Rosa Parks' case (December 5, 1955) shows how impossible it is to measure the monstrous impact of government imposing segregation and teaching racism as official policy for so long.  Government racism did much more damage than private enterprise could ever have afforded to do.  It would have been better if government had stayed out of buses altogether. Instead, the government created bus monopolies and then forced the bus company to treat customers in a racist manner.
    The Parks story ignores how government started the problem that Parks helped to end.  When government began socializing and monopolizing buses, it expanded government-mandated racism.  Parks' persecution is another example of government peeing on everyone and then claiming that it was rain.
    The persecution of Parks on a city-regulated bus is similar to the persecution of Parks' friends and family on government school buses and within government schools. Government forced people to ride segregated buses and to attend the government's segregated schools.
    The government's takeover of education was promoted by Edward Bellamy and Francis Bellamy (author of the "Pledge of Allegiance").  They wanted the government to take over all schools and use the schools to impose their dogma of "National Socialism" and create and "Industrial Army."  The Bellamys were bigots, self-proclaimed National Socialists, and advocated that government should operate buses, schools and other services as socialist monopolies and end all of the better alternatives. When the government granted their wish, government schools imposed segregation by law and taught racism as official policy.
    Francis Bellamy's Pledge of Allegiance (1892) was the origin of the stiff-arm salute adopted later by the National Socialist German Workers Party, as uncovered by the noted historian Dr. Rex Curry (author of "Pledge of Allegiance Secrets").  
    Because of the Bellamys, students were forced to perform the nazi salute to the US flag in segregated schools that taught racism as official policy. See the eye-popping photo at
    That behavior (robotic chanting to flags with the straight-arm salute) began in the United States three decades before it was adopted by the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and the government's racism in busing, schools and elsewhere outlasted German National Socialism. The government's bus monopolies still exist to this day, as do the government's schools.
    There are frightening similarities to the way anti-black laws were imposed in socialized (government) services in the United States and anti-jewish laws were imposed in socialized (government) services in Germany under the National Socialist German Workers Party.
    Dr. Curry is an attorney and is often asked about important court cases, including that of Rosa Parks. Curry said, "If the government had taken over all churches then the same horror would have resulted, with government-mandated racism in government churches.  The libertarian solution would have been to end socialized churches.  It is fortunate that the Constitution prevented government churches.  It is unfortunate that the Constitution did not prevent government buses, government-created bus monopolies, and government schools, though they are no where authorized."
    In addition to ending government’s racism, Parks should have ended government involvement in busings. The separation of economy and state is as important as the separation of church and state.   Its not too late.
    They boycotted the buses for a year and used other means of transportation.  They were not able to simply operate their own buses, because the buses were a government-created monopoly. They were even persecuted by the government for car-pooling on the grounds that it was an unauthorized bus substitute.
    A lot has not changed.  Parks’ descendants cannot operate their own buses today.  If they tried, then the result would be the same: they would be jailed and persecuted by local officials.
Similar behavior occurred in Brown v. Board of Education
Abolish the N word, Ban the N-word
Rosa Parks (December 5, 1955) and the bus boycott

Rosa Parks bus boycott Brown v. Board of Education Pledge of Allegiance

Another report said that the bus company nearly went bankrupt from the boycott that followed.

    It is amazing how media stories about segregation never mention that the government was responsible for segregation. 
    Media stories about Rosa Parks never mention that the reason the bus was segregated was because of government - because a law dictated segregation on the private bus.  That there were private bus companies at the time that did not segregate. The 1955 case of City of Montgomery v. Rosa Parks involved charges that Parks violated STATE segregation STATUTES by not relinquishing her seat on a Montgomery City bus to a white man.
    Even the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), Argued on April 13, 1896, Decided on May 18, 1896 is another example of government mandated racism in private enterprise, yet the media never mention that fact. A Louisiana law mandated racial segregation on its trains.   The state of Louisiana enacted a law that required separate railway cars for blacks and whites. In 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy--who was seven-eighths Caucasian--took a seat in a government mandated "whites only" car of a Louisiana train. He refused to move to the government mandated car reserved for blacks and was arrested.  The U.S. Supreme court at that time upheld the  state-imposed racial segregation. The justices based their decision on the separate-but-equal doctrine, that separate facilities for blacks and whites satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment so long as they were equal. (The phrase, "separate but equal" was not part of the opinion.)
    Southern states enacted laws banning black folk from sitting at segregated lunch counters. The federal courts eventually got around to throwing out those laws.  To this day the media often show historic photos of blacks at segregated lunch counters  (e.g. at W. T. Grants) and the media fails to clarify whether the segregation was a result of government laws. 
    Government, historically and to this day, has been the greatest promoter of racism and other forms of discrimination with anti-libertarian laws (regarding buses, government schools, government universities, the military, anti-miscegenation laws).  Yet, when relief is sought, it seems that Government is then used as an excuse to pile on even more government programs, along with controls of private individuals and their lives and businesses.

