Sometimes I feel like our country has simply airbrushed out our Jim Crow history. We act like we’ve been absolved of all guilt, as if we didn’t run a third of our country like a South African-apartheid state for nearly a full century. We forget that we were competing with the Soviets for hearts and minds in the Third World while we were treating blacks as subhuman here at home. It was a problem that had to be fixed. Asking nicely wasn’t working. Relying on the Supreme Court’s moral guidance wasn’t working. We finally created sufficient congressional will to do away with Jim Crow in 1964. We created voting rights in 1965. We created housing rights in 1968. The federal government had to do those things because the states could not generate the political will to do it themselves. But look at what Ron Paul had to say about this in 2004:

“[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty,” he wrote. “The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties.”

What Rep. Paul is saying here is that a private businessperson should be able to deny service, housing, or employment to someone based on their own prejudices and hatreds. At the very least, he is saying that the federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate these kinds of transactions. I don’t believe he would support individual states regulating the transactions either, although he might see that as legally permissible.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that a lot of people didn’t like integration. A lot of people didn’t like letting black people vote. They didn’t like sharing public spaces with them. They didn’t like hiring them or working with them. They didn’t like having them move into the neighborhood or go to schools with their children. They didn’t want to treat them as fully human and fully equal. Why would any of this surprise us? If those attitudes weren’t pervasive in our society, we wouldn’t have had any need for civil rights, voting rights, and housing rights bills.

People who didn’t like the end of Jim Crow naturally resented the Federal Government for ending Jim Crow, and they developed an ideology to explain why what the government had done was wrong. It was unconstitutional. It violated people’s inalienable rights. Similar arguments were used to justify slavery and to oppose federal civil rights legislation. But the former arguments were made in overtly racist terms. Here, for example, is Sen. Stephen Douglas, speaking during the first Lincoln-Douglas debate.

I ask you, are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizenship? (“No, no.”) Do you desire to strike out of our State Constitution that clause which keeps slaves and free negroes out of the State, and allow the free negroes to flow in, (“never,”) and cover your prairies with black settlements? Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, (“no, no,”) in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves? (“Never,” “no.”) If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. (“Never, never.”) For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. (Cheers.) I believe this Government was made on the white basis. (“Good.”) I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races. (“Good for you.” “Douglas forever.”)

And a little more:

Mr. Lincoln, following the example and lead of all the little Abolition orators, who go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from the Declaration of Independence, that all men were created equal, and then asks, how can you deprive a negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of Independence awards to him? He and they maintain that negro equality is guarantied by the laws of God, and that it is asserted in the Declaration of Independence. If they think so, of course they have a right to say so, and so vote. I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, (laughter,) but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever. (“Never.” “Hit him again,” and cheers.)

That was 1858. Not much had changed by 1948, when Strom Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat, saying:

“I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

Did anyone seriously think that these kinds of attitudes could be legislated out of existence? Or that a significant number of people wouldn’t resent the Federal Government for sending in enough troops to force the Southern people to break down segregation? Naturally, those attitudes persisted. But they persisted in less overtly racist ways. Ron Paul’s newsletters occasionally delved into the former style, but that’s more of a slip-up than a regular practice. People know better these days than to say white people are a superior race. The coded way to say that is to insist that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an unconstitutional overreach that actually made race relations worse.

Because, you know, under Jim Crow, race relations were just fine.

You can go to any number of racist forums, today or in the archives, and find lively discussion of the merits of Ron Paul, who is usually assumed to be “one of us.”

“Everybody, all of us back in the 80′s and 90′s, felt Ron Paul was, you know, unusual in that he had actually been a Congressman, that he was one of us and now, of course, that he has this broad demographic–broad base of support,” Mr. Black said on his broadcast yesterday.

Mr. Black is a former Klansman and member of the American Nazi Party who founded the “white nationalist” website Stormfront in 1995. He donated to Mr. Paul in 2007 and has been photographed with the candidate. Mr. Paul has vocal supporters in Stormfront’s online forum. Mr. Black has repeatedly said he doesn’t currently think Mr. Paul is a “white nationalist.”

Don Black doesn’t think Ron Paul is “currently” a white nationalist, but it doesn’t matter much because his policies and positions haven’t changed at all since the 1980’s and 1990’s. Black still supports him, as does David Duke, on the grounds that Ron Paul’s policies are hostile to Israel.

“Again, I go back to that, you know, traditional topic that I always talk about, you know, the powers of international Zionism–a power in banking, a power in media, a power in government influence, in campaign finance–a power that’s, you know, hurting the values of this country on behalf of Israel,” Mr. Duke said. “So, I would vote for Ron Paul at this moment because he’s one of the few candidates who have policies in this regard and this realm that I wholeheartedly support, and that’s why I’d vote for him.”

Ron Paul refuses to disavow these kind of supporters, Nazis and Klansmen, making lame excuses like this:

“I’ll go to anybody who I think I can convert to change their viewpoints — so that [Holocaust-denying] would be to me incidental,” he said. “I’m always looking at converting people to look at liberty the way I do.”

The ideology of Ron Paul grew organically from Jim Crow dead-enders who felt, and still feel that this is a white nation under threat.

Mr. Black of Stormfront said the newsletters helped make him a Ron Paul supporter. “That was a big part of his constituency, the paleoconservatives who think there are race problems in this country,” Mr. Black said.

“We understand that Paul is not a white nationalist, but most of our people support him because of his stand on issues,” Mr. Black said. “We think our race is being threatened through a form of genocide by assimilation, meaning the allowing in of third-world immigrants into the United States.”

You never know what is in someone’s heart or when they might have a change of heart. It’s not that Ron Paul necessarily has any antipathy for black people. It’s that he’s managed to become the figurehead for neo-confederates, and leave the strong impression that he is a fellow-traveler with Klansmen, Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and white nationalists of all stripes. He never disavows their support. He always gives them just enough of a wink and a nod to keep them onboard.

While there are plenty of things that Ron Paul says that I agree with, you cannot lie down with a dog and not get fleas.