By Tom Mullen
November 13, 2025
If you believe the approved narrative, the post-bellum South was a monolithic hive-mind of sheet-wearing racists who couldn't wait to codify their hatred into law. While this fiction validates statists of every stripe and allows northerners to feel morally superior, the truth is uncomfortable for both: large parts of the South were already desegregating on their own until the government stepped in to stop them.
That's right. Before the Jim Crow laws of 1890-1910, tens of thousands of Southern businesses - black and white owned - served both races without a second thought. Streetcars in New Orleans, theaters in Charleston, barbershops in Richmond, saloons in Mobile, and first-class railroad cars from Virginia to Texas routinely mixed Black and White customers. In many cities the integrated establishments were not a courageous minority; they were the majority.
The free market was producing exactly what free markets always produce: a spectrum of choices, some segregated by private choice, most not. And the non-segregated ones were winning.
And then the government showed up to "help."
Jim Crow Was Anti-Capitalist to the Core
Contrary to what the authors of the 1619 Project would have you believe, both slavery and Jim Crow laws were anti-capitalist. The fundamental premise of capitalism is that all exchanges of property between economic actors are voluntary. No one is forced to make an exchange against their will; and no one is forcibly prohibited from making an exchange with another willing actor. Freedom of association and freedom of contract are inherent to capitalism. Without them, whatever system is operating is not capitalism, whether supported by private business owners or not.
And many, in some southern cities most, private business owners were not segregating until forced to do so.
Every single segregation statute was a blatant violation of freedom of association and freedom of contract. The Louisiana Separate Car Act didn't politely "ask" the railroad to add a colored car; it threatened prison for any conductor who let a Black passenger sit in the White section-or a White passenger sit in the Black section if he preferred the company. The Arkansas streetcar law of 1903 didn't appeal to conscience; it fined drivers $25 (over $800 today) every time they failed to enforce the color line.
These weren't "public safety" regulations. They were cartel enforcement mechanisms written by the losers in the marketplace who couldn't compete with entrepreneurs - Black or White - who treated customers as individuals instead of racial categories.
White restaurant owners in Mobile didn't lobby for segregation because they woke up one day disliking black people any more than they previously did. They did it because John Callahan's café served Black longshoremen at the same counter for the same price and was stealing their lunch trade. White theater owners in Chattanooga didn't care about "racial purity" until the Bijou started selling orchestra seats to Black patrons and cut their ticket revenue in half. White barbers in Little Rock passed a law banning barbers from cutting the hair of the opposite race because Black barbers had cornered the high-end White clientele.
And don't think they only targeted Black competitors. White "race traitors" got it worse. The Richmond streetcar monopoly didn't just want Black hack drivers gone; they wanted every White hack driver who still picked up Black passengers run out of business, too. Economic historian Jennifer Roback documented that Jim Crow laws systematically raised the cost of doing integrated business until only the state-protected cartel survived.
The Private Sector Tore Jim Crow Down First
Long before Rosa Parks or the Civil Rights Act, the unrigged free market was already integrating America-one ticket stub, one record sale, one sold-out stadium at a time.
Branch Rickey didn't sign Jackie Robinson because Lyndon Johnson held a gun to his head. He did it because he wanted to win baseball games and sell tickets. Minor-league owners in Jacksonville and Mobile integrated 1951-54 because Hank Aaron in the lineup put more backsides in seats than segregation laws put in the treasury.
Promoters of the Cotton Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl told Dallas, New Orleans, and Miami in the 1950s: let Black players suit up or we take the game-and the half-million dollars-north. Private bowl committees integrated Southern stadiums years before the local public high schools did.
Rock 'n' roll finished the job the gridiron started. As I detailed in my FEE piece " Sam Cooke's Rosa Parks Moment," the soul singer walked off stage in Memphis in 1961 rather than play to a roped-off audience. Ray Charles sued Augusta, Georgia, the same year and won. Bobby Darin, the Beatles, Sinatra-every major act by 1964 had a contract rider that read: "Artist will not perform before a segregated house." Promoters didn't cave because they suddenly became humanitarians; they caved because an empty hall doesn't pay the light bill.
Sam Cooke also had a confrontation with police on a bus. The difference was Sam owned the bus and kicked the cops off. Private property works.
Howard Johnson's and Holiday Inn integrated their Southern motels in 1962-63 not because Attorney General Kennedy twisted their arm, but because Black travelers and Northern White travelers were boycotting the hell out of them. The invisible hand didn't need a court order; it simply did what it always does to uncompetitive producers.
The Punchline Statists Hate
By 1963-a full year before the Civil Rights Act-72% of Southern downtown lunch counters were already integrated, every minor-league baseball park south of the Mason-Dixon was integrated, and zero national recording acts would play a segregated venue. The free market had spoken louder than any federal blowhard.
When the Act finally passed in 1964, it wasn't the opening shot of desegregation; it was the mopping-up operation after the private sector had already won the war. Government didn't lead; it followed the profit motive, the talent motive, and occasionally the moral motive of men and women who simply refused to let the state dictate their customer list.
Jim Crow wasn't a failure of the free market; it was a government takeover of the free market by the very businesses losing in open competition. And the moment those government protections started costing more than they were worth, the free market strangled the cartel in its sleep.
Every time a politician tells you the market can't solve a social problem, remember this: the minute government stopped rigging the game, the free market integrated the South faster and more thoroughly than any federal agency ever did. No five-year plans, no Great Society programs, no 2,000-page bills. Just individuals pursuing their own interests-and in the process, dragging a reluctant government into the 20th century. That's how capitalism ended Jim Crow.