Libertarian arguments against federal programs to help integrate blacks in 1968 were relatively rare

I was looking at the codebook of a survey done in fifteen cities in 1968 on attitudes toward racial integration as well as the riots. I've plotted out the results of a follow up question in the survey on the reasons why people opposed federal programs that would spend money on black social and economic integration. The percentages add up to more than 100%, because people could provide multiple answers:

Only a little over 10% of the respondents who opposed these programs opposed it because they thought it was inappropriate for government to do that sort of thing. More thought it was unnecessary, too costly, bound to fail, etc. By far the most common response was that blacks shouldn't turn to the government and instead help themselves.

With all this talk about Rand Paul and what he thought of the Civil Rights Act, it's important to keep in mind that he's joining a crowd that is motivated for decidedly non-libertarian reasons. We don't have large surveys, but the same is likely to be true of the Civil War. If there were genuine advocates of libertarianism using that argument to justify the Confederacy at the time, they were probably in the minority.

The Economics of Dr. King

From Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1968), by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

...There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it... Today, therefore, the question on the agenda must read: why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life?... There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will.

...All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasure of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally "in the red." We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women.

...Economic expansion cannot alone do the job of improving the employment situation of the Negroes. It provides the base for improvement but other things must be constructed upon it, especially if the tragic situation of youth is to be solved. In a booming economy Negro youth are afflicted with unemployment as though in an economic crisis. They are the explosive outsiders of the American expansion.

The insistence on educational credentials and certificates for skilled and semi-skilled jobs is keeping Negroes out of both the private business sector and government employment. Negro exclusion is not the purpose of the insistence upon credentials, but it is its inevitable consequence today. The orientation of personnel offices should be "Jobs First, Training Later." Unfortunately, the job policy of the federal programs has largely been the reverse, with the result that people are being trained for nonexistent jobs.

"Training" becomes a way of avoiding the issue of employment, for it does not ask the employer to change his policies and job structures. Instead of training for uncertain jobs, the policy of the government should be to subsidize American business to employ individuals whose education is limited. This policy may be considered a bribe by some, but it is a step consonant with reality. We require a vast expansion of present programs of on-the-job training in which training costs are absorbed by the government; at another level, employers could be granted reduced taxes if they employed difficult to place workers.

...The Freedom Budget of A.P. Randolph is important because it provides a basis for common action with labor and other groups in utilizing the economic growth of this nation to benefit the poor as well as the rich. It raises the possibility of rebuilding America so that private affluence is not accompanied by public squalor of slums and distress.

UPDATE: I apologize for closing comments. I just wanted to share a little of Martin Luther King's thoughts on economics. Some of it I disagree with, some of it I agree with, all of it I think was coming from the right frame of mind. The comment section turned into an argument over whether Progressives are to blame for segregation and Jim Crow legislation. It's not the sort of thing that seems appropriate on this anniversary. I wish we could have comments - but, well, we can't. Sorry.

Dr. King was a Trekkie

Neddy Merrill at The Edge of the American West (a great American history blog, if you're interested and aren't following it already) shares an interesting anecdote about Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek:

Apparently Nichols almost left the show because she had a Broadway offer, until a chance encounter with a fan changed her mind.

That fan was Martin Luther King Jr. Nichols recalls their conversation:

"One of the organizers came up to me and said that there was someone who wants to meet you; and he says that he’s you’re best, biggest fan and I’m thinking it’s a Trekkie! [laughs] and so I said certainly and I got up and turned around and maybe 10 or 15 feet coming towards me I see Dr. Martin Luther King and I remember thinking whoever that little fan is, he’s going to have to wait, because here’s Dr. King, who walks straight up to me with this big, magnificent smile on his face and says, “I’m the fan!” because I’m sort of looking around for someone else, and he says, “I am your best fan, I am your biggest fan!” and I… I was at a loss for words, and if you know me, I am never at a loss for words.

…and so I told him I would be leaving the show, because; and that was as far as he let me go, and he said, “STOP! You cannot! You cannot leave this show! Do you not understand what you are doing?! You are the first non-stereotypical role in television! Of intelligence, and of a woman and a woman of color?! That you are playing a role that is not about your color! That this role could be played by anyone? This is not a black role. This is not a female role! A blue eyed blond or a pointed ear green person could take this role!” And I am looking at him and looking at him and buzzing, and he said, “Nichelle, for the first time, not only our little children and people can look on and see themselves, but people who don’t look like us, people who don’t look like us, from all over the world, for the first time, the first time on television, they can see us, as we should be!"