    In the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), Argued on April 13, 1896, Decided on May 18, 1896, the Question Presented to U.S. Supreme Court was:
        Is Louisiana's law mandating racial segregation on
                       its trains an unconstitutional infringement on both
                       the privileges and immunities and the equal
                       protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment?

The infamous conclusion by the U.S. Supreme Court was:
                       No, the state law is within constitutional
                       boundaries. The majority upheld state-imposed
                       racial segregation. The justices based their decision
                       on the separate-but-equal doctrine, that separate
                       facilities for blacks and whites satisfied the
                       Fourteenth Amendment so long as they were
                       part of the opinion.) Brown conceded that the 14th
                       amendment intended to establish absolute equality
                       for the races before the law. But Brown noted that
                       "in the nature of things it could not have been
                       intended to abolish distinctions based upon color,
                       or to enforce social, as distinguished from political
                       equality, or a commingling of the two races
                       unsatisfactory to either." In short, segregation does
                       not in itself constitute unlawful discrimination.

Fred David Gray served as defense attorney in the celebrated case of City of Montgomery v. Rosa Parks. After graduating from Alabama State University in 1951, you decided to enter law school. Because African-Americans were not admitted to any law school in Alabama at the time, the state helped finance your enrollment at a law school elsewhere, and thus you arrived as a law student at this University. To A few months after your graduation in 1954, you passed both the Ohio and Alabama bar examinations and, determined to change segregation and discrimination, you moved to Alabama to become the only black attorney in Montgomery. The following year, you defended Mrs. Parks against the charge that she violated state segregation statutes by not relinquishing her seat on a Montgomery City bus to a white man. While your defense failed on a technicality, the case mushroomed into a bus boycott for which you also served as counsel. The boycott in turn launched the most visible portion of the civil rights movement, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King and with your legal advice.

    The media always fail to make any distinction between discrimination by private individuals and discrimination required from private citizens by government, historically and to this day. It seems that the media will never even mention any distinction between discrimination that is compelled by law and discrimination that is private.  Journalists who do not make the distinction are unable to make the distinction between statism and freedom.  Journalists who do not discern the difference are unable to discern the proper role of government: That government is as wrong to compel discriminatory behavior by people as it is in forbidding discriminatory behavior.

    That it is never enough to repeal the laws that dictate discrimination, but that new laws, laws that attempt to dictate non-discriminatory behavior upon private citizens have to be piled on top. 
    Government, historically and to this day, has been the greatest promoter of racism and other forms of discrimination.  Yet, when relief is sought, it seems that Government is then used as an excuse to


Mr. Lifson contacted retired employees of the bus company including Mrs. Margaret Cummings, widow of the former bus station manager Charles Homer Cummings. Mrs. Cummings provided a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that her husband had kept during and after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.

National City Lines (which was the parent company of the Montgomery City Bus Lines) had employed a clipping service to clip and save any newspaper articles about the company’s bus service. Charles Cummings had kept the scrapbook of newspaper articles from the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. Next to articles describing the arrest of Rosa Parks, he wrote "#2857" and "Blake/#2857." James Blake was the bus driver who had Rosa Parks arrested. Mr. Cummings’ relatives confirm that he jotted down the bus number because he felt the events were so important.

With this information in hand, Mr. Lifson consulted with the Motor Bus Society of Clark, New Jersey, a nonprofit historical organization. Their research into the records of the General Motors Corp. showed that bus Serial Number 1132 was produced in Pontiac, Michigan, in March 1948. It was a TDH-3610 (Transit Diesel Hydraulic Transmission, 36 passenger, Model 10) delivered to the National City Lines (NCL) of Chicago, Illinois.

NCL records indicate that the bus was assigned Coach #2857 and sent to Terre Haute, Indiana. In 1954 it was transferred from Terre Haute to Montgomery, Alabama.

Thus, we know that bus #2857 was in Montgomery in 1955, that it was informally documented as the Rosa Parks bus at the time, and that employees passed this information on to Mr. Summerford in 1970, who then passed it on to other people.

