power that so enrages those of an authoritarian controlling mindset.

Sam Kazman of CEI pointed out that the auto was critical to breaking government-backed segregation in the South. Rosa Parks, the 41 year old black woman who refused to budge from her ‘white’ seat on a public bus Dec 5 1955 in Montgomery Alabama began it. Her arrest for violating a segregation law precipitated a year long boycott of the public buses by blacks and others opposing discrimination. By depriving a racist local government of revenue, forcing the layoff of busdrivers, and dramatizing the issue for the media, Rosa Parks and her supporters forced public officials to take positions on segregation and set in train events that changed America.

The media highlighted a few protesters in Montgomery who chose to walk rather than ride a segregated bus system. The walkers made good pictures. But the major history of the epochal Montgomery bus boycott though titled “The Year They Walked” by Beatrice Siegel makes it clear that in fact it was a well-organized car-sharing or ‘jitney’ effort that sustained the boycott: “A downtown parking lot owned by a black man became the command post for a fleet of cars that operated like shared taxicabs...some 300 vehicles were in the car pool.” The local police to harrassed the car poolers, but this only produced a greater determination to resist.

Kazman could have noted the contrast between 1955 when cars were plentiful and 1905 when they were rare, the expensive toys of the rich. In 1905 when segregation was introduced on trolleys in Richmond Virginia a black leader John Mitchell called eloquently for a boycott: “Let us walk. A people who willingly accept discrimination...are not entitled to the liberties of a free people.” Black people responded and for a while boycotted the segregated trolleys but, because of the lack of an alternative means of transport, the boycott eventually fizzled. Historican Marie Tyler-McGraw writes: “Richmond’s streetcar boycott (against segregated transit) was one of 25 in southern cities at the turn of the century and none were successful. (“At the Falls: Richmond Virginia & Its People” UNC Press, 94 p215) As Kazman says of 1955 by contrast: “The private car succeeded in cracking the city government’s monopoly... The private car created a means of escape...The story of the bus boycott should remind us that there is history not only under our wheels but on our side.” (Contact Sam Kazman CEI tel 202 331 1010 info@cei.org www.cei.org)