Lovecraft on Race and Religion: Part 1

As many readers are aware, I'm compiling notes and outlines on H.P. Lovecraft's political economy and social theory as I go through essays and letters of his that I'm collecting. I recently got a collection of his letters from 1931-1934, and the other depression years are on their way soon. Why am I doing this? (1.) Treatment of his thinking on these issues so far has been quite superficial where it's been treated at all. (2.) He thinks quite deeply about economic forces that aren't treated in very great detail in the discipline formally, but were of considerable importance for the average citizen and for the Institutionalist school in the early 20th century (namely, mechanization, technological unemployment, inequality, monopolization, overproductionism, etc.). (3.) He has very interesting commentary on how the changes observed in the 20s and 30s relate to views on political economy in the early republic.

That's all well and good - but you can't get anywhere with Lovecraft in politics or social theory without running up against two big walls: his fascism and his racism. He was both - a fascist and a racist - but his thinking on these things can be surprising as well. He is by no means a fascist in the sense that Hitler was. My read of him so far is that he is more what we'd call a "technocrat" than a "fascist" today - but in the early 30s before the meaning of the word "fascism" changed irretrievably that term worked. That's a discussion for another time. Like everything I'm running across, Lovecraft doesn't rely (exclusively at least) on platitudes. He works through his fascism very carefully and I can't really do his thoughts on it justice here.

The other wall is his racism. Unlike his fascism (which I think is overstated by critics), his racism is undeniable, virulent, and out in the open. But again - almost chillingly - it's very carefully thought through. I think we have a tendency to treat racism as the arena of unthinking mobs. It's jarring to read someone carefully walk you through his racism - to see that it is nuanced and even differentiated from the racism of others. Lovecraft, for example, repeatedly makes detailed distinctions between what he calls "race-stock" and culture. He's been presented by some reviewers as embracing Anglo-Saxon superiority. Maybe he does at some point, but in the 1932-1933 period he takes great pains to argue that no "race-stock" is superior, and relentlessly mocks Hitler for making claims like that. Lovecraft argues that almost all races are equal - simply different - and his greatest concern is the cultural tradition that evolves with a "race-stock". His concern is that when "race-stocks" mix, culture is depleted because it is watered down by the incorporation of new cultures - and that cultural depletion is what he sees as the source of Western decline. In the period that I'm looking at, Japan had recently gone through a coup d'etat that established a new militarist government. Lovecraft comments extensively on this as well and praises both the Japanese and the Chinese, lauding their respective "cultures" and the cultural maintenance he expects from the new militarists in Japan - which of course contrasts sharply with the "yellow peril" views of most American racists at the time.

Two points complicate this race/culture line of thought: the "race-stocks" he does identify as biologically inferior (Africans and "Australoids"), and of course the Jews. I haven't worked through all of these letters yet, but so far he pays very little attention to the inferior "race-stocks". I suppose there's not much to discuss there, for him. The Jewish question is very interesting for Lovecraft - again because he is undeniably anti-semitic, but he's jarringly complex in his anti-semitism. Again - he mocks Hitler's anti-semitism incessantly and dismisses any notion that there's something unique or inferior about Jewish genetics - he dismisses that idea regularly. And that shouldn't be paritcularly surprising for anyone that knows anything about Lovecraft's personal life: he married a Jew, after all! That fact has puzzled a lot of Lovecraft critics, but it's not especially surprising when you read what he actually writes about them. And yet, he's definitely an anti-semite - I'm not arguing that he's not! His anti-semitism rests on his view that Jews are commandeering and distorting major cultural institutions, which of course is not an uncommon line at all among rank-and-file racists. But even this more traditional line of thought is intriguing - he identifies Knopf, for example, as a publishing house in New York that has been commandeered by Jews. You would think, then, that he wouldn't submit his stories to Knopf - but he does! You would think that when they subsequently reject his stories he would blame "the Jews" like a young, dejected Hitler. Surprisingly, he doesn't at all! At least not in any letters that I've come across (and again I stress I've only been through some). He curses Knopf and takes the rejection very hard, but you don't see any citation of Judaism. This is especially surprising since he's already identified this publishing house as a source of Jewish influence on culture. Instead, he identifies the marketability of his stories as the problem!

