The Supreme Court struck down actual Segregation-with-a-capital-S. The civil rights legislation that followed is slightly more ephemeral than that. There's a su

The Supreme Court struck down actual Segregation-with-a-capital-S. The civil rights legislation that followed is slightly more ephemeral than that. There's a surprising paucity of cases - less than one big one per year. Federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s came with a pretty high price. It destroyed the basis for the existing Conservative Democratic tradition there. What's replaced it is... pretty much nothing. Lyndon Johnson said to Bill Moyers "we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." Some have played "what if" and thought that Johnson may well have been able to have achieved the basic same results of the Civil Rights act without direct legislation ( which induced a big backlash ) had he been able to stay in the Senate. Most Southern Senators played with language which indicated they were prepared to do something like that; we'll never know if they were serious or simply parrying to thwart the Federal law. We do have something akin to segregation in fact today. I don't feel like we have that good of a handle on the underlying causes, either. "Instilling virtue with a bayonet" never seemed an ...efficient thing to me.