In October 2001, a member of the Museum’s conservation staff personally inspected the bus, ensuring that its markings and identification were original. A certified forensic document examiner employed by the Museum examined the scrapbooks and saw no reason to doubt the authenticity of the notations.

Often, as in this case, historical truth is not officially recorded, but is passed along in private memoirs and oral tradition.

She was arrested and convicted of violating the laws of segregation, known as “Jim Crow laws.” Mrs. Parks appealed her conviction and thus formally challenged the legality of segregation.

At the same time, local civil rights activists initiated a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. In cities across the South, segregated bus companies were daily reminders of the inequities of American society. Since African Americans made up about 75 percent of the riders in Montgomery, the boycott posed a serious economic threat to the company and a social threat to white rule in the city.

A group named the Montgomery Improvement Association, composed of local activists and ministers, organized the boycott. As their leader, they chose a young Baptist minister who was new to Montgomery: Martin Luther King, Jr. Sparked by Mrs. Parks’ action, the boycott lasted 381 days, into December 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the segregation law was unconstitutional and the Montgomery buses were integrated. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the beginning of a revolutionary era of non-violent mass protests in support of civil rights in the United States.

It was not just an accident that the civil rights movement began on a city bus. In a famous 1896 case involving a black man on a train, Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court enunciated the “separate but equal” rationale for Jim Crow. Of course, facilities and treatment were never equal.

Under Jim Crow customs and laws, it was relatively easy to separate the races in every area of life except transportation. Bus and train companies couldn’t afford separate cars and so blacks and whites had to occupy the same space.

Thus, transportation was one the most volatile arenas for race relations in the South. Mrs. Parks remembers going to elementary school in Pine Level, Alabama, where buses took white kids to the new school but black kids had to walk to their school.

“I'd see the bus pass every day,” she said. “But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world” (emphasis added).

Montgomery’s Jim Crow customs were particularly harsh and gave bus drivers great latitude in making decisions on where people could sit. The law even gave bus drivers the authority to carry guns to enforce their edicts. Mrs. Parks’ attorney Fred Gray remembered, “Virtually every African-American person in Montgomery had some negative experience with the buses. But we had no choice. We had to use the buses for transportation.”

Civil rights advocates had outlawed Jim Crow in interstate train travel, and blacks in several Southern cities attacked the practice of segregated See the bus specificationsbus systems. There had been a bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, but black leaders compromised before making real gains. Joann Robinson, a black university professor and activist in Montgomery, had suggested the idea of a bus boycott months before the Parks arrest.

Two other women had been arrested on buses in Montgomery before Parks and were considered by black leaders as potential clients for challenging the law. However, both were rejected because black leaders felt they would not gain white support. When she heard that the well-respected Rosa Parks had been arrested, one Montgomery African American woman exclaimed, “They’ve messed with the wrong one now.”

In the South, city buses were lightning rods for civil rights activists. It took someone with the courage and character of Rosa Parks to strike with lightning. And it required the commitment of the entire African American community to fan the flames ignited by that lightning into the fires of the civil rights revolution.

Stands trial and is convicted of disorderly conduct
Attends the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association led by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott begins

U.S. Supreme Court rules segregation on Montgomery buses to be unconstitutional Nov 13, 1956

 The issue of segregated seating had long been a source of resentment in Montgomery's black community. African Americans were forced to pay their fares at the front then reboard the bus at the back. They faced systematic harassment from white drivers, who sometimes pulled away before black passengers could reboard. On the bus, blacks sat behind a mobile barrier dividing the races, and as the bus filled, the barrier was pushed back to make room for white passengers. No black person could sit in the same row as a white, and whites had priority in this middle "no-man's land."

Thurgood Marshall’s Libertarian Moment (- it didn't last long)  by Myles Kantor a law student at Stetson University.  This was published at on Sept. 21, 2000.

      Ok, my title’s a bit misleading. Thurgood Marshall was a libertarian about as much as
      Plato was a family advocate. The legacy for which he’s lauded (most gratingly by
      white social democrats gorged on paternalism) is in direct conflict with libertarian
      principles. One of Marshall’s law clerks attributed chief responsibility to him "for the
      idea that social reform, through the Courts in the name of the Constitution, was both
      possible and desirable." So what if these "reforms" spat in the face of American
      constitutional order and perpetuated the caste-status of countless black Americans?
      (Just to round things out, there’s Marshall’s blatant textual defiance, shared by William
      Brennan, in deeming "The death penalty.a cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by
      the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments." Never mind that the latter amendment
      mentions depriving individuals of "life." Constitutional scholar Leonard Levy rightly
      observes in this context, "Brennan and Thurgood Marshall corrupt the judicial process
      and discredit it.") Marshall, however, stands out as an example of philosophical
      contingency and individual action. His jurisprudence largely pivoted on this
      relationship, specifically with regard to the role of government and the nature of
      property rights.

