Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican Civil Rights Hero

Have you read Burt Folsom’s Myth of the Robber Barons? It has a great chapter on the UP and railroads.

He distinguishes between political entrepreneurs and market entrepreneurs and it is critical to distinguish between the two.

The former we don’t want and the latter are attacked by the former.

and I will go further...when they brought in 70% black kids into my Jr High in 1970, it was pandemonium because too many of them came from fatherless homes where they simply have never been trained to behave properly

Having grown up and gone to school in a Northern city where the schools were always desegregated, I see the breakdown a little differently. Brown v Board didn't have any impact on the schools here. If you lived an an area, you went to the school in that area -- period. All primary schools were walking distance, as were most of the high schools. There had to be some very exceptional reason not to go to the neighborhood school. All schools had some blacks, some more than others and a few were predominately black. It was all based on how the neighborhood lines broke down. But at the same time, all of the schools did pretty well by the students, both educationally and in providing a safe orderly environment. Nonsense was not tolerated.

The breakdown came when Federal judges went beyond anything in Brown v Board and starting trying to dictate quotas for schools which necessitated busing kids all around the city trying to make each school 'racially balanced.' That was insanity and it drove many whites (and some blacks) to flee the city and head to the suburbs rather than allowing kids as young as six years old to be put on a bus every morning and shipped many miles across town to a distant neighborhood at the whim of a Federal judge.

The real crack-up came in the late 70s and 80s as LBJs Great Society hit high gear, and as you said, far too many black children (a majority now) had no father or even father figure in their lives. Chaos reigns.

As an added kicker, teachers, who were once dedicated professionals are now all unionized, and again far too often behave more like unskilled labor than educated professionals.

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