So Lovecraft's anti-semitism is (1.) explicitly anti-Nazi, (2.) unrelated to genetics or bloodlines at all, (3.) willing to accept a Jewish wife, while (4.) engaging in the oldest, basest critiques of Jewish cultural dominance, and yet (5.) when these identified Jewish cultural critics reject his works he chalks it up to the limited marketability of his own stories rather than any imagined Jewish avarice. The guy is very hard to get a consistent picture of, and I'm only reporting my impressions of a three year period (and yet, one does get the impression that if one were to get a clear picture of him, it wouldn't be a pleasant one)! As Hitler (who he already critiques severely) gets more open in his violence and anti-semitism in the 1934-1937 period I fully expect Lovecraft's views to get even more complicated.

In Part 2 I'm going to discuss a very interesting critique of Judaism (really of Semitic monotheism in general - including Christianity and Islam as well, but which he traces back to Judaism) and the relationship between religion and morality.

*****

A semi-unrelated note: I came across a Cthulu emoticon that's kind of funny: (;,;)

Black Youth Unemployment: Urban Institute Research and an Op-Ed

Marla McDaniel, a colleague of mine here at the Urban Institute, shared a labor day op-ed that she wrote with Margaret Simms (another Institute researcher) on the different labor market experiences of black youth and white youth. The op-ed is based on research that Marla and I have been doing for the last two years or so with the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We have two short fact sheets out right now on the transition to adulthood for (1.) low-income black youth, and (2.) youth from low-income working families (as opposed to low-income families where there is little or no attachment to a job). She and I have both presented these findings in several professional conferences, and we're currently working on a journal article (well - she's doing most of the leg work for that right now - I haven't touched that for a while).

Margaret Simms heads our Low-Income Working Families project at the Urban Institute, which conducts research on families that have strong connections to the labor market but are still struggling with poverty. She's a brilliant economist, with a lot of experience in social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, worker's comp), and poverty research. Both Margaret and Marla spoke at length on our research findings at this Urban Institute event back in June. Also speaking on this panel is Harry Holzer (Georgetown University, The Urban Institute) who is one of the foremost experts on black youth unemployment, and youth unemployment in general.

It's worth reading through this stuff. Disadvantages faced by black youth are well known, but we provide a lot of counter-intuitive details here. We also talk a lot about the role of connecting to the labor market early in sustaining strong connections to the labor market. We don't put it in these terms directly, but this speaks to the relationship between cyclical and structural unemployment that has gotten a lot of discussion lately. Long story short: unemployment is state-dependent and long spells of unemployment destroy human capital.

Catalan on American Slavery

Jonathan Catalan has a post up on American slavery. First, he suggests that slavery in the South would have eventually died out:

I am certain that slavery in the United States would have been phased out naturally. Slavery was beneficial in the south because of low marginal productivity. The south was predominately an agricultural society, and it had not benefited from the mechanization it would benefit from in the decades directly after the American Civil War.

I have to agree with him on this. Slavery was dying out across the world, it would have been increasingly agitated against, it would have begun to get unprofitable (for the masters, that is - it was always unprofitable for the slaves). Many slave-owning Southerners felt it was a dying system and didn't even particularly like it - they simply didn't not like it enough to do much about it. Jonathan goes on:

"An important question to ask is whether or not the emancipation of the slaves during the civil war accelerated the post-war industrialization of the south. No longer benefiting from cheap labor, southern farmers had to radically increase production in order to remain profitable. This directly leads to another question: how long would it have taken to naturally rid the country of slavery?

There were important technological developments prior to the civil war: steel plows, seed drills, threshing machines, et cetera. The dramatic burst in agricultural productivity, however, occurred in the post-war (indeed, this increase in productivity directly after the war led to the industrial revolution of 1879-1906, since it allowed otherwise occupied labor to be restructured into more productive industries)."

I found all this very interesting, because I suppose I never really thought of the late twentieth century as a boom time for the South. Maybe you only learn this in Southern public schools, but I was always taught that the War retarded industrial development in the South, so the idea that the end of slavery encouraged industrialization seems unusual, albeit I suppose plausible, to me.

