After reading Thomas Sowell, I don’t think that I can ever look at the ‘Civil Rights Movement’ as it was constructed, as an improvement for black Americans. It looks more like a disaster, which stopped their progress dead in its tracks, and then set them back to a pre-industrial lifestyle.
A fundamental building block of a free market economy is contract law. The free exchange of goods and services hinges on mutually agreed contracts be they formal mortgage agreements or the informal exchange of a dollar bill for a candy bar over the counter at a convenience store.
Long before our Constitution was written and our nation was founded, it was widely understood and accepted that a basic principle of a contractual agreement was that it was non-coercive and entered into without duress. Some civil rights legislation turned this long accepted principle on its head.
Speaking for myself, if I owned a rental property, I would be happy to rent to anybody regardless of race, creed, etc. provided that I had a good faith belief they would take decent care of the property and pay their rent on time. I'm not blind to the fact that racism and other biases exist, and most assuredly, there are others who may not feel that way, and may not want to (for whatever reason) rent to somebody because they are Catholic, Irish, oriental, black etc.
The fact that under certain non-discrimination laws, that property owner must rent to somebody they would not otherwise rent to of their own free will, IMHO, makes that a coercive (and therefore invalid) contract.
I truly believe a free market would clean this up. A property owner who would refuse to rent to a clean, responsible black family loses a good customer to a competitor, and may end up renting to white trash that falls into arrears and destroys the property. Further, a black entrepreneur who saw this type of discrimination in action would be free to specialize in establishing rentals for those who were discriminated against and would likely find a previously unfilled market niche.
An employer who refused to hire a superbly well qualified candidate simply because they were Irish may very well find themselves losing out to a competitor who had no problem hiring the candidate.
As it stands, there have been doubtless millions upon millions of contracts signed in the US that have been entered into unwillingly under the threat of coercive state and federal laws. IMHO, none of these are valid contracts and as such they only foster ill will between the parties of each contract, and further they suppress free market innovations that would have otherwise taken place.