Robert Doar of the American Enterprise Institute urges policymakers to examine one piece of American history.
Officials in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Washington could learn a few lessons from the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. Federal efforts to uphold the law faced many challenges then. Local populations and officials fiercely resisted the court-mandated desegregation of the University of Mississippi and the Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights marches.
The federal government nonetheless prevailed. How? The key was restraint: Federal leaders from presidents on down realized that lasting change could only occur by working with Southern leaders—using police power as a last resort.
I know this story well. My father, John Doar, was in charge of federal civil-rights enforcement in the South during the most intense years of the civil-rights movement, 1960-67. Our country was fortunate that he—a Wisconsin Republican working for Democratic presidents—was deeply committed to working with local leaders.
“We can’t solve problems from a thousand miles away in Washington” was how he put it. “You have to keep going back and working with people in Mississippi if you want to bring lasting change.” These were his refrains when civil-rights leaders demanded he use federal power more forcefully. His restraint came from his belief that the people closest to a problem were best suited to solve it. Additionally, as a lawyer he refused to take shortcuts that compromised legal processes. Rather than assert executive-branch authority aggressively, he relied on the courts and ultimately Congress to assert their power. Perhaps most important, he respected the authority of the states in our federalist system. Federalism requires that state governments be viewed as parallel, not subordinate, to the federal government.
Taking this route wasn’t easy—there were setbacks, defeats and casualties. A violent riot killed two during the desegregation of Ole Miss; voting rights took time to be won; Viola Liuzzo was murdered during the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and Klansmen killed three civil-rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss.
Still, slowly and steadily progress was made.