There are a couple of other developments that are worth considering here. First, the Jim Crow Laws were passed as the Reconstruction regimes began to subside during this same time period. In a lot of ways, blacks reverted back to a state of semi-enslavement. Sharecropping and credit extension from landlords cemented the reassertion of this semi-slavery, making labor cheaper and perhaps once again retarding the progress of industrialization.

By the early 1900s you had another force - the large-scale migration of blacks and others from the South to the North, known as the Great Migration. This would have increased the marginal productivity of labor and caused the South to substitute away from capital.

And finally, I hate to break it to my Austrian readers, but Southerners also often point to one source as the reason for the transition from being the "Cotton Belt" to the "Sun Belt": Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Between the New Deal, the military spending, and the military-industrial complex that continues to do a lot of work in the South, a lot of thanks goes to Southern Democrats and their allies in the White House.

From the culture wars...

1. Politicians are ugly, ugly people.

2. I don't know if it's better or worse that Glenn Beck claims he didn't even know Martin Luther King delivered the I Have a Dream Speech on August 28th at the Lincoln Memorial when he scheduled his rally on August 28th at the Lincoln Memorial. That seems like it should be a 4th of July or December 7th or April 9th sort of date for Americans. I've had a tough time figuring out what I think on this. Ex ante, I can't figure out a good reason why this is inappropriate or why Beck shouldn't do this. But I have a strong suspicion that something will be done or said there that will make it inappropriate. He claims it will not be used to demagogue, and who are we to stop someone that makes that claim? But in all likelihood it will be used to demagogue and the worst part is, to his ears it won't even sound like demagoguing so when people criticize him for it he'll develop even more of a martyr complex than he already has.

Yglesias's Lynching Statistics

Yglesias had a post up yesterday on a really strange attempt by the conservative magazine American Spectator to try to discredit Shirley Sherrod by arguing that her relative, Bobby Hall, was not lynched because he was not hung (he was beaten to death). Yglesias goes through the history of lynching, and some of the reports on the incident, and demonstrates quite clearly that lynching doesn't necessarily mean "hanging", it simply means mob justice before a trial can take place. It often implies hanging, but the act is not required. Why the American Spectator would try to take a stand on this is a worthwhile question for any subscribers to that publication to ask. But I was also intrigued by the graphic that Yglesias included from the Truman administration's "To Secure These Rights" report:



One thing that caught my eye was how many of the early lynchings were of whites. For the first ten years, about half the incidents involved whites, and then very quickly the vast majority were lynchings of blacks. What happened here? One of the books I rescued from the Urban Institute's library before it closed up was the 1966 follow up report on civil rights titled "To Fulfill These Rights", but this report didn't even mention lynching (which I suppose is in and of itself a sign of some progress). I also consulted DuBois's 1915 article on lynching and he doesn't mention the phenomenon of white lynching. I have three theories for what's going on here. If anyone has any way of arbitrating between the theories or has any additional theories I'd be interested in hearing about it:
.

1. The end of Reconstruction marked the beginning of the Jim Crow era. The late 1870s and early 1880s were a time of institution building at the state and local level; new institutions emerged to control blacks now that the old laws and customs of chattel slavery and the protective cover of the Union Army were both gone. In 1875 or so, while the United States was not a pleasant place for blacks, it was not yet the Jim Crow world that would emerge. I know specifically of former Confederate officer William Mahone, who (at least initially) made political inclusion of blacks a priority in Virginia. But as the institutions of Jim Crow began to emerge this sort of position became untenable for whites, and men like Mahone very quickly began to relent. So - perhaps white lynchings in the 1880s, which quickly dropped off afterwards, were a form of institutional enforcement. Whites were lynched early on for the same reason that blacks were: they weren't sufficiently deferential to white privilege. Perhaps a few tried to defend blacks during lynchings and suffered the same fate. As the institution matured, whites "learned their place" as it were, and didn't make any attempts to challenge a system that, after all, provided them with privileges. It seems like a reasonable explanation.
.