      Marshall’s turning point came during the student sit-ins at segregated restaurants.
      Hundreds of students were arrested for trespassing, which is what tends to happen
      when individuals refuse to exit land that doesn’t belong to them. Marshall at the time
      was the top attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Present to
      hear Marshall’s reaction to defending the students was Derrick Bell (who goes on to be
      a professorial victicrat, to use Larry Elder’s excellent term): "Thurgood stormed
      around the room proclaiming in a voice that could be heard across Columbus Circle
      that he did not care what anyone said, he was not going to represent a bunch of crazy
      colored students who violated the sacred property rights of white folks by going in

      That’s impeccable logic. (I think the students were more misguided than crazy,
      though.) Once one sobers up from the intoxicant of social justice (which has a knack
      for begetting antisocial injustice), the students’ actions boiled down to criminal
      conduct, plain and simple. Unfortunately, the students’ indignation for state tyranny
      eclipsed their respect for proprietary prerogative. I’m sure many consider that
      disrespect a permissible and even commendable means of achieving justice. The
      terrible irony is that those means helped institutionalize injustice on a massive scale
      while convincing a country that justice was served by doing so.

      Marshall’s earlier support of property rights didn’t endure and in fact he facilitated his
      volte-face. Juan Williams describes the course of events in his recent biography:

      "Looking for strategies for defending the students, Marshall called a conference of civil
      rights lawyers at Howard University on March 18 [1960]. Most of the lawyers, like
      Marshall, were skeptical of finding any legal basis for defense. The courts had long
      held that store owners had the right to refuse to do business with anyone they chose
      not to serve.

      Marshall’s young, activist staff, however, put forward the idea that a restaurant had to
      deal with anyone who walked in the door, regardless of race, under the Equal
      Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And Marshall became a convert
      when he began to consider that if racial prejudice were enforced by the state’s police
      and courts, then it was unconstitutional."

      The Supreme Court went on to be converted, and private prejudice was deemed state
      prejudice in Garner v. Louisiana (1961).

      It requires not legal profundity but literacy to discern the Equal Protection Clause has
      no bearing on the prejudice of a restauranteur. The sentence where that clause appears
      begins, "No State shall." No less an activist justice than William O. Douglas recognized
      this in his concurring opinion:

      can be as prejudiced and intolerant as they like." He however went on to write
      regarding restaurants, drugstores, etc.: "Though they are private enterprises, they are
      public facilities in which the States may not enforce a policy of racial segregation."

      This blurs the distinction between citizen and state, treating individuals conducting
      commerce on private property as extensions of the state (echoes of a certain ideology
      imposed on Italy, Germany, and elsewhere during the first half of the twentieth
      century?). Brought to its logical conclusion, this means homeowners cannot engage in
      discriminatory conduct on their property, for instance posting a sign on one’s lawn
      reading "Whites Not Allowed on This Land." After all, if their racial prejudice were
      enforced by the state’s police and courts (i.e., if a white trespasser were treated as
      such), that would constitute state action. Like a restaurant license, title to a house
      derives from the state; and surely a "public interest" could be contrived against
      residential racial prejudice as it was against commercial racial prejudice. (The Court did
      something akin to this in the 1948 case of Shelley v. Kraemer, in which it was held
      judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in land transactions violated the
      Equal Protection Clause. As an additional nexus, Marshall was one of the attorneys
      that argued against the covenant’s legitimacy.) Douglas’s exemption of individual
      conduct from the Fourteenth Amendment, then, is vacuous.

      Further decisions eroding property rights were to follow, and Marshall played an
      important role in that erosion. Amalgamated Food Employees Union Local 500 v.
      Logan Valley Plaza (1968) is emblematic. (Marshall was now a member of the
      Supreme Court, previously serving on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and as
      Solicitor General.) The Court had to decide the permissibility of picketing on a
      supermarket’s property located in a shopping mall. Marshall’s majority opinion held
      the First Amendment barred the supermarket from ejecting the picketers, citing a rule
      from an earlier case:

      constitutional rights of those who use it."

