Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality

by its very existence. De jure segregation also had this deep and pernicious ef ect: it made de facto segregation

look benign by comparison. Institutionalized racism had two

ostensibly distinct, even opposite systems serving to validate it.

In the South, this racism had the authority of law. In the rest of

the country, the social inferiority of Blacks had the appearance

of being natural, not imposed by force.

De jure segregation was destroyed over many years because

vast numbers of Black people with some brave white al ies

fought it, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

De jure segregation was fought in the courts and in the streets.

“The streets” included shops, restaurants, buses, hotels, parks,

toilets, because of the high priority put by the movement on integrating public accommodations. Much of this activity was il egal. The courts and the streets were not separate arenas.

When the Supreme Court disavowed segregation in public

education in 1954, it was left to Black children to desegregate

the schools. They faced white mobs led by armed police and

elected white of icials. The children, not the Supreme Court,

integrated the schools. When Rosa Parks refused to give up

her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on

December 1, 1955, she was arrested and convicted for breaking a state segregation law. The Black community organized a boycot of the Montgomery buses that eventually led to their

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Pornography and Civil Rights

desegregation. Endless acts of civil disobedience resulted in

perhaps hundreds of thousands of arrests over a period of at

least a decade; marches led to continuous confrontations with

violent police; civil-rights activists used the courts, sometimes

as litigants, sometimes charged as criminals.

The courts were the courts of segregation; north or south,

federal or state, they had protected segregation. The streets were

the streets of segregation. The police were the police of segregation. The vote was the vote that had kept segregation inviolate. Civil-rights activists confronted the institutions of segregation because they wanted to destroy segregation. They went to where the power and injury were and they confronted the power

that was causing the injury. This power hurt them whether or

not they fought it. In fighting it, however, they forced it to reveal itself—its cruelty and its sadism but also its premises, its dynamics, its structural strengths and weaknesses. Each confrontation led to another confrontation, more and worse social conflict, often more and worse police or mob violence. The courts

led to the streets and the streets led to the courts. The good judicial decisions led to the armed police who did not accept those decisions, which led back to jail and back to the courts. There

were also in time negotiations with two Presidents of the United

States (Kennedy and Johnson) and the Justice Department; then

back to the street, back to jail, back to court. There were battles

and compromises with federal legislators; then demonstrations,

marches, civil disobedience, jail. In the impoverished rural areas

of the Deep South, civil-rights workers taught illiterate Blacks

to read and write so they could pass the literacy tests that were

being used to keep Blacks out of the voting booths. The civil-

rights workers were met with white violence. So were the Blacks

who tried to register to vote, throughout the South.

The social conflict was real. Many were hurt and some were

killed. The conflict escalated with each confrontation, inside