2. Lynchings became racialized. There are a lot of things in our society that are thought of as "black things" or "white things". Crime and punishment is no different. The South has always been a violent place, and its not particularly surprising that mob justice was meted out to whites as well as blacks. But when lynching became a specific tool of Jim Crow, it became a "black punishment". Part of keeping the disparity between whites and blacks intact was to make sure that whites weren't subjected to "black punishments". Violent outbursts are racially categorized - you don't hear that much about black duels and you don't hear that much about white lynchings. You can see this trend in servitude and slavery itself in the very early South. Bound servitude was initially a fate of both whites and blacks. But very quickly chattel slavery was distinguished as an institution for blacks alone. In a sense this explanation, like the first one, is very much an "institutional emergence" explanation.
.

3. Bad statistics. You can't work with data of varying quality every day and not keep in mind that the statistics might just be bad. It's quite plausible that total lynchings were much higher in the 1880s than is reported here, but that white lynchings were reported and counted more often than black lynchings. As the years went on and this was recognized as a real problem, counts of black lynchings became more accurate. If this is the case, then the substantial number of early white lynchings may be a mirage - they may have formed just as small a percentage of the total as they did in later years.

Webb and Affirmative Action

Since we're going down the divisive race-tinged politics path, I'll also share an excellent op-ed by my Senator (who, I might add, I voted for in his race against George Allen), Jim Webb, on why we should get rid of affirmative action programs.

Webb makes two points about affirmative action that I consider to be quite self-evident:

1. It is fundamentally unfair and discriminatory, and
2. It was an absolutely defensible, if imperfect, remedy for centuries of state-sponsored discrimination

These two obviously butt up against each other, and I've fallen out on the pro-affirmative-action side of that clash, while still recognizing the truth of both points. He buys both of these arguments too, and then he makes some very good additional points in favor of dropping affirmative action:

- Affirmative action now is not helping who it is supposed to help: African Americans. Non-African American "people of color"are benefiting from this policy despite the fact that their history of discrimination doesn't even begin to approach that of African Americans.

- Race based policies that treat whites as a monolith ignore disadvantaged white sub-populations deserving of help (Webb specifically mentions poor Southern whites). At the same time, they give a leg-up to "people of color" that are advantaged by treating "people of color" as a monolith (more recent Asian immigrants, for example). This isn't some naive "we should be color-blind" point. This is a serious point that monolithic racial thinking obscures disadvantages within the categories "white" and "people of color".

I think these are both sensible observations. Am I swayed on my position on affirmative action (which I actually came to through a long, complicated, acrimonious episode on campus at William and Mary - it was not a position I came to casually)? Not by this op-ed alone, no. But I think he makes some excellent points.

I would add one of my own - one nagging problem I have had with affirmative action even through my conversion to being a supporter of the practice. Affirmative action generally improves the chances of people of color at later stages of their lives: college and employment, specifically. It seems to me, by then the problem is already entrenched. The real disadvantage faced by African Americans is not in the admissions committees of colleges, it is in the quality of primary education in their communities. It seems to me, affirmative action at these later stages does nothing to impact the root cause of these problems. It's a farce, in that sense. Perhaps it takes a few real achievers from bad schools and gives them a chance to shine as they could have shined in high school if they had a more supportive environment. Perhaps. And that's what's kept me supporting the program. But it isn't a solution for black students who have already lost out in elementary school and middle school, where I imagine the bulk of the problem lies.

The NAACP statement on the Tea Party

There has been a lot of back and forth on the NAACP statment that I simply haven't engaged in. Some interesting exchanges have gone on on the blogs of The Atlantic that I thought were worth highlighting, specifically some from Ta-Nehisi Coates, here and here. Coates also has a post here titled "Why Black Writers Tend Not to Shout", about how he and other black writers are usually very circumspect because their audiences are often largely white. So they equivocate and try not sound particularly pushy about issues like this. Coates notes that the NAACP's forthrightness on this point was a relief for black writers who typically try to avoid these confrontations. Factually, Coates sounds right on target on this. But I have to say I found it supremely ironic that of all people, Coates wrote this one. He can be very in-your-face in his own comment section, and very dismissive of commenters. I know from personal experience. I've only commented a handful of times before and he's gone into weird attack mode almost every single time, and not just towards me. Usually I comment on posts of his on the Civil War (he's a Civil War history buff). Those posts are his way or the highway - let me put it that way.

I know I can be blunt and I feel perfectly free to disagree strenuously with commenters on this blog too. But then again, I never claimed to be meek and mild, did I? :)

I like Coates's final post on this issue a lot. It is here. I left this in the comment section, which pretty much sums up my views on the NAACP statement on the Tea Party:

"I agree whole-heartedly.