      Justice Hugo Black would have no truck with such sophistry: "[W]hether this Court
      ownership of property." "These pickets do have a constitutional right to speak about
      Weis’ [the supermarket owner] refusal to hire union labor," Black wrote, "but they do
      property." Indeed, he went further and argued the Court’s action was a taking for
      which just compensation was due under the Fifth Amendment: "[I]f this Court is going
      to arrogate to itself the power to act as the Government’s agent to take a part of Weis’
      compensation for the property taken."

      In Garner and Amalgamated Food Employees, Marshall set forth the formula that
      private property plus public purpose equals proprietary diminishment, i.e., a disability
      is inflicted upon businessmen. I know a beekeeper that harvests honey and sells it at a
      stand in front of his farm. Under the said formula, if he kicked off Freedom for Bees
      activists from his honey stand, it’s no long shot some court would hold that abridges
      the constitutional right of bee activists to picket on his land. Stated more bluntly, the
      state would compel the beekeeper to permit trespassing.

      The racial discrimination that prompted Marshall’s conversion to coercive property
      usage is grounded in the much broader premise that the State can subordinate a
      rudimentary right to realize an objective, in this instance ostensible social harmony and
      freedom of speech. In their convenient detachment from the fallout of their haughty
      holdings, judges can ignore how they have exacerbated social tension and created a
      right to trespass both literally and figuratively on property rights. (I guess that means I
      have the right to picket on the property of and gain entrance to a women’s gym
      because the proprietor has segregated me from fit bachelorettes.)

      The approach of that paradigmatic libertarian Murray Rothbard simplifies this
      Byzantine subordination and promotes individual rights. In his article on the
      flag-burning controversy ("The Flag Flap," The Free Market, October 1995),
      Rothbard quickly went to the heart of the matter and argued, "[T]he entire problem can
      be resolved by focusing.on the natural and integral right to private property and its
      freedom of use." Applying this basic liberty, one discovers people may destroy their
      own property or deliver an oration in protest, but that does not entitle them to do so on
      the property of others. The relationship is clear: "[F]ree speech or free press rights are
      own, to sell."

      Mark Tushnet, a Marshall law clerk and author of two studies on him, observes that
      "Marshall was not a strong traditionalist, though he felt traditionalism’s pull." The pull
      is seen in Marshall’s initial aversion to defending the student trespassers. This was
      harmonious with the Madisonian maxim that "Government is instituted no less for
      protection of the property than of the persons of individuals." At the forefront of civil
      rights litigation, Marshall was in a position to promote the rights of black Americans in
      a liberal manner conducive to justice. But instead of pursuing rollback of the massive
      statism that had originally dispossessed blacks of the most elementary self-ownership
      (i.e., slavery), Marshall sought to redirect statism’s momentum with the effect of
      advancing the Marxian prescription, "despotic inroads on the rights of property." Juan
      Williams’s description of Marshall as an "American Revolutionary" is therefore
      accurate, although not in the sense he intends. (Marshall also took an ahistorical, statist
      position in supporting what amounted to gun prohibition: "I don’t believe you have any
      right to carry a gun, except for policemen and law enforcement officers. But I don’t
      see why anybody else needs a gun." It’s as if he were oblivious to the fact that a salient
      method of racial subordination in American history was deprivation of the right to bear
      arms. See Stephen P. Halbrook’s Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the
      Right to Bear Arms, 1866-1876 and The Second Amendment: Toward an
      Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond,
      Georgetown Law Journal, December, 1991.)

      Thurgood Marshall had his libertarian moment. His failure to pursue it
      was everyone’s loss.

                                             September 21, 2000

      Myles Kantor is a law student at Stetson University. is the first, or one of the first, to use the phrases below, according to searches of the internet and newsgroups.  The number on the left is the web search result total, the number on the right is the newsgroup search result total.   The searches show how the fault for segregation is not placed upon the government via government mandate, nor even upon "government schools" (for which the misleading term "public schools" is often substituted in the media).

“government mandated segregation in government schools”   0,    0
“government mandated segregation in public schools”           0,    0
“government mandated segregation in schools”                     0,    0   
"mandated segregation in government schools"                     0,    0
"mandated segregation in private schools"                            0,    0
"mandated segregation in public schools"                             9,    0
"mandated segregation in education"                                    9,    0
"mandated segregation in schools"                                       4,    0
"mandated segregation"                                                   587,    168

"ended segregation in government schools"     0,    0
"ended segregation in public schools"          124,    4
"ended segregation in public"                      174,    4
"ended segregation"                                  1720,   334

“government segregation”                            134,    46