There is a lot to criticize in critiques of the Tea Party movement that frame all Tea Partiers as racist, or that downplay the fact that it fundamentally is a small-government movement (however hypocritical, however poorly executed). The worst commentary on the Tea Party movement has been the commentary that blindly dismisses all of them as racists, and dismisses even the idea that they may be expressing genuine differences of opinion. That has been the worst sort of response.

But the NAACP has provided the best sort of response - the sort of response people should have been making all along, namely that

(1.) Elements of the Tea Party have incontrovertibly racist positions and motivations. This phraseology that they used - discussing "elements" was precisely the right note to strike.

(2.) That these elements should be denounced, not just because the NAACP doesn't like the Tea Party movement, but because if the Tea Party movement itself wants to have any relevance it can't continue to coexist with these elements.

If people confuse these points or fail to understand them, that's on their heads. I thought the NAACP statement was perfectly understandable and right on target.

Now, was it a tactical error? I suppose that depends on how you define it. If you think that ensuring we all communicate our views to each other in a marketplace of ideas is dependent on descending to the least common denominator of public discourse, that it is dependent on getting rid of all nuance and contingency and specificity, then yes, I suppose you might describe the NAACP statement as a "tactical error", because clearly there were willfully ignorant readers that missed the point.

But honestly, I don't want to participate in a public discourse like that, I don't think the NAACP wanted to either, and I applaud them for transcending it."

Links on Race and American History

- In the 1860s, photography was enough of a novelty that you didn't often take pictures of your slaves. A very rare exception was found recently, depicting two young boys who were either slaves or had recently been emancipated. What's especially interesting about the photo is that it was produced by Matthew Brady's studio (although not by Brady himself). Brady is easily the most famous photographer of the Civil War period, producing many iconic pictures of the war.

- The Virginia Historical Society blog has a post up on why the Civil War started. I consider this to be a more complex question than most people admit. It was about slavery, but it wasn't just about slavery - and it wasn't about slavery in the way that most people think it was (i.e. - it wasn't about abolition per se). That's my view from a very cursory reading of the evidence. One thing I do think is important, though, is to differentiate between the Deep South and the Upper South and their quite different justifications and the implications of those justifications. This blog post does a good job highlighting the distinction of Virginia's (eventual) decision to secede.

- Jonathan Chait quotes the National Review on conservatism and civil rights. I don't have time to read the whole NRO piece, but this is the key from Chait's post:

"Voters may reasonably conclude that a political philosophy that places such strict limits on government that it cannot ban racial discrimination in circumstances such as those of the South in the mid-1960s is defective... They also erred about the Constitution, even as they, like Paul, urged restraint in its name. Too many conservatives in the Sixties treated the claim that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution are not valid law as though it were a serious argument. But even those who were immune to this kookery acted as though the enactment of these amendments had changed nothing."

- A discussion of the autobiography of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers on C-Span.

- The financial crisis in Greece has delayed the delivery of the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. from China. The Greeks had offered to ship the statue for free, but have been unable to deliver. It will eventually come, and everyone seems gracious and understanding about the tough spot that Greece is in.

I also have two questions for readers:

1. Glenn Beck is holding a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th this year. August 28th (aside from being my birthday) is the day that King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. The theme of the rally is pretty unobjectionable, but given King's politics some people think it's an opportunistic move. All the speakers are prominent conservatives and libertarians, so even though the rally is billed as a broader patriotic event, you never know what's going to be said there. What do readers think of this?

2. This is a more specific question, but does anyone know how the liberation of serfs and peasants in Europe in the late 1840s and early 1850s affected the discussion about slavery in the United States? I'm still reading the 1848 revolution book because I've found barely any time to read, but I just recently read the section that deals with the end of serfdom, and I was curious if there was any crossover. You usually hear about three factors driving the debate over slavery in America. First, the slave uprisings by guys like Nat Turner in the early 1830s. Second, the rise in importance of the cotton crop. And third, the expansion west, which would raise over and over the question of whether slavery would exist in the territories and new states. But you never hear anything about how Americans reacted to the end to serfdom. This seems like it would be very important. The institutions of serfdom and chattel slavery are of course very different, but many of the problems and questions overlapped. Does anything know if this had any impact?